a hungry brain

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:20:19 GMT

This is the third Ted inspired post.....

Schtoom is a open source VoIP project in Python. This could be huge!

Shtoom

Vercotti: (Michael Palin) Well, I had been running a successful escort agency - high class, no really, high class girls... we didn't have any of that . That was right out. And I decided. (phone rings on desk) Excuse me. (he answers it) Hello... no, not now... shtoom... shtoom... right... yes we'll have the watch ready for you at midnight... the watch... the Chinese watch... yes, right oh, bye bye... Mother.

-- Ethel the Frog

Shtoom is a open-source, cross-platform VoIP softphone, implemented in Python. As well as the basic phone, the package also includes a number of other applications -

shtoom - the end-user phone
shtam - a simple answering machine/voicemail application
shmessage - an announcement server

Shtoom should work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It ships with user interfaces for Qt/KDE, Gtk/GNOME, Tk and a command line. There will hopefully be native user interfaces for Windows and the Mac soon, until then, the Tk interface works on those platforms.

Shtoom has audio support on Linux using OSS or ALSA, and on all other platforms using the PortAudio library. Native sound drivers for Mac/Windows are planned (the Mac interface should be done soon -- volunteers to help with an interface from Python to Windows DirectSound libraries are more than welcome!)

Shtoom requires Python 2.3.3 and Twisted 1.1.1 or greater.

Availability:

Shtoom 0.2 is now available. You can get it from the Sourceforge Files page. Or, for the brave, you can get source via subversion. Anonymous checkouts should get svn://divmod.org/svn/Shtoom/trunk/shtoom, while folks with developer access should use svn+ssh://divmod.org/svn/Shtoom/trunk/shtoom.

[Marc's Voice]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:19:24 GMT

Context Broker.

Context Broker Architecture. CoBrA is an agent based architecture for supporting context-aware systems in smart spaces (e.g., intelligent meeting rooms, smart homes, and... [Raw]

[about.CoBrA]

Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) is an agent based architecture for supporting context-aware systems in smart spaces (e.g., intelligent meeting rooms, smart homes, and smart vehicles). Central to this architecture is an intelligent agent called context broker that maintains a shared model of context on the behalf of a community of agents, services, and devices in the space and provides privacy protections for the users in the space by enforcing the policy rules that they define.

Key differences between CoBrA and other similar architectures are the following:

CoBrA uses the Web Ontology Language OWL, a W3C Semantic Web standard, to define ontologies of context (people, agents, devices, events, time, space, etc.). In other systems, context is often implemented as programming language objects (e.g., Java classes), lacking the expressive power to support context reasoning and high-level knowledge sharing.
CoBrA provides a resource-rich context broker to maintain a shared model of context for all computing entities in an associated space. In other systems, individual entities are usually required to manage their own contextual knowledge.
CoBrA allows the users to define privacy policy to control the sharing and the use of their situational information (e.g., where they are, who they are with, what they are doing). In other systems, the computing entities are usually free to share any acquired situational information of a user.

Figure 1 shows an overview architecture diagram of CoBrA. For more information, please see the documents listed in the paper section.

Thanks Danny!

[Marc's Voice]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:18:27 GMT

New short from Susannah Breslin. Former BoingBoing guestblogger Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin celebrates a birthday today. She also a new short story out in Ducky Magazine. Dig the phat cover art. Excerpt:

One morning, she woke up and discovered that her head was gone. She had reached up to pat her hair, or rub the sleep from her eyes, or scratch her ear, and she had realized that her head was nowhere to be found. Where, she wondered, had it gone? She had no idea at all. She could not recall, in fact, very well what had happened the previous evening. She had been at a bar, and she had gotten drunk, and then she had come back home. From what she could remember, her head had still been sitting squarely on her shoulders when she had climbed into bed. Perhaps, she considered, her head had run off at some point during the night while she lay sleeping.

Link to "The Woman Who Lost Her Head". [Boing Boing]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:16:30 GMT

ASCII Babes.

