Mike O’Connor

This is the scratchpad I'm going to use to keep notes to myself as I migrate Sex and Podcasting from Xoops to Word Press on my IIS server (Win2003). This is extreme geekness, not good reading unless you're trying to do the same thing.

Read on for the geek stuff... (more...)

I've been puzzling about the problem that BlogTorrant solves for quite a while.

Namely -- how can I make it easy to put BitTorrant versions of big files (like my Sex and Podcasting podcasts) up on my sites.

These sites of mine are built on Xoops, a very nifty, very flexible open-source content management system that can do all kinda cool stuff. But blogging isn't it's strong suit -- not terrible, but it's a little clunky at things like track-backs, RSS, etc.

I solved the "how do I do enclosures?" problem by using FeedBurner to generate the RSS feeds that you're seeing -- one of the nice things about that system is way it auto-magically does all the enclosure stuff for podcasting.

This BlogTorrant gizmo looks like it might be the add-on that will make it easy to do BitTorrants in the Xoops environment -- I will do some tinkering and update this post with a cookbook if things work out.

Ah. A completely satisfactory geek experience. Now that I've rassled most of the basic podcasting stuff into shape, I wanted to move on to doing interviews and conference calls and recording them -- Ralph pointed out that Skype was the way to go.

Doug Kaye (the maestro of IT Conversations) put together this definitive post on how to record Skype calls. There are other ways, but this is definitely the industrial-strength approach.

I'm going to start doing "conversation" podcasts, but before that I'm going to use this to record an interview for a consulting project I'm working on -- tomorrow. I have a little rant n'record that's going up on Sex and Podcasting about how you could use podcasting as an organizing tool for work (the show will go up in a day or two).

Safe Haven's not getting much attention these days because I'm still getting my sea legs with the podcasting stuff. Sex and Podcasting is gonna be getting a new post a day, at least for the next week.

But I ran into a cool thought while listening to The Gilmore Gang yesterday (what happened to them by the way -- a great series of podcasts that seem to have trickled off to nothing back in February).

Here's the idea -- why not use RSS on a manufacturing shop floor to let machines and work-centers tell each other (and us) what they're up to. Machines could "subscribe" to upstream machines, and "publish" for downstream machines and let each other know what's going on -- feeds could talk about what came into (and left) the machine/work-center.

I spoze this could be expanded to anything that has stuff moving through stages -- paperwork processes, hospitals, etc. All kinds of real-time applications come to mind.

One thing that would be neat is that we'd get away from the huge central database notion and so adding a workcenter, or rearranging them, would be easy. Simply a matter of changing who subscribed to what. Sortof an object-oriented model that us regular people could understand...

It could be really visual too -- lots of cool UI possibilities there. Not to mention fitting in better with the notion of lean manufacturing, and visual management.

Now, back to podcasting.

I'm late into the game -- podcasting's 5 months old, but I'm there now.

This blog has been neglected for the last couple weeks while I've been getting things pulled together, but I'm there now and this is an entry to record what I've learned. It's going to be another really long one, so I'll put topic headers and keywords (for Google) "above the fold" and leave the gory details for the "read more" section...

Sex and Podcasting -- what it's about, why I'm doing it, why I transmogrified Lorenzo's "Sex and Broadcasting" book title into my site's name, plus some of the interesting current developments in the podcast world like Adam Curry's Podshow.com.

Licensing -- I'm going to play RIAA licensed music. At least I think so... This section is where I'll explore the differences between ASCAP/BMI performance rights licenses, Harry Fox Agency mechanical rights licenses and SoundExchange federal copyright licenses and how I've decided to proceed -- the short version is; I've got a BMI license for the performance rights, and will work with Harry Fox on mechanical rights when they decide what to do.

Equipment -- hardware/software plus construction. I got a couple cool new toys -- some nice mics plus a really neat Marantz PMD660 digital recorder (which i wound up getting in preference to the Edirol R1).

To learn more... (more...)

