Since I spend almost all of my time shucking it for the man, aka working for a living, I have little time to implement all of my ideas, so I give them away for others to use, learn about, profit from, etc… Here we go again!

{fray} is all about storytelling. People write their stories, and they sometimes have events where they get together and speak/read their stories, obviously the site should offer an RSS feed with enclosures so you can hear the authors reading their stories in their own words…

We all love Woz, and why? Well, I know he had something to do with some fruit company, but we really love Woz because of his old “Dial-A-Joke” service. Bring it back with an RSS feed featuring a new joke everyday!

As for sponsorship, obviously the makers of hard drives will want to sponsor your podcast, I mean, you’ll be filling up those hard drives in no time! We can also look to the manufacturers of audio gear, speaker systems, Slim Devices, as well as software producers who make those great audio apps!

Sponsorship eh? I mean, if I ever go to Prince Edward Island then you know I’ll stop by the Formosa Tea House. The Formosa Tea house should sponsor the Live at the Formosa Tea House show, just look at the Google juice! Try searching for Formosa Tea House…

Speaking of those Silver Orange and Reinvented guys, they were discussing asterisk (phone dork!) an open-source PBX system, and how they use it… Since it can save your voice mail as an MP3, it should be dead simple to create an RSS feed with enclosures of all of your voice mail… So, what do to with that? Well, set up a phone number, and allow people to phone in, and say something, then feed that out to the net via RSS. Whammo! You do your audioblog, set up a phone number, people call in and leave comments, and you then provide those comments via an RSS feed…. I think I got that right, makes my head spin a bit…

Ok, so you set up your asterisk system to do comments in audio for your audioblog, with the feed to get the comments, and this all costs money right? Well, you could force the people who call in to listen to an ad before they leave a comment, but should you? Maybe you should just add in some advertisements (in audio) to the feed itself, or at the end of people’s comments… I don’t know, I’m a geek not a salesman…

Hmmm, that’s all I got right now… I just wish I had the resources to implement some of these ideas!

I have not really written much about this podcasting thing, and believe me, I could write volumes… I’ve been experimenting with the concept for years and years now. It’s nice that the tools to make it easy are starting to show up…

Adam has got iPodder.org as sort of a hub for this “iPodder platform” and podcasting stuff, which is really starting to catch on. Many of my old scripts to automagically download content are no longer needed as RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures are starting to appear.

This is all just the beginning. Sure, I’ve got my “little” stuff over in the Audio section, but I’m not really pushing it, I’m more of a kickstarter, and things have been sufficiently kicked…

Just today I was discussing VoIP with someone and they said that their office phone system, which uses VoIP, sends you your voicemail as an email with a wav file attached. Sounds nice, but why not provide an RSS feed of your voicemail with enclosures, so you could sync your iPod as you run out the door, and listen to all of your voicemail on the go. Crazy idea? Maybe…. The point is, there are many applications we might not have thought of yet.

There’s getting to be more daily shows/audioblogs now, and my time is being stretched. (I currently drive about 90 minutes a day and really don’t want that to increase!) I wonder how this will work. Will there be just a few well known shows? Will people shorten their shows? I mean, in 1997 there were a handful of weblogs, and you could read them all during your lunch break, but now we use aggregators to subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and we always have new content, and we rely on being pointed to the good stuff. Perhaps as more people listen we’ll just get into the mode of hitting the episodes that interest us. It’s an interesting problem. I won’t get into the audio/search/metadata thingy right now, as that’s something for another time.

Thank you, and goodnight…

A while back we asked Who Owns Your Data? and since then DataLibre has appeared to tell you that you should own your data.

As I revisited the Groundspeak forum on Buxley’s use of Geocaching.com’s data, I started to notice that people were concerned about the ownership of their data, and there are a few interesting ideas, and the discussion of the Waypoint Licensing Agreement we discussed recently comes to the surface as well.

My quick take away is this: Always read those agreements, as you really should know what you are agreeing to. (And for the agreement makers, create a way to provide feedback on these agreements if people are uncomfortable with them or have questions.) Second, publish your data first. Get a web site, post your data there before you post it elsewhere, even if you don’t promote it or make it public, put it out there, so that when the data you gave away turns sour, you still have your original copy with a permanent home on the web that you control…

Wow! Dave really did it… Frontier 10.0a1 has been released under the GNU General Public License.

Yes, I said the GPL. Woo!

That makes Frontier “free” software, and not “free” like Dave made it 10 years ago, but totally free, within the limits of the GPL of course…

This should be interesting…

(Excuse me while I dig through my backups from the late 1990’s for all my UserTalk code!)