Portraits of hundreds of your favorite celebrity babes - from Angelina Jolie and Elisha Cuthbert to Victoria Silvstedt and Vivica Fox - lovingly rendered in ASCII format. Our inner geek couldn't be more pleased.

ASCII Babes (asciibabes.com, via Coolio's)
Previously: Deep ASCII, Color ASCII Porn

[Fleshbot]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:15:32 GMT

Technorati Toolbar.

I'm developing the Technorati Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It enables you to look up references from blogs that point to the web page you're reading, and lots of other cool stuff. I'm developing an open-ended plug-in system: Technorati Toolbar Plug-ins will extend the Technorati Toolbar to support popular blogging tools, render interactive interfaces to dynamic web services, and integrate other tools and services into high level, practical, task oriented user interfaces.

[Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:14:42 GMT

Good time waster: simple sliding tile puzzle. My dad sent me the url to this java-based slider tile puzzle, and it has killed half my work day so far. He solved it in 48 moves. I guess 44 is the minimum. I can't solve it! If everyone who reads Boing Boing spends ten minutes on it, it will result in 312.5 man-days of wasted time! (It didn't work in Safari for me; I had to use IE) Link
[Boing Boing]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:14:26 GMT

The $14 SteadyCam. Brian sez: "For less than 5% of the price of a real Steadicam (the ones made for small video cameras go for about $900), you can apparently build your own "Steady-Cam" for $14 with parts from a hardware store. The sample video makes it look pretty good. Great gift for the amateur videographer in your life who refuses to use a tripod, the bastard. (Oh, and stabilized images compress much better for the Web, too.)" Link
[Boing Boing]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:13:07 GMT

Distributed audiobook for Down and Out. Jill Smith has begun a distributed audiobook project for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whose new, liberal Creative Commons license allows for exactly this kind of mishegas (see the distributed audiobook project for Lessig's Free Culture for an example of how well this can work). She's recorded a reading of the prologue and posted it to the Internet Archive's public submission area, where open-licensed material is hosted for free.

I'm immensely gratified by this -- audiobooks are my favorite nontextual medium for storytelling and I can't fall asleep at night without one. I would love for others to take Jill's lead and finish it out. Link (Thanks Jill!) [Boing Boing]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:12:18 GMT

WND. An Arab language jihadi Web site posted a very rough six point plan for causing economic destruction in the US. The points are:

attacks on the assets of large American companies all over the world;
attacks on U.S. oil refineries;
attacks on civilian airports with the goal of financially devastating U.S. airlines;
deliberate pollution of food system;
setting of fires in the forests – "especially those that provide the American market with the raw materials for the wood and paper and byproducts industries";
attacks like those on the railway transportation lines in Spain.

[John Robb's Weblog]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:11:41 GMT

Here is a good outline of terrorist infrastructure. [John Robb's Weblog]

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:11:04 GMT

Try your hand at balancing the federal budget. US Federal Budget sim created at Berkeley.

This simulation asks you to adjust spending and tax expenditures in the the 2004 budget proposed by the White House in order to achieve either a balanced budget or any other target deficit...According to the White House, the 2004 fiscal deficit is projected to be $307 billion. This does not include the costs of the Iraq War, so it has been increased by a base estimate of $50 billion for those costs in this simulation (which can be increased, lowered or eliminated depending on peoples views of the costs or likelihood of the war.).

Link [Boing Boing]

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 11:58:00 GMT

Top Tip: Shutdown folder in Windows?. We all know when Windows starts up, those programs in the startup folder start up with Windows. Is there a folder like that when the computer shuts down? [Extremetech]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:22:21 GMT

AbiWord goes Mac native. AbiWord is a cross-platform, open-source word-processor that reads and writes Word, OpenOffice, Word Perfect, RTF, Palm and HTML documents. The project has just shipped an OSX-native version that runs without X-Windows, meaning that all you need to do to run it is double-click and launch. Link (via Forwarding Address: OS X) [Boing Boing]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:22:08 GMT

Classic Gamer Magazine. Classic Gamer Magazine is a downloadable PDF zine (6MB compressed) devoted to news and reviews of obsolete arcade games. I love the graphics, especially the repros of vintage video-game ads. Link (Thanks, Cav!)
[Boing Boing]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:21:07 GMT

Bush photomosaic of American dead in Iraq. Bush photomosaic of Americans who have died in Iraq since the war president entered office. Link
[Boing Boing]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:19:50 GMT

RSS version history by Dave Winer.