Steve and Ralph and I had a little chat in the "comments" section of the video-conferencing post that went up a few weeks back, which got me thinking this morning...

Since I imagine most of the folks who are reading this blog are Beer Gang members-in-good-standing, I was wondering if you'd be interested in having a conferencing area on the site so you could talk to each other directly. It's easy (a couple mouse-clicks) to put up, if you think it's a good idea.

One of the dreams I've always had (from reading too much science fiction, no doubt) is to be able to do point to point video phone calls with folks. I was an early fan of ICQ -- which back in the olden days was one of the very first video-calling applications.

I've always been disappointed with the results. The early cameras were crummy, bandwidth limitations resulted in choppy pictures with huge latency and the sound-portion of the call was always a nightmare.

It had been a few years since I'd messed around with the stuff, so when my buddy Bill Coleman asked, I took the opportunity to do a geek project and see how things work these days. This is a "notes to myself" post in case I have to retrace my steps some day.

The big breakthrough was to use Skype for the audio portion of the call. It's pretty easy to get the video portion of the call up and running with MSN Messenger (and presumably AIM and Yahoo Messenger as well). But getting the audio to work has always been way too hard for me to suggest to "normal people" because of all the firewall and routing issues. Skype neatly solves that problem and we judged our Saturday Geek project "pretty cool" and a big success.

Good things

- It's pretty cheap. For Bill and me, who both already have broadband Internet access and computers and like that, the only out of pocket cost is the $50 we spent on our spiffy little Logitech cameras. The instant-messaging client (MSN Messenger is what we used) and Skype are both free.

- Quality is good -- especially the audio. Skype has got the kinks worked out of their stuff, so the audio portion of the call was smooth as silk. And the video works pretty darn good too. A little fiddling (mostly with the video "size" setting once the video portion was up) and we got the audio and video latency (geek talk for "delay") pretty well lined up with each other so the lips moved when the sound arrived.

- It's pretty easy, and thus a rewarding project and a lot more fun than all this stuff used to be.

- It will work for people at work. That's a really big deal for Bill, because he wants to use this to keep in touch with his clients, who tend to be scattered all over the landscape. See the Cookbook for the tech details, but I think this rig will work with no firewall changes (except for the firewall on your PC) and thus won't give security-people heartburn.

"Read more" to get to the Video Cookbook... (more...)

I have an admission to make. I was inspired to get the haven.com domain (which I use for all my personal stuff on the 'net) after reading some cyber-punk novel or other. Might have been Neuromancer by Bill Gibson or maybe Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Whatever. Anyway I was entranced with the idea of "data havens" that was floating around in the fiction of that time, and that's what was on my mind when it came time to get my very first ever domain name. I was tickled to death to find out that haven.com was available (for free back in those days).

Some years later, Ryan Lackley contacted me to see if I would be interested in selling him the domain for a new venture he was involved with, which at that time was called HavenCo. Their premise was to set up a secure data haven in this odd little place called Sealand (that's their official "national" site -- also check out the Wikipedia entry about Sealand, which includes the latest developments like the fire in 2006). Sealand is an old WWII gun platform about 10 miles off the coast of England that is owned by a pretty odd character who dubbed himself "Prince Roy", declared himself a sovereign nation and embarked on all kinds of schemes ranging from ship registry to fishing tours.

I passed -- we'd just sold gofast.net, and I'd sold Television.com and Company.com and was feeling like I needed a breather.

HavenCo launched about a year later (July 2000), amidst much fanfare and a fabulous piece in Wired Magazine.

Well, almost five years have passed as I write this and as I was updating my web site with a little group of links called "All the Havens this isn't..." I decided to see how HavenCo was doing. Unfortunately, as with lots of schemes that were hatched in 1999, HavenCo isn't doing so well these days.

Here's a link to the official HavenCo web site. Doesn't look too bad does it? The site's still up, and it appears that they're still open for business. Well, not so fast.

