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Just received this message from pool-151-202-103-233.ny325.east.verizon.net (the person didn't leave a name) -- You have difficulty authorizing Ableton Live? You are a bona fied incompetent moron. Update 2007-04-29 -- aaah, I see. Someone linked it in their forums. I had to laugh when I saw the comic book guy comment :) …

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People seem to be migrating in drones from the former golden boy of the Rails community: the Typo blogging engine. Reasons vary (Sporkmonger's Bob Aman is put off by the lack of effective spam filters) -- but I can't say I'm surprised. Never installed Typo myself, but have been curious about the surprising amount of people who deem it acceptable to replace a solid solution (say, WP or MT) by something that exchanges stability for Ajax widgets. Apparently one year later the trend-setters can finally admit that flashiness is only cool when it doesn't require cleaning up every couple of …

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Since I got my PowerBook early last year I'm on the search for decent alternatives to some of the applications I was using on the PC. Thanks to a flourishing development community I found replacements for the most important stuff (and more), but one thing that is still missing is a decent multi-track audio editor suitable for music production. I've been using Samplitude on the PC for the last couple of years, which after a brief learning curve turned out to be perfect for my needs -- it offers quite elegant means of editing audio, including non-destructive filters and timestretching …

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Via the De:Bug Blog I just came upon the "Mission Statement" of Jimmy Wales' new site, Campaigns Wikia: Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics. [...] This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging …

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I first heard of East Timor by watching "Manufacturing Consent", a documentary on Noam Chomsky. In this film Chomsky calls East Timor the great untold war story of the 20th century. He states that the atrocities committed by foreign nations in East Timor are comparable to Pol Pot in Cambodia. And he notes that, in contrast to Pol Pot, nobody seemed to notice. (The film, btw, I now consider mandatory viewing for every member of a society that has TV, newspapers, and/or corporations. Much time is spent on Chomsky's view of how public opinion is shaped by political and commercial …

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Today in the online edition of The Indepentent: "Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested", by Henry Porter. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up." Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the …

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Did you notice Sam Ruby's new preoccupation with ETags? When he's talking with founders about their new web services, "the first thing I ask is; 'do you support ETags?'" I'm so glad that he's doing that, and talking about it publicly. I've been a web developer for a number of years now, and from the beginning I knew about some basic caching issues and about the HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response -- but it took me a while to figure out that in my scripts it's my responsibility to send this header. Request caching on this level is simply something …

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While reading this: Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. ... and re-reading this: The data technologies powering Google Reader can easily be used and extended by third-party feed aggregators for use in their own applications. ... it struck me: centralized aggregation, decentralized delivery and UI the hardest part in a reader (IMHO) is aggregation, because it offers a lot of pitfalls with little reward for making it "just work" more interesting: the visible stuff solves bandwidth issues for everybody solves stability issues for everybody saves costs for the developer/hoster (these …

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del.icio.us apparently has just added a feature that I've been wanting for a long time: It's now very easy to see the history of bookmarks for a specific URL without having to bookmark it yourself. Here's an example of such a bookmark history page: del.icio.us bookmarks for mailfeed.org. I regularly check these URL bookmark histories on del.icio.us, because it can answer all kinds of interesting questions, e.g.: How popular is this URL? Since when have people known about this? Who bookmarked this URL first? What are their comments? I imagine this caters to a small audience, but it's a …

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I previously mentioned the all-Ruby Jabber server xmppd, a new project that is going to be really interesting once it's above a certain basic threshold -- a core goal of this project is to get to a stage where you simply start a script to get the server running, with minimum configuration and no root privileges required. As I'm a fan of such low-barrier-to-entry, low-dependencies software (cf. SQLite) I'm tingling with anticipation. I just found that a similar project has recently been launched in the Perl space, initiated by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal and Flickr fame. This project is called …

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I just wanted to check out the beta of Ableton Live 5.2 -- since switching to a Mac last year I haven't found a decent audio sequencer yet that I could actually afford, and had been hearing great stuff about their recent improvements. Well what can I say: I didn't get to actually use Live, because its copy protection mechanism sucks, and clashes badly with my stubborn viewpoints on privacy -- and then some. For example... When you start up the application for the first time it requests admin privileges?! After canceling this request you're informed that it just …

