Part of the challenge of keeping more than one blog is keeping them active. Some days, I struggle quite a bit to post something on both blogs each day. Most of the time, I can manage, though there is still 1 or 2 days a month I can’t quite manage it. That’s forgivable as a reader of a regularly updated blog written by one person.
ThePhoneBoyBlog

You gentle reader may have noticed an effort being made here to post daily, but along with the notions expressed above, I begin to wonder if its necessary or desirable.

Blogs, via RSS, are so easily aggregatable, and the vanity that one's blog will be the readers sole input so vast, that in fact, intermittent postings may be better for both the blogger and the reader. I believe this because I am both.

If you want a single every changing and updated blog, there are the multi-author blogs, Boing Boing, community blogs, Metafilter, aggregators of posts filtered by attention like Digg, Techmeme, and even the aggregators of aggregators like PopURLs.

Just an emphasis on the choices RSS, blogs, WWW and Internet make available for "Some Assembly Optional."

I have a theory and I need numbers to prove or disprove it. If you use open source, please tell me in the comments what you think are the three most important open source projects going today. I'll post my hypothesis, the numbers, and my conclusion next week. Thanks! - Nat Torkington

Only three, that was trickier than I expected…

In the end I went with:

1. Infrastructure
   
2. Server
   
3. Client

Ignoring OSs and the Internet suite (DNS, MTA, etc. etc.)

A great, fantastically warm, night at the UP event (interesting opportunity for recursion here) and the vote was rewarding. Myself, I couldn't help but vote for an MVP who's integrity was such that he quoted Gartner and predicted mediocre success for Vista. David deserved better, despite the bloodthirsty prediction of a spammer murder in 2007.

The time constraint led to some speed talking, and despite meeting Douglas Bagnall on the way in, I neglected to mention the poster child for NearlyNet data transfer, remarkable what CafeNET, and rsync can achieve.

In fact, much was omitted, due to time pressure and elation at the opportunity to speak to an audience who I expected a good proportion to have heard of Hari Sheldon.

On the topic of Wellington (& New Zealand) my prediction was "Uncertain," not due so much to doubt as to the acknowledgment that a small population is easily swayed by near term events (No, my intention to mention "Fooled By Randomness" was also overcome.) My confidence though is buoyed by the accessibility of points of view delivered by our Internet-working of which UP is a fragment.

The wisdom of a multiplicity of viewpoints, exemplified by the five speakers, and the audience, was confirmed. Memes that were common included, iPhone, Telecom, and [wid|gad]gets, Tom's "No-one under 25 will buy an iPhone," superb. But Google, except by indirection, an intriguing omission.

Amazon's S3 (and EC²) was explicitly addressed by Philip Fierlinger, but his conclusion that hardware cannot be done from New Zealand was mystifying given the enlarging structural separation of design & build.

Tom's TXT comment, regarding grammar and spelling, and David's observation that fullstop followed by two (numbers less than 100 are spelled) space   was very old school. TXT is popular because it is intimate, secret, which leads to its effectiveness in bullying, bullshit, block the sender, oops, another post)

Perhaps we may risk a little more light on the sins of omission.

Tom's obeservations (Did you mean: observations?) regarding locality, globalisation, (Add to dictionary) were pertinent. We are where we (wii, tempted) live. And that is a beautiful blue jewel (yes, Bejewelled) planet. We can just get along.

I owe my thanks to the organisers, particularly Gordon. And to the unexpected after match function, Kevin Dorne, Jamie Baddeley, and Brian Calhoun. Immigration is a blessing.

An Auckland man was left partially blind because of an infection as a result of wearing a pair of coloured contact lenses for several days.

President of the Cornea and Contact Lens Society Dr Trevor Gray says the industry needs to be more controlled to prevent similar tragedies.

One option is to make all contact lenses prescription only.

While in no way minimising the tragedy of the loss, nor impugning the motivation of Doctor Gray, I think this might not have been the best example to use as a media lever for greater regulation.

The victim borrowed the novelty contact lenses from a friend. How would the legislation proposed by opthamolgists influence that? It wouldn't, it wouldn't have as much effect as the now well publicised risks will have. And I doubt there'll be any water drinking contests run as a result of the "Hold Your Wee For A Wii" in the US.