After I kicked drew into doing the audio thing, he kicked me back into proper distribution, or at least some attempt at making things clearer. So here’s RasterWeb! Audio in 3 easy steps…

Gosh, look at that: Looksmart Acquires Furl.net (See Also: Why del.icio.us is neat, and Bootstrapping out into open space.)

[Sometimes I hate being a smart hacker type with no business sense…]

One thing I found interesting in the article is this bit:

“Every person who furls a page is casting a vote for it,” said Krim. “We’ll be taking the masses’ votes instead of just the webmasters’ votes.”

They even mention Google’s PageRank, which is interesting, because I see it having one of the same problems, context. Is someone ‘furling’ a URL a vote for… how authoritative the page is? Maybe. I mean, I stick plenty of things into del.icio.us just because I want to read it later. It might be a link to something that totally sucks and is wrong in every way, but I won’t know that until later, when I read it. Just like Google’s PageRank, which is a measure of popularity, not quality.

Hmmm, perhaps we need to solve that problem!

Oh, and as for the whole ‘masses’ versus the ‘webmasters’ - well, I guess us weblog types are ‘webmasters’ eh? Shouldn’t all the masses become webmasters eventually?

Ok, back to testing…

Following up on Browser Zeitgeist, we present Browser Zeitgeist in SVG!

(Yes, you’ll need a browser/plugin capable of displaying SVG files… Shouldn’t this be built into browsers by now?)

Ben Goodger had the following to say:

Netscape had it by being first.
Microsoft has it by being everywhere.
Firefox will have it by being best.

We’re coming.

But I think he left out the bit about Netscape blowing it by getting all uppity.

Remember when Han Solo said Great kid, don’t get cocky!? Well, small victories are great, but they are not equivalent to crushing the Empire.

While Firefox may be great, or even the best, I am continually saddened by the fact that many people/companies/organizations do not want the best, they just want the “good enough” - Really? Sure…

Ask yourself this? Is Windows better than Mac OS X? Is a BMW better than a Dodge? Don’t underestimate the power of “being everywhere” cuz while the dark side is not stronger…. ok, I give up on the Star Wars analogies, you get my meaning…

As an aside, I’ve had Firefox version 1.0 Preview Release quit on me a number of times. I can usually tell when it will happen because there is crazy disk activity beforehand. That’s ok, I blame the plugin authors, why? It makes me feel better…

Recently we looked at the Waypoint License Agreement, which we didn’t really like. Well, we later found some folks that appear to be violating the agreement.

Jeff Boulter says in Geocaching blog complete! that he is scraping the data from Geocaching.com and redistributing it. Perhaps the license was different when he first did this, but he does mention saving the data in both places, which is what I thought would make sense, post the data somewhere that is not Geocaching.com before posting it to Geocaching.com, since I don’t see how they could claim the rights to that data then.

Jeff also created a GPS Coordinate Grabber, so now he’s really pushing it, since he’s providing tools for others to violate the license as well. Where will it stop!

Oh, it doesn’t stop, as Buxley’s Geocaching Waypoint also takes that data, and it seems that while in the past there was some sort of “arrangement” with Geocaching.com, that may not be the case anymore, since as of 2004-09-16 Buxley was being blocked (see Status, sorry no permalink.) If you want to follow the development of this, there’s a forum thread titled Buxley New Caches Not Being Updated? to read through…

Oh, and for a bit more background on Geocaching.com and the whole data issue, see The History of Geocaching at gpsgames.org and of course you can’t miss the slashdot crowd’s reactions to such…

I swear, as time goes on, I wonder more and more how people can build systems that rely on Windows, or use Windows for anything critial, see Microsoft Graphics Bug Threatens Systems:

The more serious of the two vulnerabilities allows a specially malformed JPEG graphic file-when viewed in any of a large number of Microsoft products-to compromise the system, allowing execution of any attack code.

Years ago, I remember telling people you could not get a virus simply by reading an email. Later I had to update that to “by reading a plain text email” and now, well Microsoft has done it again, made the impossible possible! Thanks Microsoft, for bringing us the future!

I like how IT folks will send out messages warning people not to open zip files, when zip files are not the problem. Will they now send out messages telling users not to view JPEG files? They often neglect to mention that these only affect Windows users, could it be because they are the ones that choose and install Windows systems? We users of Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, heck any non-Windows platform, normally don’t have such concerns.

I have this vision of utopia, it’s working at a shop that does not use Windows. I did it before, I sure would like to do it again… Is it still possible?

You know me, your friendly neighborhood license examiner…

When we last spoke I was all in a tizzy about the Movable Type License, well it’s time to move on, and look at another license. Next!