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I'm a pretty geeky guy, but there are quite a number of technological trends that I've known for a long time before I actually start using them, and where I simply don't know how much I'm missing. A particular field of software that suffers from this is communication software: namely instant messaging and voice-over-IP. I had an ICQ account in the 90ies (when I was working at SinnerSchrader in Hamburg), but basically used it to make lunch plans with a buddy and not much else. Well that has finally changed. Within weeks I got a new ICQ account, a …

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Reading some of the comments of another Slashdot article on Windows Vista made me aware once more that the landscape of operating system adoption is shifting: the Windows slice of the pie seems to be getting smaller, at least for home users. For one thing, people start switching to Apple. I haven't counted yet, but the amount of people you meet who casually mention that they just got their first Mac seems to increase exponentially. Then, during the last months, it became abundantly clear that Ubuntu is becoming a serious alternative to commercial desktop systems. I've been waiting for signs …

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I've been submitting feature requests and bug reports to the NetNewsWire forum -- Brent Simmons seems pretty responsive. I'm looking forward to an application update, it's been months since 2.01 was released, and I'm wondering what Brent's working on (probably mainly NewsGator integration, which at the moment is of little use to me.) The more I'm using the application the more I'm finding its limitations -- it's still the best aggregator for the Mac (though Vienna is getting closer and closer), but sometimes I'm a bit envious of the Windows world where FeedDemon is making great strides lately. I'm …

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I make a lot of little notes in text files that never develop into a full article and eventually get deleted. So to change that, and to maybe even increase the post frequency a bit, I'll start publishing smaller comments. Have no idea yet which way suits me best though; first approach: assemble several semi-connected commentaries to get to article length. TextMate 2.0, which I guess won't be released within the next six months, will be a free update for registered users of TextMate 1.x -- a bold financial decision for the developer Allan Odgaard, but great for his users. …

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For the last couple of years I've been toying with ideas on how to cut back on my expenses, and one of the top items is the plan to cancel magazine subscriptions. They don't actually cost that much, but I've been getting better information elsewhere, and usually quicker; to me the print media is on the verge of becoming irrelevant. But every couple of months I stumble upon an article in the printed press that I didn't catch via other channels, and that manages to refresh my interest in the old media. Today was one of those days: while …

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There currently are quite a number of very happy reactions over the announcement that Telestream's product Flip4Mac WMV is now available for free -- Flip4Mac WMV is a collection of "Windows Media® Components for QuickTime" that allows you to play certain Windows Media formats from within Quicktime, among them apparently some older formats that Microsoft's Media Player 9 for OS X can't play (I'm not actually sure about that, but this seems to be a reason why people install it -- that and the fact that MS has just discontinued their own Media Player.) It's curious that there is a …

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Recently there have been a number of requests for new ideas in the aggregator market, and as I'm constantly dissatisfied with my feed consumption experience (no matter the tool) I have lots of opinions on the state of aggregator software -- and even some ideas for improvement. I'll save the grand overview for later; because some things are better shown than told I thought a good start would be to show sketches of what I'd like to see in the next generation of aggregators. Here's Sketch One, which is kind of an accumulation of concepts, and which describes the basis …

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There is another wave of comment spam coming to my site -- the new variant, where they don't post their own URLs any more, but either URLs that aren't active yet, or URLs of blogs that have already been infiltrated with comment spam. The rationale behind that: I'm supposed to not be put off by the usually offtopic comments and broken grammatical structure and leave them alone, which increases the PageRank of the URLs posted, which in turn increases the PageRank of all pages these URLs link to. Comment spam by indirection. Here's the kicker: they are already putting quite …

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Just read in a comment by Esteban Kozak that SearchFox RSS uses both "attention and community data" when determining the value of an article, which means that some of the weird effects documented earlier might be a result of other people's behavior, as opposed to my own. To recapitulate: I'm trying to understand the algorithms behind SearchFox RSS's "Topics I Like" listing, and found that some terms are conspicuously high on the list where they don't really deserve to be (currently: "quake", "ning" -- see image below), and others that I care about more are nowhere to be found (currently: …

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On David Weinberger's blog: transcript of a talk and Q+A by Joshua Schachter of delicio.us. It's a bit sketchy, but has some interesting bits nevertheless. I was especially delighted by the discussion after Joshua introduces the upcoming "network" and "group" features, where groups are opt-in collaborations and networks more like the current inbox feature, in that users won't be told that you have included them in your network. Excerpt: I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip …

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This is an update on my ongoing series on web service client authorization ([1], [2]): exciting times ahead! To reiterate: there are more and more sites appearing that provide means to connect to them to read and manipulate data you have stored on their servers via web service APIs. This enables the creation of third-party applications and services that build upon these sites and enhance their services. E.g., there is an iPhoto plugin for Flickr, lots of alternative interfaces to your del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. The problem: nearly every one of these services requires you to give up your username and …

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SearchFox is really great. It's a web-based feed reader (currently in beta) that watches you reading feeds, and which uses this attention data to improve your reading experience. After you have used it for a while SearchFox develops an understanding of the things you care about, and presents these accordingly (feed articles are sorted by ranking, not time). How SearchFox works There are several ways to tell the application that you like a specific feed article: by reading the article (in SearchFox you are presented with a list of headlines and some metadata, and have to click a link to …

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The last time I wrote about it this was little more than an extrapolation of what was happening, but now (only weeks later) we're getting beaten over the head with it. This is what I see when I search my memory and feeds archive of the last couple of weeks for the term "buys": eBay buys Skype Yahoo buys Upcoming.org News Corp buys IGN Google buys Meetroduction Fox buys MySpace Verisign buys Weblogs.com AOL buys Weblogs Inc. (not related) eBay buys Verisign Payment Services ... and most of these businesses were traded for unholy sums of cash. Note how the …

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Strange, the DVD format is only ten years old and already on the verge of being obsoleted. In two years time everybody will buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. But those will be out of date in five years as well, because by then everything will be stored on hard drives, and rented off the Internet. From then on new data formats will appear every couple of months, but nobody will care because thanks to DRM all content will only be consumable for a couple of days anyway. You will stop updating your home entertainment center to accommodate new physical content mediums, …

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Last week a friend invited me to visit the Popkomm, using the press pass of a colleague. Who am I to refuse a free invitation? Having never been at the Popkomm, I was curious to see what it actually was like. Another friend had already warned me that the general attraction was to meet business partners and potential clients, and that it wasn't really a place to experience new forms of culture, or a place where a lot of new bands got signed -- so my expectations were rather low. And still I was surprised by what you find there …

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After the recent Ballmer debacle I merely glanced at a screenshot of the Channel 9 interview with Bill Gates, and downloaded the interview with Marc McDonald instead. This turned out to be a good decision. Most of the Channel 9 interviews by now are product presentations, but occasionally there are real gems that should be mandatory viewing for everybody in the field. The sessions with Bill Hill about Typography, human perception and interfaces are such gems (see links below). This session with Marc McDonald is of near Bill Hill-level quality, but admittedly on a subject that is a bit more …

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Yet another patent that describes a technical "invention" both blatantly obvious, and with apparently well-know prior art: "System and method for obtaining information relating to an item of commerce using a portable imaging device". A method, system, and apparatus are provided for allowing users to readily obtain information associated with a selected item from a remote location. More specifically, a user at the location of the first entity operates a portable imaging device to capture an image of identifying data, such as a barcode, that identifies a selected item. The captured image is then communicated to a server operated by …

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A short excerpt of current news, from my perspective. First signs that the Flickr sell to Yahoo might be good for the founders, but bad for the community. A bastard-child of universal login is emerging, with all the benefits. Encapsulating almost everything. The DRM emperor gets new clothes: exchanges the old business suit for ill-fitting cargo pants. Acrobat Reader to support 3D data. Exciting stuff, if you're an Adobe manager in need for new markets. And a lot of business as usual. Welcome to the next corporate Internet boom. …

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Tom Conrad has apparently just presented "Pandora" at Bar Camp. Scoble quotes an email from Tom with a short description of the service: "Pandora is a "music discovery service" designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a "station" that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations …

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How about this for a definition? It's just a small event, but their approach to invitations bugs me a lot. I was already wondering how O'Reilly could keep up their seemingly altruistic behavior on such a massive scale, to the point where they're now more talked about for their community involvements and conferences than for their books. Apparently they couldn't. It should have been clear that their main interests are not simply to advance technology, to help create new ideas, but that these are just tools to earn money. I simply forgot about that, and liked them a bit more …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. I'm having a series of conversations with Falko Schmid about current interfaces to structured information, and about using existing web services to build all-encompassing information structure and search facilities. Our conversation started with the realization of a problem: apparently nobody can build a single system that integrates all information. There have been many attempts to accomplish that (Google and Wikipedia being the most prominent and successful) -- but if the last years have shown us anything it's that there is no way to define a stable content structure that …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. In my earlier article, "Connecting Web Services: Inherently Insecure", I commented on the sad current state of security in connecting public web services like Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm and others with specialized client software. In this article I'd like to make suggestions as to how this current situation could be improved. So as a follow-up to my complaint above, this is a proposal of a simple method to provide more secure web service client authentication that should adress most of my ealier criticism. Let's start with a scenario that illustrates …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. During the last couple of months I've been using more web-based services like del.icio.us, Flickr, last.fm and others, and while I like the growing availability of web site APIs I'm often wary when testing out the possibilities, e.g. when testing a new client software: They usually require that you hand out your full login data! Consider this: I like Flickr's ability to group photos into sets, but their current Flash-based Flickr Organizr, to be honest, sucks. It's bloated, and while it imitates native applications in its user interface, it …

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Asa follows up on his recent Linux not ready for the desktop commentary. He acknowledges that there are several lines of argument that disagree with his assessment, and he reacts by making this a bigger topic in his blog: he announces a four-part series about more specific questions of Linux on the desktop. I've been using various SuSE Linux distributions since the mid-/late-90ies, and I love it as a server, but I definitely agree that Linux is still anything but user-friendly. I've been trying some versions of the Ubuntu Live CD and was delighted by the approach; but there still …

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Scoble interviewed Steve Ballmer (transcript, announcement). Finally! While watching the short video I was struck by the realization that the Steve Ballner shown here is not that different from the one in the monkey dance video. Even worse: the video shows that Ballmer is a scary, scary man. He looks like a gnome, a ghoul, with the eyes of a predator. He doesn't seem genuine, real, or honest; and he is striking an upbeat pose that does not fit. Anyway, I watched the video and became very bored and very disappointed very quickly. Lots of marketing fluff and the empty …

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Just saw a guy on a bike who was listening to Hip Hop playing on his cell phone. He was actually using it as a music player, not as a ringtone; and while he was riding along he subtly grooved to the music, occasionally glancing around if he was passing anyone he knew, or if anyone was watching. It seemed strange at first, but then I realized that I had seen this before, in a different context: There are more and more young people on the streets and in parks who use their cell phones as a way to play …

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Another wonderful podcast from Dave Winer, which starts off as a monologue about his recent Audible experiences, sidesteps into a little DRM history, and ultimately comes to the center of the problem with current media distribution: Customers are treated like thieves, there's too much distrust, and it seems as it's building up. His prediction is actually a lesson he learned as CEO of a software company in the 80ies: ultimately users will learn in how many ways DRM screws their side of the bargain, and that's when the model stops working. This is quite an emotional podcast for Dave, and …

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Via Dave Winer: Apple seems to be caching podcast feeds and MP3 files as part of their iTunes podcast integration. The Dailysonic blog gives several reasons why this is bad for the content producers, and could even cost them money. In a nutshell: Podcast producers need their subscriber numbers for the advertisers. And, worst of all from a listener perspective: The caching mechanism seems yet to be unreliable, which means that some podcasts never reach the listener. Hm, I see... I was wondering how Apple were keeping track of their subscriber count. Routing it over their servers makes sense for …

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I'm in desperate need for a better backup strategy. By now it has become clear that our data storage media are utterly unstable; I've had lots and lots of misburned CDs, CDs that I can't read after years or even months, of after I change CD drives; I've had backups on DVDs that only can be read on specific computers, and at least four hard drive crashes (that I can remember) during the last 3-4 years. So I'm always interested in what other people have to tell about their experiences. Here's an interesting discussion on MetaFilter about Safely Storing Mp3 …

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I just read another rant about the many weaknesses of PHP, and of course I'm in complete agreement. Over the last years I've come to use PHP more often than I would have liked to, simply due to the fact that it's pretty much the only scripting language that is available virtually everywhere; and in contrast to Perl I don't have to look up function calls and the language reference as much, simply because it is closer to what I'm normally using (namely the C languages, and Java). But the reason I'm posting this is not my urge to awaken …

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