Even regulation would not prevent further occurrences, many things occur even when there is regulation and information in abundance.

We don't need regulation and experts forced on us, it is probably sufficient to publicise the problem, and its regrettable that the publicity only arises from our media, and/or that we pay attention, when there is a tragedy.

Sorry, but you are unable to access CokeTunes. To access this site you need:

A PC with a Windows Operating System (Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP). Unfortunately this site does not work on a Mac because the Mac version of Windows Media Player does not support the Digital Rights Management technology used to protect the music.
Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above. Version 6.0 is available free from Microsoft. Click here to find out how to install it onto your PC. IE7 Beta is not currently supported, but will be before the browser goes to general release. CokeTunes does not currently work in the Mozilla Firefox browser due to technical limitations.
Windows Media Player (version 7.0 or above). Windows Media Player 10 Series is available free from Microsoft. Click here to find out how to install it onto your PC.
Flash Plug In (version 5 or above)

DRM is about business models, as the DMCA has illustrated in the US. There have been a number of unintended, business model related, and adverse, consequences, of controlling tinkering and communication. Everything from garage door remotes to printer toner refills have rushed to avail themselves of the competitive advantage the legislation imparts.

While our Bill may be more wisely framed, it is still protecting a business model that is exploitative of more than it benefits.

DRM is the ultimate tail wagging the dog, where a minor, some might argue trivial aspect of culture and production is setting the rules for all of us. The inevitable vulnerability of placing the safe in the lounge will not be remedied by applying tax-payer funded enforcement in the hands of content proprietors and the State.

After all, once we can control "premium content," then there'll be enough incentive to extend it to "spam," "hate speech," and then, perhaps the utlimate incumbent, the State, will find a good reason to control a lot more communication.

Thus the changes proposed in The Copyright Amendment Bill, reassuringly described as seeking

"to achieve outcomes benefiting New Zealand’s society as a whole."

Much like the oft opposed parallel importing regulations that were extensively opposed in select committee, repealed, then re-instated after two rounds of "consultation."

Its not going to benefit any but a small proportion of New Zealander's and they are less likely to be "creatives" as it is the proprietors of the material, and it will impact on activities which have not been much more than the irritant "shrinkage" (the fee the recording industry charges its artists for breakage of celluloid disks, yeah right) but not to any degree.

Such legislation must have a special appeal at a time when NZ appears to be benefiting producers, and NZ, but change is inevitable in all industries and if enforcement of old models becomes more expensive than the revenue that could arise from newer ones, who is this for? Yes, comfortable incumbents who find it easier to sway legislators than customers.

Copyright is a deal we struck when it was more valuable for us to cede that right to create a state enforced monopoly in distribution. Now we all copy, perhaps we should revisit the deal rather than prop up constraints that no longer exist, in order to sustain those who solve a problem (creation and distribution) that largely no longer exist.

My basic tenet is that decentralisation and collaboration of small pieces loosely joined is a model that exceeds in many ways the hierarchical monolith of centralisation with its architectural tension between the center and the edge.

The fragmentation of the monolith into smaller pieces is a trend which continues and the latest example I have is the widget. Once standardised, this will allow you to assemble any number of functionalities in interesting ways. Standardisation is critical to extracting the full value of this technique, until then it remains a scattering of smaller or larger ponds in which every boat has to be rebuilt to float in another. We need the ocean.

This is the bite-sizing of the web, extending the power RSS gave us, and beefing up the IFRAME capability of HTML (standardised) and turning web top construction into a drag and drop task.

But that's not what I set out to write about. Currently I'm visiting a few new sites that I might want to use further, Geni.com for example. And every time I do, its the registration, profile population and configuration rigmarole all over again.

Then I read this. Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue?

It sure is for me,

The number of sites I've been to recently that offer me one service I want, then lard themselves up with a whole lot "Web 2.0 Community" functionality that I already get somewhere else.

Building a community can happen external to almost any service, and if you do want a little more by way of profile from me, let me give it to you from another site. Now that other site is not likely to be MySpace, there have been some hints recently that they are contemplating isolation and freezing out some services that make them more desirable, duh! But from a site I control.