I signed up with Geocaching.com, you know the deal, create an account, log in, use the site, you do it everyday. Now, you can download what are known as ‘Waypoint files’ which have an extension of .loc and are really just very simple XML files. I’d show you here, but I don’t think I can, so I’ll describe it. (I hope that’s ok.) They contain information about a cache, an id, a name, coordinates, and a url that points to the Geocaching.com site. All good? Sure…

If you are not logged in to the site, it tells you that you have to log in to read the Waypoint License Agreement. Once you log in you can then read the Groundspeak License Agreement. I know, I just gave you two different names, which both seem to point to the same thing. It’s confusing like that… When I get to the page in question it tells me I’ve agreed to the license agreement, seemingly even before I’ve read it. It then presents a copy of the agreement for your records.

A copy for your records? I wonder if I’m the first user to actually make a copy of it for my records, let alone read the thing…

Oh, but I did read it, that’s what the friendly neighborhood license examiner does!

I don’t think I can excerpt any of it here, because I would probably violate it, but I’ll give you the gist of it.

First, they (”they” will be “GROUNDSPEAK, INC.” for the rest of this.) retain exclusive ownership of the data. I know, the users entered the data into the system, and perhaps they gave up their rights to it at that point, but let’s move on…

You can make one copy of the original data for archive purposes. Does this mean if you backup your hard drive more than once you are in violation of the agreement? I think so…

There’s plenty of nice bits about what you can do with the data for internal purposes, the data can pretty much be “pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered” as long as you do it internally. That’s good.

You cannot sell, rent, or lease the data. This is reasonable, and for a commercial entity, heck, for any entity, this is the “right thing to do” and I totally agree.

But… you also cannot provide access to the data to unlicensed third parties. Does this mean if I upload data to Geocaching.com it then becomes their property and I can’t tell you about it unless you have also agreed to the license? Can I post it on my weblog?

Ok, this next one is just wacky. It reeks of some lawyer who has never used a computer. Ready? You shall not reverse engineer or disassemble the data format, because, you know, you might try to dupe their proprietary and copyright-protected data model and export format. This is an 8 line XML file, which you can read with almost any computer manufactured in the last 20 years. If there is a job out there reverse-engineering tiny XML files, I want it! Seriously, anyone who has ever seen HTML can probably reverse-engineer this thing by quickly glancing at it.

Oh, there also seem to be a number of applications that can use these files. I wonder if all of the developers have agreed to some sort of license, or had to pay some fee. Surely they didn’t just reverse-engineer the format!

There’s one more bit worth mentioning. Something about how they will be willing to license the data to you for a fee. Yes, they will sell, rent, or lease the data to you for a price.

So what’s the deal? Well, Geocaching.com (dba Groundspeak) has to protect themselves, and their data, and have to make sure they can make money from it, and prevent others from making money from it, since that could cause them to not make money. That all makes sense right? Sure some things bother me, like my interpretation that your data becomes their data and you lose the rights to it. I had thought that when you create something, you are by default the copyright holder of it, is there a transference of copyright in this case? Maybe that’s in an agreement somewhere I missed. Probably when I created an account on the site. I’ll probably get kicked off soon and have to wander the wastelands unable to geocache…

Perhaps a Creative Commons license could be of use here, allowing non-commercial use of the data. Of course I always wonder about that too, what if I provided some web site with the data, free of charge (non-commercial) but then had ads appear on the site (commercial) how is that handled? I’d like to use the data to do interesting things, and I can - internally - but it seems that if I show you that data, I’m in trouble.

So why in the heck do I bring this stuff up? (Besides being a troublemaker who likes to complain a lot…) Because people need to be aware of what they are doing with their data. We’ve talked before about exit strategies and the importance of such in relation to your data, and we’ve talked about people agreeing to licenses and violating them. Exit strategy good. Data lock-in bad. Violating licenses bad. Reading licenses good.

Hmmm, perhaps I should have titled this “How to make money on open-source software”

Nonetheless, I’ve seem relatively few projects use ransoms for development. David Raynes mentions this idea in combination with Dropcash in an entry titled Using Dropcash for Feature Ransoms? Seems he hit the nail on the head, as Chad Everett tried it with his MT-Notifier ransom and David did one with his MT Dropcash Plugin Ransom that came out “more than successful” in his words…

I’m probably not an expert in the field, but over the years I’ve seen people do a few things, release their software as shareware, or “freeware”, or commercial, or open-source… and occasionally the open-source stuff will have a donation model, where you donate cash (usually via PayPal) or you send a gift (usually via Amazon) and in these cases you do the work (probably for the love of doing the work) and if you get compensated, well, that’s just a bonus. There’s nothing wrong with this model, and I hope it continues. Luckily open-source developers have things like Sourceforge to help with the infrastructure, bandwidth, and hosting costs associated with releasing open-source software.

