Month: October 2004

After drilling a hole in the wall, my electrician informs me he does not think we’ll get that cat-5 all the way down to the basement. That’s not what I wanted to hear…

Perhaps it’s time… Yes, time for us to enter the early 2000’s and actually look into wifi. The first thing we realized was that prices have dropped. Quite a bit. I mean, that Linksys WAP11 that cost well over $100 three years ago can be found on ebay now for around $30. So I actually got one, plugged it into the old router, and had a wireless network. (Well, after screwing around with Virtual PC, which sucks, but such is going the cheap route.) Of course it did me no good…

See, none of the dozen or so computers strewn throughout the house had wifi adapters. Since I was going the auction route, my plan was to get another Linksys WAP11 and connect them ala wireless bridging. Because I wanted to match the hardware rev for compatibility reasons, and not pay a lot of money (I’m cheap, remember?) I bid on a few, but did not win any… then along comes Other World Computing, and Belkin.

Other World Computing had this Belkin 802.11b Wireless USB Network Adapter on sales for $19.00. Did I mention I’m cheap? Well, I am, but this was a bargain! Cheaper than the Linksys WET11‘s I found on ebay, and it says it works on Mac OS X 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and even Mac OS 9.2 and something called Windows! This wireless thing just might catch on.

So now we’ve got a wireless access point, and an actual wifi adapter so that we can connect to that access point… It’s all so very exciting, isn’t it! Oh, just wait until Wifi Adventure #2 for more crazy 802.11b madness!

Oh sure, Google is the Search King right? And their new Google Desktop Search is awesome. If you use Windows. And Outlook. And Internet Explorer. And Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint. Who uses these things?

Ok, plenty of people use these things, but really, I thought Google was full of smart people. Their engineers are supposed to all be super-geniuses. Do they really use Outlook and PowerPoint on a daily basis? I know, they built this thing for the “average computer user” right? I suppose… but think about this, the hacker way says that you hack on things you care about, and you will be good at it, and put more into it, and scratch your own itch, and all of that. So while this Google Desktop Search thing was made by smart people for people who want to find things, I’m not sure I get it. Maybe I’m just a hacker snob of some sort…

I don’t really use Windows, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc… I do use Mozilla stuff, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc. So how awesome would it be to have something that could easily search my browser history, email messages, and calendar info? It would be nice… Mozilla Search anyone?

We could add in formats that have been opened (either by their owners or others) like PDF, Word files (plenty of apps read them), HTML, RSS, RDF, Atom, text, EXIF data in images, and on and on…

I think you could hack together your own Desktop Search using ht://Dig, or mnoGoSearch, or SWISH-E, or some crazy combination of all of those, but it’s not something I want to do, I’ve already got desktop search, via find, locate, egrep and a host of other tools strung together…

Well, everyone seems set on defining podcasting, and heck, since I consider myself someone involved with it before it even had that name, I might as well toss in my two cents…

See, I keep reading and hearing people who say that podcasing is not new, I mean, it’s just the same as web-based radio/audio shows, except you can automatically download it. Or by gosh, I have some commercial application that records streams and converts them to ogg files, so that’s the same thing too! Right? Right?

Dammit people, it’s NOT the same thing!

I see podcasting as the combination of a few of things. Using the enclosure tag in an RSS 2.0 feed, and automating the process of receiving the enclosures specified in the RSS feed.

I think this is pretty close to Dave Shusher’s definition of Podcasting.

Oh, and the fact that it is using open stuff, like RSS 2.0 and (usually) MP3 is what made things really take off. Like I said, people were automating the download of audio content before, but it was a hack, not a platform. What is a platform? Something you can build upon. (Hopefully without having to buy your way into.)

I checked the date of itconv.pl and it says 2004-02-12, which means that in February of 2004 I had automated the download of enclosures from the ITConversations RSS 2.0 feed provided by Doug Kaye. (Oh, itconv.pl was about 50 lines of perl code I wrote to automagically download the new ITConversations Doug released…)

And as Doug reminds us, before he was doing it Dave Winer and Christopher Lydon did some stuff with enclosures as well, which is what spurred him on. (Looks like I added enclosures links to AmphetaDesk on 2003-09-24.)

And Dangit, let’s give some props to Dannie J. Gregoire, who appears to be the one who made up the word podcaster.

So anyway, podcasting happened, and is happening because of a combination of many things, and many people. I see things like “Podcasting came about from Adam Curry, Doc Searls and Dave Winer” or “A month ago, the only podcast was ”Trade Secrets,” a daily news-and-technology talk show co-hosted by podcasting’s pioneers: former MTV VJ Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer.” and while Dave and Adam did a whole lot to move things forward, there were, and are, other people involved, and each one makes things grow a little bigger.

Do you think weblogging would be what it is today if the only sites doing it were the ones mentioned under ‘ye olde skool’ on tpoowl? Network effect people!

Ok, I’m tired, signing off…. Next time I’ll try to be more upbeat, or post something about the cats. ;)

(Note: It has been mentioned that Ben Hammersley is probably the first to use the term “podcasting” in public, though I still think it was Dannie J. Gregoire who applied the term to what we were doing in late summer 2004.)

Today as I was pulling out of the driveway I had to pause for this teen to walk by, so I started to fire up the Car MP3 Player (aka Rio 500) as I waited. I finally pull the car out and drive past him and see he’s carrying an iPod.

Can you believe it!? Me, a proponent of the iPod Platform… a veritable early adopter of podcasting actually in near sight of an iPod owner and user! All the while fiddling with my Rio 500… Sigh… Is there no justice in the world?

I thought to myself, is he listening to Daily Source Code? Evil Genius Chronicles? Or even our own RasterWeb! Audio? Aw, probably just some MP3‘s he stole from Steve Ballmer…

Perhaps it’s all just a ploy to get you to use this freeiPods referer link and get me that iPod…

Failing that, I’ve done some rough calculations, and have determined that with the ad revenue of this web site, we’ll be purchasing a (used) iPod sometime before 2006 rolls around…