Now this must be sounding OpenID-esque, (not without critics) about which I know very little despite guru Doc Searls being heavily involved. I tried Sxipper, I hated it, which probably means I don't understand it well enough, but it was intrusive, gigantic and not much help.

When I go to a new site, if I register, I want to give them a password, a URL, and have them suck my favourite movies, books, etc. etc. into their application (and sync it if I change anything). Then in the small pieces loosely joined widgety world, I can hook together the various parts of my presence without repeating myself to every web site I meet from Amazon to Weebly.

Something at the data/information rather than functionality, operating in an X11-like "I am the server" mode and you are my client. Resonates with Doc's VRM musings well.

In response to a Telecom marketing initiative linking broadband to education, Steve Biddle at Geekzone expressed some reasonable concern about kids relying on the Interweb as a source of credible information.

I'd go further and be concerned if anyone was using any single source of information for any purpose.

Teachers, text-books (Feynman's experience), parents, poets, priests, politicians, the books in the library, newspapers, TV news; all suffer from weaknesses, biases and plain inaccuracy.

There's no perfect source and trying to identify it is not the skill that's needed. Discrimination is whats required, to learn to discern at best the probable accuracy taking into account source and a whole lot more.

So I agree, kids shouldn't rely on the Interweb, or anything else in isolation.

"Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" also works in reverse.

This multi-source approach is acknowleged in the press release:

“The great thing about using broadband is that you can do so in conjunction with other excellent learning resources such as library and text books” — Telecom GM of Consumer Marketing Kevin Bowler.

The line I heard and like about Wikipedia is that it might be the first place you go, but should never be the last.

And if schoolkids using it for homework is a concern, how about the American mid-term elections?

One of my gurus, Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is Chief Analyst at, and led me to, Telco 2.0.

By and large they come up with sensible ideas about the future of telecommunications, though they take that difficult position of straddling the disruptive divide between the incumbent past and the faster moving future. The risk of having one foot in the grip of large, slow moving, comfortable monopoly incumbent from the past, and the other in the future agile novel disruptive world of diversity can easily be imagined.

But a recent post to their blog showed their savvy about the trend, and I was happily reading away, as one does when the content is agreeable, until I struck this line, and I acknowlege I may misunderstand and/or put too much weight on a single phrase, but:

The uncertainty of regulatory intervention ultimately works against the carriers, as it drives away risk capital.

Doesn't "uncertainty" = "risk?" or is this some use of either term with which I was not previously familiar?

Isn't uncertainty precisely where risk capital is supposed to be invested?

This of course is one of the many hypocrisies of our brave infrastructure capitalists, risk rewards for gilt-edged security. Champagne on a beer budget.

They bloviate about the risk, while its arguable there is zero risk in frequencies, copper or fibre. They will all return, not at the monopoly rent level that may be their wish, but how much more sunk could a cost be than copper?

Yes, there have been losses on all those infrastructures, but I would argue it was because of over-enthusiatic investment based on monopoly rent returns on stove-piped services that didn't arrive.

Even fibre's cheap, if you're not a Telco ("How we paid the construction guys 18 pints of beer and they gave us a free metro fibre network in Palmy North")

Not sure of the situation in the UK, but our roads, sewers, water pipes, electricity lines, ie all transport infrastructures are funded by the commons, the services over them from a range of suppliers. Telecommunications at the fibre, frequency or copper, is no different.

You can debate the options, but its done when AT&T do it.

Having proprietary service/carriage integration in this day and age is like banks issuing their own currency.

Robert Anton Wilson died recently, and like many artists, it drew my attention more than had been paid in the past and I stumbled over Celine's Laws.

They're entertaining, but seem to me, particularly the second, to have good applicability.

1. National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.
2. Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.
3. An honest politician is a national calamity.

Celine's Laws

• An open platform allows developers to implement functionality the platform provider hasn't gotten around to yet.
• An open platform allows developers to reimplement and replace functionality the platform provider has gotten around to, but has failed to do well.
• An open platform allows developers to meet needs that scare the platform provider, and allows consumers to have those needs met where otherwise the platform provider would block a capability.
• An open platform allows its users to get far more done, and latches them to that platform far more tightly as a result.