Here's an article that ran in 2002 that starts giving you a clue that maybe things are starting to unravel. Check out the pictures of the Sealand platform. Hmm. I'm not sure I'd want to put much of a raised-floor computer/network operations center out there. And I sure wouldn't want to live out there for a couple years the way Ryan eventually did.

Here's Ryan's writeup of where things are at -- which is the usual disarray of failed contracts combined with a dash of international sovereignty foolishness. I found this paper that Ryan presented at DefCon to be especially poignant.

So to sum up -- it looks like (as of this writing) HavenCo is limping along, milking it's remaining customers for whatever it can. The founders are all gone. Lawsuits abound. Dreams are shattered. Geeks are pissed.

Sigh. So many stories like this... Remember all that baloney in Wired Magazine about The Long Boom that started coming out in 1997 or so? Oh well...

Julio's been writing about podcasting for (seemingly) ever -- and i didn't read any of the posts until today when he pointed folks at this great 4 Minutes About Podcasting movie.

NOW I get it!

Amazing -- all of the "tell your own story" ethic of community radio, combined with all the cool "build your own feed" capability of RSS feeds, which results in "radio" that's going to show up in Google.. If you're a community-radio type person who hasn't messed around with podcasting, go watch that movie -- and then let your imagination run wild. I'm sitting here thunderstruck, realizing what the possibilities are...

What an amazing community technology. For example; you're an organizer of (fill in the blank), laboring away in your local community. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to hear an occasional "show" about your cause, direct from the mouth of your inspirational mentor? If you're an inspirational-mentor type person, wouldn't it be great to periodically share your "show" with others?

Or, if you're more like the typical community-radio programmer, wouldn't it be great to reach the .0003% of the population of the planet who shares your passion about (fill in the blank)? Conversely, wouldn't it be great to listen to shows produced by people who exactly share your tastes and views?

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be broadcasters. Their days of being in any way relevant are numbered.

This one totally nifty technology. Thanks Julio for pointing me at the link that finally turned the light bulb on. I'm going to add useful links "below the fold" as I explore -- to see that stuff, hit the "read more" button.

Bandwidth -- A puzzler

The community radio movement was all about access to limited bandwidth (in our case, noncommercial FM channels). Podcasting is going to present an interesting bandwidth problem for the person with a really popular podcast -- it's going to slurp up a lot of bandwidth to deliver a 50 mByte file to thousands (millions?) of fans that are hungry for your stuff. Looks to me like we'll need to marry BitTorrent with podcasting pretty soon now.

I'm really interested in the "how do you do it?" part of podcasting right now, so that's what this first collection of links reflects.

Engadget provided a great starting point on this page about podcasting.

Creating podcasts is pretty straightforward -- make a radio show, but pipe it off to an MP3 file when you're done. I was Googling for "make a podcast" and got zillions of articles about how to make digital radio shows -- lots of talk about mixers, and line-inputs-to-the-computer, and like that.

What I'm interested in right now is the RSS feed part -- and the very last part of that Engaget article is what tipped me over to understanding. It all revolves around the notion of an "enclosure" in an RSS feed -- something that most blog-creating software doesn't grok yet, but I bet all off them will soon.

I think for now I'll try just editing up my own RSS feed by hand rather than trying to force-feed Xoops (the software I'm using to create this blog). I'm going to use the XML file in the Engadget article as a template, build me a little "hello world" podcast and see how I do. But not right away. First I gotta finish helping Marcie lay down flooring in the upstairs room at the farm.

This is the latest geek project -- reclaiming Robert's old PC and transmogrifying it into a personal video recorder (PVR for short) with a Hauppauge PVR 350 and SageTV software.

Sure, I could have gone out and bought a Tivo or ReplayTV for about the same (or maybe a little less) money. But I see several advantages to doing it myself;

Yep, like everybody I've switched to Firefox. I'm just a slave to fashion.

But I'm addicted to the Google Toolbar which only works under Internet Explorer.