Dave Winer posted a version history for RSS. This should be quoted in every article that's done about RSS or other syndication types like Atom.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:19:29 GMT

Channel9 conversation continues....

Channel9 gets Slashdotted. Oh, the comments are great!

Here's some other reactions from around the Web:

Kent wants a single page of all the RSS feeds. I'll do that tomorrow.

Evelyn Rodriguez: Maybe It's Time to Re-Think What Marketing is

DonXML: The human beings behind XML at Microsoft. "My only regret from last night was that we didn't have someone there walking around the dinner with a video camera, recording what I saw, a bunch of human beings in open and candid discussions."

My reply: Don, I recorded a ton of them, but the audio is useless. I'll try tomorrow in some of the product team meetings.

Jerry Pisk takes us to task for our HTML (over in a comment over on Jason Mauss' critique of Channel9): http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fchannel9.msdn.com - They can't even get the Transitional HTML right. It's just so typical of Microsoft - we're going to listen to you, as long as you say and do what we want you to. In this case only use IE and waste your time watching videos... But we're going to keep telling you it's not marketing so you have to believe it's not.

Yes, we know we have crappy HTML. Watch the site over the next few weeks. That, itself, will turn into a Channel9 topic.

Jeff Putz: "...the content strategy is kind of poor..."

My reply: AMATEUR HOUR IS THE WHOLE IDEA! In fact, here's the point. We're using cheapo digital video cameras. You can buy this stuff at Best Buy. No lighting. A $30 microphone. Stuff you can do at home.

Listen, we want candid looks inside Microsoft. NONE of the interviews I posted were checked out by PR. No lawyers. No execs. It's just me and Charles roving the campus for interesting people doing interesting things telling interesting stories. We interview them over lunch. In the cafeteria. In their offices. Hopefully soon out on the lawn. Maybe at the Pro Club while we work out.

Now, we have a multi-million-dollar studio. Why not there?

A couple of reasons. 1) Scheduling becomes a nightmare. Asking for one hour of Bill Hill's time is one thing. Asking for four hours so he can come into studios is a whole nother thing. 2) When people go into the studios and have lights and makeup and stuff, they become un-human. They start talking differently. In fact, even in front of my little tiny digital camera they behave differently. Eric Lippert, today, on his blog, talks about "fidgeting" on camera. I want them to feel as comfortable as possible. We're just having a conversation.

Why not just text? someone asked me on IM. I'm well-versed in why video sucks for online communication (I do write a lot, if you haven't noticed). Watch Bill Hill's video again and tell me that the conversation would be just as interesting in text as it is in video. Even with the amateurish video quality. The poor lighting. The crappy camera work.

Plus, we wanted to play around and learn how people might want to use video in the future. This stuff is remarkably easy to do now with a digital camera, a firewire connection, and Microsoft Windows (using Movie Maker to edit the videos).

I can't wait for the day when you all can post your own videos to your blogs. Yeah, the text purists will yell and scream, but let's play around together. There's more to life than just ASCII text you know. Imagine doing a blog just for your family with home videos.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:17:37 GMT

Core versus Context - Core creates value that competitors can't replicate.

From :: Under the Buzz - "April 2004 - Vol 5, Number 1 - The Unattainable Real-Time Enterprise (by Geoffrey Moore) (PDF):

QUOTE

My analysis in a nutshell is that core activities are those that increase the sustainable competitive advantage of a company. Core activities create value for customers in a way that is hard forcompetitors to replicate, and by doing so increase the market power of the company. Investors notice this, and reward the company with a higher stock price.

Of course in today's market, core doesn't stay core for very long as competitors copy successful companies. At one point a web site to distribute marketing information was a core activity. Now it is a context activity, something that is required by the market that does not differentiate. Political factors also drive context to encroach on core. Everyone wants to feel important, meaning to feel like core, even though their activities might more reasonably be considered context. In most organizations, context activities compete for resources with core, and when they win, the company loses.