Here’s how I see the ransom model working for feature requests and enhancements. You’ve released some application, but it doesn’t do X. Users request feature X, and in reviewing it, you determine that it’ll take Y hours to do, and you’d like to be compensated with Z dollars. You just need to figure out the X, Y, and Z part of it. Any problems with this? This should not violate any open-source licenses, as you’d still release the code once it’s complete, then anyone can have it. Is it fair to the people who paid that everyone else gets it for free? Yes, the people who paid really wanted that feature, and were willing to pay for it…

This is actually done by some companies that deal in open-source and/or custom development as well. There’s a gated community of users, maybe they’ve got 20 clients in the steel industry who use their product. If one customer wants a feature added, but can’t afford it, they may see if other companies want that feature as well, and distribute the cost. (Hmmm, perhaps this should be called “distributed cost development” or something.)

Now, for new software, it’s a bit harder. Someone who has never released anything isn’t likely to get any ransom money for an unreleased application, especially with no prior bits of code out there. So, if you plan to ransom and release something, you’ll most likely need to have released something of value previously. For instance, Developer Joe has this great new idea for Application X, and he’s already had 100,000 downloads of his previously released Application Y, and users love it. Based off of Developer Joe’s reputation as a good programmer, he might be able to get people to pitch in and pay the ransom for Application X.

Anyway, I think the idea is fascinating, and there are probably many ways to make money on ope-source software, and even commercial software that have not been fully explored yet.

I use Thunderbird to get mail via IMAP to the Exchange server. Now, Exchange is a weird beast, and I am not a Windows guy, so there’s a problem. Outlook lets you create rules (aka filters) that can run on the server or the client. I set up rules on the server using Outlook originally, and figured it was easier to do it on the server since I use Thunderbird in at least 3 or 4 places, and didn’t feel like making filters for each copy of Thunderbird.

So in typical Microsoft fashion, things don’t work. As I added more rules via Outlook, they were not working. I finally mention this to an ex-Windows guy, and he tells me there’s some limit to how many filters can be created on the server. Argh! You think Outlook would tell you this! But no… and it’s not like I’ve got hundreds of rules, it’s really not that many…

That’s ok, we can work around that. Filters in Thunderbird are fairly easy to create, though I’d still like to see a text file I can edit, like the the mailViews.dat file does for views. (Any idea where the filters are stored?)

As long as we’re talking about views, those things in the little drop-down menu, they are easy to create, and if you want to copy from one machine to another, find the file named ‘mailViews.dat’ in your profile folder. You can even reorder them so they appear in the filter menu the way you like.

Oh, the format is pretty simple, I would think it would be easy to share views quite easily:

name="Has Attachments"
enabled="no"
type="1"
condition="AND (has attachment status,is,true)"

A far cry from mork indeed!

Ok, you want one more file to mess with? Then try ‘persdict.dat’ which holds the words you’ve added to the dictionary when doing spell checks. You know, words like “diff”, “grep”, and “wiki” - ok, that’s it for today’s Thunderbird hackery…

I’ve got something I call vcalxical.pl, which is a perl script that logs into an Exchange server running IMAP, and then reads a mailbox that is really a calendar, and pulls out the VCALENDAR parts, and formats them into an ics-type file. You can import this into Apple’s iCal or into Sunbird.

Now, it’s far from perfect, but it works for me. Your Windows guys would have to have IMAP enabled, and I’m guessing it doesn’t take much to break things if they really want to. (For instance, at some point in time things changed from plain text to HTML, who knows!?)

The idea is this, when stuff gets scheduled in Outlook/Exchange (which you don’t use cuz you don’t use Windows) it’ll show up in iCal or Sunbird after the script runs via a cron job. Theory, anyway… I think it would be better to have the calendar on available via webdav, as I don’t know how the apps like having the file changed on disk willy-nilly. That way it really is a remote calendar.

I’ve been using it on and off, but not testing it too heavily. iCal seems to be popping up alarms to stuff. Sunbird, I’m not sure yet…

Still, we hack on…

So you’ve learned how to backup your del.icio.us data with something like this:

curl -o delicious.xml -u username:password "http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000"

(Well, the 10000 most recent entries anyway!)

(Note: Since originally writing this, a new method was added: http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all might be used instead. See the API docs for details.)

Now what?

Obviously you run some sick and twisted perl code on it and you get an HTML page that lists all your posts, by tag, with posts displaying under each tag they belong to…

Anyway, that’s what dir.licio.us does…

(It ignores the timestamp and extended field, but you could hack those in if so inclined…)