This is where you say something clever
This is just too cool. Brian Eno and David Byrne are planning to release the raw tracks from their hugely influential 1981 album, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with Creative Commons licenses, allowing for their use in remixing and mashups.
The tracks aren’t on the site yet, but I’ll be waiting!
Thanks, Xeni!
Technorati Tags: music
I just got a really nice phone call from John Kenagy, CIO at the Oregon Health Sciences University, letting me know that the UW’s Catalyst WebQ online quiz and survey tool, has won the Joanne R. Hugi Excellence Award presented by the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium. The Hugi Award “is to recognize and share information about outstanding IT practices among the higher education institutions of the Pacific Northwest.”
WebQ is one of the great group of Catalyst Web Tools that Tom Lewis and a small crew of intrepid perl programmers write and make available for folks here at the UW. It’s a great survey and quiz tool and it gets used for all sorts of things – from research surveys (it’s been approved as a tool for human subjects research at the University) to student government and faculty senate voting.
In our brief conversation, John mentioned that NWACC doesn’t like to give the Hugi award to huge megaprojects, but to “the things that quietly propel us forward”, which I thought was a lovely way of expressing the kind of value that we get from tools such as WebQ. It’s another way of expressing the value that Dave Weinberger famously stated as “small pieces loosely joined.”
As part of the award someone from the UW will be talking about WebQ and the Catalyst Tools at the upcoming NWACC annual conference in Portland in June.
Congratulations to the whole Catalyst crew for a great tool, and thanks to NWACC for the lovely bit of recognition!
A good quote from Terry in a meeting I’m in:
“Troubleshooting in the 21st century is the art of correlating seemingly unrelated events.”
Technorati Tags: quotes, troubleshooting
This is really interesting – Amazon has released S3, which offers open web storage for $0.15 per gigabyte per month, accessible via web services (REST and SOAP interfaces provided) and BitTorrent. Authentication is via Amazon login, and you can use access control lists to control access to the files.
Interesting that there’s no WebDAV interface to S3, at least from my brief look at the documentation.
They’re guaranteeing 99.99% (“two nines”) reliability.
This could point the way towards ubiquitous cheap online storage accessible via Web interfaces.
Technorati Tags: web-services, storage, web-services
One of the problems with the way my feed aggregator (Bloglines) lists my many subscriptions is that they get presented in alphabetical order within a folder. There’s now 63 blogs in my “blogs” folder. When I start to read I usually start at the top of the list, but rarely get to the bottom. Which means that I almost always read the Apple Blog and BoingBoing, and fairly frequently make it as far a Jon’s Radio and mamamusings, I don’t get to Susan Crawford’s blog as often as I should.
That’s something I intend to correct, because Susan is writing some of the most intelligent commentary on the state of the discussion of Internet law and regulation. Last week she posted a great essay on network neutrality, or as she thinks we ought to term it, substrate neutrality.
You should stop reading my blog and go read Susan’s now.
But when users say “internet” they mean relationships. We forget, because so many machines are involved, that the internet is a social world. Users don’t think about transport — they’re indifferent to the substrate. They care about what they do there. And what they do is create a complex adaptive system unlike any other communications network we’ve ever had before. The unpredictable ecology of the internet could never have been generated by a broadcaster or a newspaper. It’s constantly revising itself in response to the feedback it’s getting from everyone. And its value is almost wholly unrelated to the work carried out by the access valves, the gatekeepers to internet access. As I’ve said before, the internet is like an ocean, but formed through attention rather than nature. (And, just as we’re almost totally ignorant of the life-forms beneath the waves, we don’t know all that much about what’s going on on the internet.) The essence of our relationship to this ecology, this complex adaptive system, is one of explanation/comprehension — at the most. We can’t predict what it will do next.
The point about this ecology is that it is largely indifferent to the substrate it’s carried on. The CD is not the song. The term “network neutrality” doesn’t capture this — we should consider using “substrate neutrality” instead. Otherwise the network providers’ arguments are so easy: “But it’s our network!” they can say. (AT&T’s new slogan is “Delivering your world,” as if the online experience was a visual pizza. We won’t even need to rise from the couch.)
Technorati Tags: network-neutrality
At last week’s calendaring BOF at Etech, folks asked how CalDAV treats recurring events. I had to embarrassingly admit that I didn’t know the answer. Just because I’m evangelizing calendaring interoperability doesn’t mean I’ve actually read the spec! (he says sheepishly).