My recommendation is that companies never lose site of the distinction between core and context as they do business. Invest as much as possible in core activities. Seek to reduce costs and outsource context activities. If you have to cut spending in downturn, don't do it across the board, cutting core and context by equal measures. Instead, seek to actually increase your investment in core while making even more drastic cuts in context to achieve the total cost-reduction goal.

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:16:57 GMT

Google is a single, very large custom computer.

Fascinating!

From Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power:

QUOTE

Competitive Advantage

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:16:29 GMT

Game operations in New York. ...Spent some time today updating my links page, where I try to keep track of anyone doing anything remotely game-related in New York. Doing this is usually depressing, but I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I was adding more promising new companies than deleting lame dead ones... Maybe things are actuallly looking up.

Speaking of which, I'm hosting a meeting of the "Gamoids," the NYC IGDA chapter in a few weeks... If you have a professional interest in the field, and are in the area, let me know. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:16:08 GMT

Why is LSD use down. LSD use is way down in recent years, according to arrest records, hospital records, and surveys with high schoolers. Slate looked into it, and came up with two reasons why. First and foremost, the DEA busted a couple of guys in rural Kansas back in 2000, who supplied 95 percent of the country's acid. The other reason is the breakup of the Grateful Dead.

"The LSD market took an earlier blow in 1995, when Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died and the band stopped touring. For 30 years, Dead tours were essential in keeping many LSD users and dealers connected, a correlation confirmed by the DEA in a divisional field assessment from the mid-'90s. The spring following Garcia's death (the season the MTF surveys are administered), annual LSD use among 12th-graders peaked at 8.8 percent and began their slide. Phish picked up part of the Dead's fan base—and presumably vestiges of the LSD delivery system. At the end of 2000, Phish stopped touring as well, and perhaps not coincidentally, the MTF numbers for LSD began to plummet."

Link [Boing Boing]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:15:52 GMT

Spymac beats Google to the 1G free email punch. A small Mac-related web hosting site offers a free gig's worth of email. The company promises no adwords or other forms of promotion linked to email contents. Instead, they're using the free service to promote Web hosting and auction services. Link to announcement on Spymac site, Link to related News.com story. (via Batelle, thanks also Jean-Luc) [Boing Boing]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:15:26 GMT

Train Your Own Replacement [Slashdot]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:14:29 GMT

Customer demand for a ubiquitous InfoPath runtime. The last time I asked Microsoft why there's no plan to make the InfoPath runtime ubiquitous, the answer I got was: "We don't hear customers asking for it." Well, I do. Here's a typical rant from one customer who, because his company has a relationship with Microsoft that he doesn't want to jeopardize, asked me to anonymize his comments:

I believe a primary requirement of a forms application is to make it possible for the form to be completed by a wide audience of people from whom I wish to gather data. A key driver, at least in the world of my customers, is to be able to distribute the form widely to people who aren't necessarily connected to the network and get them to fill it in and return it. I don't want to authenticate these people in my network. They won't install software on their computers just to fill out my form. They don't want to learn a new application.

It seems InfoPath has completely ignored the question of how the form will actually be filled in by the responder. There is no free viewer as there is with Adobe Acrobat. There is no ability to save the form template as an ASP.NET web form. It appears that Microsoft expects everyone to purchase a full copy of InfoPath--the complete form design application--just so they can fill out a form. They can't possibly believe the product will gain any traction with this licensing and deployment model, can they? [1] What are they thinking? [2]

So my main question is, is there any way to deploy InfoPath forms without putting full InfoPath on every desktop? [3] Do you know whether Microsoft understands this issue and are planning anything to address it? [4] The two applications that are widely available on everyone's desktop are a web browser and Adobe Acrobat, and it seems like it would be a good idea for InfoPath to support forms deployment via one of those means. Am I missing something here? [5]

... [Jon's Radio]

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:14:15 GMT

Gorilla Glue. General purpose glue [Cool Tools]