Taken from "Four stories on why iPhone third-party apps matter, from a long-time Treo user" but I think it has vastly wider application than the iPhone niche, though it certainly explains why that niche will remain narrow.

One of my favorite jokes is one that I always mess up. It’s supposed to go:

Me: Ask me what the secret of comedy is.
You: What’s the sec-
Me: TIMING!!

I was thinking about the famous Wayne Gretzky quote

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Which among other problems, suffers from a timing issue, what if you could see where the puck is going, in the next game?

There's no real advantage to having a good idea of where the puck will be in the next game. Its merely frustrating, and of no assistance in the current game. Perhaps it depends on how far away the next game is, and how quickly you can skate.

Its why claims of past prescience, which I occasionally make, are so irksome. So what? Its information you can't use, and if habitual means you'll be making similar predictions in the next game, by which point your insight is forgotten.

A prophet without honour, a cliche.

What costs a lot? Energy. Specifically, the energy needed for a cellular carrier to get a signal to a customer. ABI Research says it’s the third biggest operating expense carriers face. The solution? WiMax, which is twice as energy efficient, 11 times if you factor in data traffic — and metro-scale Wi-Fi, which is 50 times more efficient compared to, say, WCDMA. ABI's new research says the move to wireless broadband by the carriers will account for growth in kilowatt hours from 42.8 billion in 2005 to 124.4 billion in 2011. The study compares the juice use of WCDMA, HSDPA, CDMA2000 1XRTT, EVDO, WiMax and municipal Wi-Fi.

WiMax Briefs

The scale of the difference may be insignificant here, but its interesting nonetheless.

While the iPhone isn't expected in New Zealand (Asia Pacific) until 2008, I had a more imminent reason to monitor Steve Job's MacWorld Keynote. Will Steve Jobs announce an "iPhone" in January 2007 at Macworld Expo? It was my first prediction market and after it closed (automatically by the date and time) I needed to set the closing position. $100 price for the share. I'd been a little pessimistic in my initial price, $30, representing my feeling that 30% was the likelihood of the assertion being correct.

There as been an explosion of insightful and lame observations about the announcement, and I guess, as always, time and the market will tell. How hard was commentator reaching to achieve 20 points if they needed to stoop to this:

But what will the monthly service cost? What will the data plans cost?

Is this a question we ask if any other manufacturer releases a new model? Its perhaps a tribute to the impact and hysteria surrounding a SteveNote, but I doubt Cingular/AT&T are about to craft a specific plan for any handset brand or model.

Myself, I'm vacillating between excitement about the device (even sans GPS, but with the hot wireless standards (sans NFC)) and the unlikelihood that it will succeed beyond the 1% goal. Its potentially a wise attempt to eat their own lunch, but the handset market is not the barren green field that MP3 players were, and there's not really a dearth or demand for a celluar iTunes lockup. I hope in the next year Greenphone and OpenMoko gain traction for the modular solution which is more of an alternative than a proprietary exclusive offering which Apple has always specialised in.

Children's safety, online and with respect to sex, is a difficult topic to address. Any failure to join the hysterical hue and cry of the latest moral panic leaves one vulnerable to quite vile conclusions. Even so, here's a couple of links that put a little perspective on the degree of self-protection that the digital natives are adopting, and some research results about where the real threat lies.

Will it make any difference to the debate? Not likely, its too good a seller of policy, moral highground and media, but at least the next time you see a lurid headline about online risks, you'll be able to contemplate it within the context of some credible information, here's your grain of salt:

'The kids are alright': Survey provides glimpse of young social networkers' habits

The facts about sexual predators online and where abuse really occurs

Want to know what the New Year holds? Well, come along to What's UP - 2007 next Thursday to hear predictions for 2007 from a group of infallible experts: or "bloggers", as we like to call ourselves.

A group of more-or-less well-known local bloggers (including the (in)famous DPF, Tom "WellUrban" Beard, techno-prophet Hamish McEwan and Mr Geekzone himself, Mauricio Freitas), will make rash forecasts about the Internet, gadgets & games, business and telecommunications, technology and (my particular field) Wellington & NZ.