So for those who want to know, from the latest draft of the CalDAV spec – the answer is that recurring events are treated as a single object in CalDAV:
Recurrence is an important part of the data model because it governs how many resources are expected to exist. This specification models a recurring calendar component and its recurrence exceptions as a single resource. In this model, recurrence rules, recurrence dates, exception rules, and exception dates are all part of the data in a single calendar object resource. This model avoids problems of limiting how many recurrence instances to store in the repository, how to keep recurrence instances in sync with the recurring calendar component, and how to link recurrence exceptions with the recurring calendar component. It also results in less data to synchronize between client and server, and makes it easier to make changes to all recurrence instances or to a recurrence rule. It makes it easier to create a recurring calendar component, and easier to delete all recurrence instances. Clients are not forced to retrieve information about all recurrence instances of a recurring component. The CALDAV:calendar-query and CALDAV:calendar-multiget REPORTs defined in this document allow clients to retrieve only recurrence instances that overlap a given time range.
Technorati Tags: calendaring, caldav
Interesting – Dave Winer has taken my notes from Tim Bray’s Etech talk, where Tim listed some specific problems with RSS 2 that caused the creation of the newer Atom protocol, and turned that into a list of things to avoid in doing a successful RSS 2 feed source, which Dave calls A Busy Developer’s Guide to RSS 2.0
Technorati Tags: atom, RSS, syndication
I cut out from Etech before it ended, to get back to Seattle in time to see my son in a skit at his school tonight (gotta set some priorities, after all).
Some thoughts on themes that permeated throughout the conference:
Open APIs – Online apps are opening up web service APIs to the world, allowing people to create new combinations of services in creative ways. These are almost all web service APIs, some easier to use than others. This is being done by both the big guys (Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft) and the startups (Technorati, Ning, EVDB). As the Yahoo t-shirt and sticker said – “Mashup or Shutup”,
AJAX interfaces – Ajax has arrived big-time. Offering more immediate feedback by allowing changes in web apps without round-trips to servers is a very powerful technology that resonates with users. Client-side Javascript is the engine that powers this, and has gathered a large following in this community as a very powerful language in its own right, because of its dynamic (lisp-like) properties.
Syndication is happening – while the question “Is the content in your aggregator more important than the content in your email inbox?” wasn’t answered affirmatively by the majority in the crowd, the mere fact that it was being asked is indicative of the amount of information exchange happening via RSS and Atom. Between this and the open APIs for mashups, we need to adjust to a reality where we’re not in control of the context in which people see our content.
Learning from gaming – We can now think about taking what makes games compelling to so many millions of people to design applications that have that appeal with the same emotional resonance.
Coping with community – We need to evolve new and better ways of dealing with very large online communities, numbering in the millions.
So, all in all, how was Etech?
It was really good to get a chance to meet some folks I had only had online communication with (like Tim Bray) or hadn’t met at all (like Robert Kay from MusicBrainz and Matt Pasiewicz from Educause). And it was great to get a chance to hang out some with Ted Leung, Tantek Çelik and Catherine Yang from Educause. I wish there had been some more small-scale unstructured, or perhaps more loosely structured, time – but that’s hard to do in a thousand person conference.
There were some very good sessions – I tended to be drawn to the talks that had the highest conceptual content, as opposed to those that detailed working code, perhaps because I don’t spend a lot of time working with code these days. Linda Stone, Clay Shirky, Amy Jo Kim, and Danah Boyd were real standouts for me.
I felt good about going down and flying the banner of calendaring interoperability work – it’s important work, and people were interested. I look forward to next year – maybe then we’ll get a calendaring presentation on the agenda!
Update – Julian Bleecker wrote to note that he enjoyed the notes but I got his last name wrong – sorry, Julian!!! That’s the result of trying to take notes from the very back of the room while not having a conference agenda handy.
Looking at the way physical environments become computational grids – physical structures for play in the real world in which different kinds of social groups and formations come together and engage in playful activity.
The way the social network leaks into physical space – not just the Internet, but telephony an dother technologies.
Paths are the interface – the way people navigate the city – the city as a game board grid.
Teh things that we see around and turn away from can become pieces of the game expereience – Debris Become Legible. These can become instcription devices for game play. The way infrastructure becomes part of the game – goals or pieces or moments for power-up. different aspects of urban space become a way for the game to pervade physical space. Annotation rewrites the rules.
Movement = Power-Up. Traditional console gaming doesn’t address physical mocement. Shows a room full o fguys staring at a screen – this iw weird – social play should have another register of interaction and engagement besides sitting still even when you’re in a group of friends.
Pervasive games are ways of experimenting with social contexts and groups of people. Look at different ways in which social beings can be mustered to look at things in a different way.
So What?
The stakes are about a different way of seeing the world and how it works – hopefully in ways of making the world more inhabitable and sustainable. e.g. seeing debris as something that needs to be dealt with.