Fortunately, there's an open source project that duplicates the toolbar for Firefox called Googlebar.. Just installed it a few days ago. It works great and has some features that Google's doesn't. One that I found intriguing was the ability to restrict a search to a given institution of higher education.

Very nifty gizmo...

The Annual O'Connor Christmas Day Christmas Party always produces a few really interesting conversations. This year I talked to an old friend (who will remain anonymous - you'll see why in a minute) about using blogs as a way for people to talk to each other without revealing their identity.

This kind of thing has been happening on the Internet ever since the beginning, but public blog site (like Blog Spot) make it MUCH easier for "normal people" to set up an anonymous space than most of the preceding tools.

So natcherly, this morning the New York Times runs a story about an anonymous blog. Pretty darn handy. The story on the Times site is about Anonymous Lawyer, a fictional web site about life in a Big Law law-firm. A great example of an anonymous site, run on a public blog service.

In this case, eventually you find out the identity of the author of the site, but only because he allows that to happen. I imagine there are lots of blogs out there where it would be very hard to figure out the real identity of the person posting.

Another possibility would be to set up a "private group" on Yahoo Groups. That would tend to keep your posts off the search engines -- a drawback to Blog Spot is that most of their blogs get sucked into the search engines (I'm not sure whether you can make a Blog Spot blog "private").

If you have a finite group of people in the group, you could all share the same user-name and password when posting to your blog/group and thus add another layer of anonymity to the conversations.

Marcie's blog is an example of a site where identity is consciously "managed" within narrow limits. She's very careful not to reveal the location of our farm, because she doesn't want people to come visiting unannounced. For a long time, you also wouldn't have been able to get in touch with Marcie except through the blog, although we recently changed that.

So -- if you're an organizer looking for a place where identity can be masked in order to have candid discussions, consider a blog on a public server.

I've always liked to hang out with people who are REALLY into what they do, often to the point of being irascible and grouchy because there's nobody for them to talk to as a peer.

One such fellow is Steve Emly, the founder/proprietor of Emcom. Steve is into network monitoring at a level that defies description and I love learning from him.

Son Richard and I are embarking on the (probably ludicrous) project of converting my vinyl record collection to digital and I came across another fellow who's at the "guru level" during the process of looking for "de-click, de-pop" software to clean up my beat up old vinyl.

I don't know what his name is, but I **know** that he's another person who's functioning at that supremo-geek level -- I would love to meet him some day. BTW, I know it's a "him" because he's got to be the curmudgeon narrating the video on his web site. Bet the house.

If you ever want to learn about digital audio recording or digital sound enhancement, head out to Enhanced Audio or the associated TracerTek (which seems to be down today, but is the bigger/better site). Download copies of his free demo software and the tutorial that goes with it. Spend an enjoyable half day narking around with his DC Six software and you will be a whole lot smarter than when you started.

He's into cleaning up old records, but he's also really into forensic audio. You know, where the cops have bugged your office, you've used loud music to cover up your conversation about the big drug deal? He's got some killer software that will remove the music and leave the conversation behind. Very much reminded me of the old movie Blowup. Some of the demos are to die for. Definitely a great geek holiday that you can take from the comfort of your workstation.

I'm a big Strongbad fan (thanks to my kids who turned me on to the whole Homestar Runner gang a year or so ago).

This week's Strongbad Email is especially appropriate for us folks who fiddle around with security. Here's the link.

I'm a terrible speller (although much better now that I get constant feedback from my word processor). I've become so dependent on the spell-checking that I find it bothersome when it's *not* available -- as is the case when filling in web-based forms like this one that I'm using to compose this blog entry.

But my troubles are over. Thanks to Julio's recent post about extensions to Firefox and Internet Explorer I'm now happily spell-checking my blog entries with the IESpell spell-checking add-in to Explorer. It's free (for personal use anyway). Lots of other handy stuff out there too. Thanks for the pointer Julio!

Watch my posts become more erudite!