ObURL: http://wellingtonista.com/looking-up-2007

A quick experiment with Google Docs & Spreadsheets blogging function and Blogware's XML-RPC MetaBlog Api.

I've been trying to use the Del.icio.us "daily blog posting" feature, to put a once a day posting of my del.icio.us links and tags here, but that has failed and neither del.icio.us or Blogware have a solution yet.

I would like to see a working example of this technology, which implements the structural separation of UI and backend in such a simple way, so here goes...


Well that worked (and so did the republish function if you can read this) it would seem then that the del.icio.us errors are theirs.

Dana Gardner bemoans the costs the chaotic, disjointed entertainment, communication and computing technology and services market imposes. He correctly observes that no "multi" or "integrated" solution from a single supplier or consortium will solve the problem.

No, because to get "it" requires the constituent provider companies to relate as partners much differently. So far they all seem to want to keep as much of "it" as they can, to no one's full solution offering.

Handicapped by greed and self-interest, Dana uses an example of sumo wrestlers rather than undergraduates trying to get laid, and too stupid and risk-averse to imagine that co-operation could, in the words of the cliche, "grow the pie."

This kind of proprietary isolation, forward channel integration or stove-piping is continual blight on what could be achieved outside of the walled -garden, in the seemingly unlikely event that a walled-gardener recognises the wall keeps as many out as it does keep in. The structural separation of service and platform means profits for efficient and successful providers of either, with out the need to jam them together and extort from the service alone to subsidise the platform.

Given the elephants in the room are unlikely to recognise or accept the step down from the current optimum to search for a potentially higher peak, we must hope that in an environment of small pieces facilitated by reduced communication and transaction costs, will establish or adopt external open standards, akin to email, RSS, and others, and build a shared interoperable ecosystem. the answer to Dana's poll is "We remain in pre-tower Babel and nothing really improves, and we remain our own systems integrators at high cost and complexity."

There will be niches of soup to nuts integrators, Apple classic among them, but there are almost always more people using another solution, particularly in such a diverse and deep layer of activity, than are using yours. Clearly standards, user-facing ones, are the only answer.

I don't know the detailed differences between these two, but to cut to the chase, the winner will be the cheaper "good enough" system. How do I know this? As I heard a Forrester analyst say recently, look at the customer (now in the driver's seat), not the vendor (except in conditions of natural, legislative or network monopoly) to see what will happen.

And there's the fact that the cheaper, "good enough" system always wins, be it transport, LAN, Government or religion.

this is why a heavy-duty core will always lose...by definition, it must
offer services which are of interest to only a subset of its users and
yet all users are impacted by them... /mtr

This is an excerpt from one of Marshall's posts to the X.400 discussion mailing list (ironically delivered over SMTP) explaining why the X.400 list was being delivered over SMTP.

Sony and Toshiba, neither renowned for their openess and standards adherence, though they love to control them, and the revenues that result. Toshiba is the provenance of CSS, the beloved content scrambling system that proved how vulnerable such systems are.

Sony backs Blu-Ray and Toshiba HD DVD.

Given the typical VHS-Betamax intransigence of these actors others have stepped in, with no better motive one suspects, to mitigate the problem.

LG has a triple-standard player (the two in question and the legacy DVD), while Warner Bros Studios are proposing a triple standard disc.

Of course the first question to everyone's lips is not, "How did it come to this?" but rather, "Will you license this technology to other manufacturers/studios?"

The consumer, first faced with a choice of two standards, buy either (or both, given prices fall this gives you more of a brand choice than the LG solution) and discs appropriate to your standards choice. Given the new long tail environment of on-line sales we can perhaps elide over the issue for vendors of stocking two standards on limited shelves.

With the development of a multi-HD player and a multi-HD disc, the choice of player increases to three, but even those with one of the two original choices now have a second option in the discs they buy. I look forward to playing a multi-HD disc in the multi-HD player, which standard will it or I select?

Are we learning yet?

