A few weeks back, my friend and fellow podcaster, Kreg Steppe, asked me to come onto his open software focused show, Valid Syntax, to discuss free software and open source licenses. I was more than happy to oblige and I very much enjoyed the ensuing conversation.
Kreg just posted the episode, if you would like to take a listen. If you have been wanting to learn more about free and open licenses, I think this makes a good place to start. Kreg has also said that this will be the first of a renewed run of episodes so consider subscribing, too, for more discussions of open source projects.
Just a quick note from on the road as we make our way South from DC to Atlanta for this year’s Dragon*Con. We made excellent progress, stopping just past the halfway point in Greensboro, North Carolina. There was a little bit of traffic between DC and Richmond, Virginia, but once we got into I-85, the highway we’ll take the rest of the way, it was smooth sailing. If we make an early enough start tomorrow, we’ll hit Atlanta early in the afternoon.
I already talked about how this time last year marked the start of my daily blogging habit. It seems like a good time of year for me to start new practices. I’ve undertaken three in the last few weeks that seem to be sticking well. They are small things, not directly related to my hacking or other pursuits but helping to maintain and improve my overall health and mental well being. The coming week may present a bit of challenge as any con, let alone Dragon*Con, is chaotic and can be highly disruptive to daily routines.
Tomorrow, I will get to re-connect with friends I see about once a year and am getting excited about the prospect. In fact, since programming doesn’t start in earnest until Friday, tomorrow will be all about the opportunity to hang out with friends. Since Balticon is my local con, I don’t typically arrive early for it and miss out on this window driven mostly by out of town travelers. It is my turn to be the out of town con-goer and I am looking forward to it.
Re-targeting ads stalk surfers for weeks after they shop
Slashdot links to a story at NYT that I find fascinating for its potential to drive home the point about widespread behavioral advertising. If more users notice these sorts of creepy practices, the more fuel we’ll have for debate around better practices around transparency and affording the ability to opt out.
When visiting The Pirate Bay this weekend, as I am occasionally want to do, I clicked on the big splash ad for “The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard“. I was greeted by a video by Simon Klose, the director responsible for this project. He already has accumulated a large volume of footage, over two hundred hours, short over the course of two years. He has started a Kickstarter project to hire on a professional editor to help produce the finished work from all that material. His intro video is a nice tease for the stories he’ll be working into the finished product.
When I committed my own modest pledge, he was only a few thousands dollars towards his goal. When I saw Cory at Boing Boing pick up the story, I had an update in my inbox from Simon. As of this writing, he has met his project goal and still has most of a month left for further fund raising. The surplus above the original $25K milestone will got to “more time in the editing studio, sound production and animations”. In other words, polishing the film even further.
I am fascinated by The Pirate Bay, as long time listeners and readers no doubt realize. There is a lot more going on to their motivations than any petty sense of entitlement their critics would like to believe. I am heartened that Klose has the funds he needs to proceed and cannot wait to view the finished result.
I saw this project via Hacker News, which reminded me of two other recent stories. One I shared a while back was video of sonification of various sorting algorithms. The first sample at the CodeSounding project page sounds similar which is surprising to me. A sort algorithm only has a few dimensions of interest, mostly time and relative magnitude of elements being sorted.
The reason I am surprised by the similarity between some of the samples and the very simple sonic space produced from sorting is due to the other recent story, Jonathan Berger’s lecture (mp3 link) on TVO’s Big Ideas about the social ethics of music. In that lecture, he specifically presents sonification of data sets that have a deep social dimension, for instance the spread of the oil plume in the gulf. Berger is a composer so perhaps his work, which uses similar techniques, shows more of his hand as a maker. His finished work definitely is meant to be as evocative in the result as the original input.
However one of the things he said that stuck with me is how music, and sound more generally, is better than visualization for representing multidimensional data. I would expect code to open up much more fully using sonification than the CodeSounding samples represent. Maybe it just wants for a hacker/musician to do a better job mapping the interesting dimensional elements of source code into the sound scape.
Word of warning, I could not find any license information so I suspect it is all rights reserved. That and the fact it takes in Java class and jar files, being written itself in Java, may be a turn off. Or an inspiration for an open source project to do one better.
I am already on a hiatus from the podcast for reasons of preparing for and attending Dragon*Con. I though I would take more time off than in years past as a much needed mental break. So far, it has been relaxing though I will admit to feeling a little at loose ends at various points during this past weekend.
I have been deliberating what to do with the blog during my extended podcast hiatus. The news stories I curate flow out of the editorial process for putting together each week’s news show. It is pretty easy to keep that going even without the dedicated work on the weekends to do the more in depth write ups for the podcast. Blogging at the same volume, though, feels like I am not taking as full advantage of my hiatus as I should.
Despite that I’ve already caught myself glossing over more stories, falling back more on the form of the link dump in the last few days. Once on my way to Dragon*Con, I will be thoroughly unable to keep up with any news curation or comment. There just isn’t enough time left at either end of the day to keep up with my feeds, let alone pull even the barest post together.
Because of a year’s worth of accumulated habit, I am loathe to spin the blog down entirely while I am traveling. I am reminded of last year’s con at which I successfully started blogging daily (on weekdays anyway). I have fond memories of pushing myself to stay up just a bit later each day to blog solely by the glow of my laptop screen before finally crashing. That started as a promise to my wife to share an update every day since she didn’t join me last year. It grew into a very effective, more encompassing habit of which I am rather proud.
I definitely think I will embrace slowing posts down to more like a one a day. Between now and Wednesday, those will more than likely take the form of lists of links. After that and until I return next week, the daily posts will share more of my thoughts and impressions of the convention and the travel on either side. I will try to resist the urge even to keep up with my feeds, devoting my attention to activities at the con and relaxing.
I may, however, spend a bit more time micro-blogging. My iPod Touch usually works pretty well in the convention hotels. I like to share updates to make it easier to find and hang out with folks on site. I rarely use it anywhere enough for my activity to be considered a deluge, but fair warning. Also, if you see a story you don’t want me to miss and would accept 140 characters or less of comment, feel free to @-message it to me. Posting a social message fits into the breaks between panels and events pretty well as it happens.
My name is Thomas Gideon, also known by my nickname, “cmdln” (which using Unix style abbreviation stands for “Command Line”). I have been programming professionally for over a decade and hacking around with computers of many varieties for most of my life. Within recent years I’ve developed a couple of meta-interests beyond just the technology [...]more →
"[T]houghtful, informative, and deep, a real plunge into the geeky end of the news-pool. There's great analysis and rumination, as well as detailed explanations of important security issues with common OSes and so on." -- Cory Doctorow
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