The “Big Urban Game” Large totems that were carted around the city – semicodes were the goals fo the game – got points for retrieving using mobile phones. Marketed for Qwest – ConQwest – getting people to navigate physical space and encountering poeple not involved in the game, and that interaction is interesting.
Superstar – at UbiComp in Tokyo last year – put stickers all over Tokyo, have other people find and take picture of them, and send them in to the “mothership” – the more pictures you have the more points you get. A cooperative game – you want to link to others and have them take your picture at the same time. One of the goals is to enlist other people and get them involved in the game play.
Pervasive Performance – games that are stage as a form of urban play – Blast Theory group in the UK. Create a mixed-reality experience – one level is online play And then there are real people in the world (the performers) A PDA equipped with a GPS and radio – the online players steer and guide the performers to a goal, through a 3d immersive interface. The physical players (who are actors) gather a group of people who follow them around.
Ludic component – Geocaching – a casual gaming experience. An interesting way of combining people who participate (the cachers) and the people who search. It’s a global thing – use of the whole world as a kind of gameboard.
The Go Game – The object of the play is to do insane activities in physical space – turn the world upside down. Gets the players “out of themselves” in a whimsical experience. It also turns the world upside down, as you see activities in physical space that you woldn’t normally see.
Mobile Phone Games -
Using mobile phone can become an interface not for games on the screen, but playhing games that pervade the physical world. clickr! co-located individuals interact with an experience. You don’t need the latest, greatest, phone to do mobile phone games. Participating in largers social contexts.
Flirt Stampede – uses cell tower location to create a virtual stampede. IC you’re closer you’d see the stampede on your phone screen.
Flirt Lost Cat – a lost cat wandering around the city – depending on where you were you might come across the cat. Using our movement through the city as a way of creating a casual, playful experience.
Twitcher – using your phone as a way of capturing birds that are flying around. Your phone buzzes – you need to capture a picture of the bird before it flies away. If you’re standing next to someone else who has the game, you might both have the opportunity to capture the first picture, if you’re within bluetooth range.
Viewmaster of the future – Using quicktime VR and a sensor for orientation sensing. You look into it and as you pivot around the view changes. You can think about ways that these kinds of experiences allow you to experience a cinematic or game moment as you move about the world.
Human PacMan
Catch Bob – Using gaming as a way of asking research questions – how does collocation inform social interactions? Identifying where other people were and trying to attain a shared goal on tablet PCs as you played the game.
Deeing Yoshi – depending on pervasive network doesn’t work, so try to use the spottiness of the network get used as part of the game mechanics? Food that Yoshi can eat are identified by specific wifi nodes – as you pass them you get the food – so as people played the game over weeks they’d find where the good food was – sometimes the node was doen, etc.
piedimonsters – they have courseware called service design. Interested in nutritional fitness. Idea was to turn pedometers into physical game by combining it with tamegochi. Tying nutrition and physical activity by putting it into a game. What kid wouldn’t want to power up their avatar by walking to school instead of getting a ride?
research.techkwondo.com
TrimPage Junction Framework
NumSum – a web-based spreadsheet. A single page app. Allows saving offline, through Save Page As in the browser.
Next Action – GTD to do list app. Nice code viewer in the app.
Persistence Technique 1
Modern browsers keep dhtml DOM tree intact during a File Save Page As
Keep you data in the DOM tree
myHiddenDataDiv.innerHTML=bigString
Whenever user saves the HTML page, you’re ok
Might not work in Safari
Persistence Technique 2
Flash 8 Storage
Flash to JavaScript bridge
Seamless!Except, when you hit squantum level storage usage (Brad Neuberg)
Persistence Technique 3
IE’isms
IE persistence
IE offline data
(but nobody uses it)
Persistence Examples
DOM Page Saving Tehcnique
- IddlyWiki & Friends
Num Sum
Next Action
Flash storage technique
AMASS demos, Tiwywiki.
You need Synchronization in addition persistence
- can use data/record level semantics, track deltas, change requests, not changes; INSERTs only; unique ID gen. OR just punt
You also need a client side API – VB style? No – Rails Style? You can get tw write once run anywhere. Do do that you’ll need SQL on both sides – we know it on the server, but what about the client? Will Firefox have something?
TrimPath Junction
A MVC Framework for JavaScript
raiels-like API with client-side SQL
Designed for write once run anywhere – server runs Rhino
Designed for pluggable client-side storage.
eval and with in JavaScript – changes dynamic scoping.
Why care about with?
Domain specific mini languages are easy – JSP, ASP, SQL are examples of mini-languages.
HST Templage engine
JST==JavaScript Templates 297 lines of code.
TrimQuery SQL Engine – RexExps to transform SQL to TQL