Once again, Intellectual Property isn't benefitting anyone, it may eventually benfit one of the small coterie of large players, but presently their self-interest completely trumps the customers interest in a simple, interoperable system that allows them to buy or borrow a disc from a library or a friend and have it work on their choice of player from a range of manufacturers.

But, despite lip-service to the notion of the customer as king, and competition and the market-place's power to choose, these consortia of vendors will continue to try and hedge their bets, avoid risk, and guarantee their returns via this demonstrably damaging and stupid practice and process of competition at the infrastructural layer of entertainment systems, the media and recording standard.

One must marvel at either the magnitude of their selfishness, greed or stupidity, or maybe its the scale of the returns that justify this incredible public stupidity, one that a manufacturer and a content producer have the resources and motivation to attempt to mitigate. Not solve, mitigate.

Again, the comfortable incumbents of consumer electronics standards setting are wasting our time and money with a futile battle that we, the customer, will eventually decide as we have in every single other such stoush. We did with Ethernet, VHS, audio cassette, etc. etc. etc.

What I'd like to see is us, the consumer and our representatives, create an open standard for HD media, one without licensing fees of any kind. Then I think we'd see a real market operate, and real companies and capitalists in it, not cowering incumbents who, like Telstra and Telecom, want their investments "guaranteed" along with their rate of return.

The HD debacle is another example where the tension and divergence between the motives of the producer and consumer are such that the consumer needs to co-ordinate to wrest control and conflict from the hands of the comfortable incumbents and into the open.

Listening to Matinee Idol on National Radio I heard for the first time, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron.

It was written at a time when the "scarce" broadcast spectrum was allocated and managed by the State, and exploited by commercial entities to optimise returns by maximising the number and value of recievers, so they could be sold to the customers of broadcasters, advertisers. Such a model left many identity groups under-served and tended to present a homogeneous presentation that favoured the dominant identity group. While Scott-Heron's complaints reflect an (doubtless too, one of many) Afro-American concern, there are certain to be groups of Americans of European provenance who felt equally slighted by lack of attention from the structurally inevitably mass media.

In the way of coincidence I then read Clay Shirky's "The future of television and the media triathlon" and Steve Rubel's "How TV Will Become the Ultimate Open Content Platform" on the subject of TV.

You'll notice the link to Steve's posting actually references one of the comments to his claim, which reads in part

I think by "TV" Steve means the big flat screen on your wall, not ABC or any other specific content producer/distributor.

and concludes:

The big flat screen on your wall will indeed be just fine…

Well, I certainly hope thats what Steve was talking about

In fact, broadcast TV, terrestrial, satellite, digital or analogue is unlikely to become "Open" anytime soon, those comfortable incumbents will hang on just as long as all such entities, based on selective access to "scarce" resources, do. In the ultimate scarcity, a single entity has a monopoly, but the case exists for small numbers of oligopolists too.

However, if Steve is talking about "The big flat screen on your wall," that device is and has been Open for a long time. Already one TV is sufficient to display all the broadcast TV described above, console games, recording devices and more. There may be a need for a growing cluster of boxes to provide or adapt inputs to the screen, but the screen remains content agnostic. Rightly so. Where would we be if a different TV or radio was required for every broadcaster?

Actually, we'd be where iPod and Zune are trying to keep us.

Clay Shirky's coincidental and perhaps contemporaneous post deconstructs the expectations of HDTV's greatest advocate Mark Cuban. A bold move to challenge the brash and wealthy Cuban, but Shirky is the one who raised questions about the media's slavish acceptance of SecondLife "resident" numbers…

The pull-quote for me:

Cuban doesn’t understand that television has been cut in half. The idea that there should be a formal link between the tele- part and the vision part has ended. Now, and from now on, the form of a video can be handled separately from it’s method of delivery. And since they can be handled separately, they will be, because users prefer it that way.

He also makes the point that despite better being the enemy of good, good enough quite often trumps better, particularly if good enough offers other benefits in convenience or reduced costs.

Being "cut in half" is structural separation. And Television isn't the only comfortable monopoly incumbent who needs to learn this lesson.

The revolution will not be televised, but will be observed on a monitor near you.

[And Joe Trippi? Check the Wikipedia disambiguation page at the top of the page]