Author Archives: Mike O'Connor

BlogTorrant – making BitTorrants easier for your blog

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.

Radio people are digging their own graves

I loved this New York Times piece called “Fade-out, how the new rock is passe on radio.”

Here's the punchline quote at the end;

Quote:

Some analysts fear that, when radio stations switch from alternative rock to programming aimed at older listeners, they may be making a sacrifice. “Radio has ceded the younger demographic to other media,” said Fred Jacobs, president of Jacobs Media, a radio consulting company in Southfield, Mich., specializing in rock. “I just don't know how we're going to get back people who didn't get into the radio habit in their teens,” he said, adding, “It really becomes problematic down the road.”

Another tidbit from the article. Turns out the big programmers (Cox, Clear Channel) dropped women from their ratings target in 2003! And here's another gem.

Quote:

“The format in the last couple of years has gone through an identity crisis,” said Kevin Weatherly, program director of KROQ, a closely watched alternative powerhouse in Los Angeles. “You have stations that are too cool, that move too quickly and are only playing the coolest music, which doesn't at the end of the day attract enough of the audience. Or you have the other extreme, dumb rock, red-state rock that the cool kids just flat out aren't into.”

Dumb rock. Red-state rock. I love that…

Here's a tip to the broadcasters. Figure out what podcasts the “cool kids” are listening to. Do something like that on your radio station. You'll be fine.

Update…

Hm, later the same day, Clear Channel (biggest oinker multi-radio-station owner in the land) posted declines in radio revenue. Here's a relevant quote;

Quote:

Radio broadcasting revenue fell 7 percent to $773.6 million, while live entertainment dropped 17 percent to $424.5 million

And here's a link to the story.

"Messing with my man" — a musical project, with apologies to Steve Reich

Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing posted this great voicemail message from a very angry young woman who accidentally left the message on a wrong number. Here’s the link to her post. I’m goofing around with some new audio gear this afternoon and decided to do a little fooling around with it. I hope she hears it some day, and uses it to direct her anger — she’s been done wrong!

This is a take off on a great Steve Reich piece called “It’s gonna rain” – here’s a link to get you started on that one.

And here’s a link to my little MP3 — it’s about 3 minutes long, 2.5 mBytes.

Listen…

Recording Skype calls (for podcasting, but also interviews for work)

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).

RSS as a replacement for databases

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.

Sex and Podcasting — my new podcasting gizmo

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… Continue reading →

Question for y'all — should I add conferencing to the site?

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.

Video conferencing on the cheap — finally

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… Continue reading →

Son Richard was in the paper over the weekend

Here's the link to the article, which ran in the St Paul paper this Sunday – click here for the story.

A great lesson in community organizing and Margaret Mead's famous quote Quote:

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Marcie and I were a part of that committed group of parents that changed the direction of the school. But it was Richard who stole the show. At both of the big public meetings, he got up and made the comment that people all remembered.

Pretty cool guy, that Rich.

Havenco – the rise and fall of a data haven

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…

Podcasting

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.

Great eye and ear candy – Arcade Machine Self Test

Way to go Gizmondo — an amazing post here to delight your senses. As long as you're willing to spend a little time outside the box, that is.

Head on through to the assembler.org site and try the two screens out — I like the animated one the best. Even better with the suggested MP3 tracks playing at the same time. Took me back to my “new music” days in the late '60's these did. Very excellent.

Rural development

Marcie and I alternate between a house in town (4 days a week) and our farm three days a week.

One of the things that bugs me about the farm is how difficult it is for people to make a living in rural America. It seems to me that just like there's a pretty strong tide running in the “outsourcing” trend, there's also a trend that ultimately leaves rural America empty — except for “gentleman farmers” like me.

Lots of people have observed this before me, but now I'm a part of a rural community, so I devote a little more of my time working on the problem. Here's a story that just ran about Center for Rural Entrepreneurship and some strategies that small rural towns are adopting in order to retain their younger generation.

I hate to be a grouch, but I don't think this kind of thing is going to work. The underlying economic forces are so strong that efforts like these strike me as wishful thinking.

I hope to be wrong on this one, but as I've poked around in my Western Wisconsin county, I have discovered that there's no business-starting infrastructure left. The local banks have all been sold to regionals, as have the bedrock main-street businesses (the phone company, electric company, grain elevator, etc.). Big-boxes are killing the local retailers.

More than just brains are fleeing — capital is too. Used to be that farmer-capital would get reinvested in local projects (a meat packing plant or a window manufacturing company). Now, when farmers sell their land (which they didn't used to do), the money winds up in a Fidelity account and invested in the usual-suspect portfolio.

As a tech guy, I've been involved in the rural development discussion for years, mostly focusing on the need for broadband Internet. Internet is often painted as the economic savior for rural America. Sorry kids, but this isn't going to cut it — any job you can do over the wire in Western Wisconsin can be outsourced to a place with much lower wages. Don't bet the ranch on that idea. Sure, you have to have Internet as a precondition for lots of other things, but it isn't going to float the boat.

Sorry to be such a grouch — but that article started this little cascade and I had to get it off my chest.

Winter project — a dresser for Marcie

I’m kicking off a new topic area — Woodworking. The “notes to myself” I wrote about my home brew PVR (“FreeVo”) project is what inspired me. Another kind of geek stuff I do is fooling around trying to teach myself how to make furniture. So this is the first of an periodic series of posts describing my efforts.

This winter, the “big project” was to try out making a dresser. This is my first foray into the realm of boxes — and this dresser has 7 of ’em! The big box of the dresser case, plus six little boxes for the drawers. The big lesson learned is that making things square in two dimensions is a lot easier than making them square in three. The big box is out of square about an eighth of an inch and that wound up driving me nuts for the whole project thereafter — constant corrections.

I built this dresser following (slightly modified) plans from Bill Hylton’s Chests of Drawers book. A great book — filled with plans that are mostly way too advanced for me, but very clear and good at helping navigate the rough patches.

Here’s a picture of the big box, just after I glued it up. It was at this point that my fateful eighth of an inch out-of-square crept into the scene. I got too cute — I used mortise and tenon joints instead of the loose tenon joints that Bill describes in the book and paid the price for deviating from the instructions of the Maestro.

Now the “big box” is basically done. The top isn’t structural, it’s going to get hooked on with those little angle irons you use to put solid-wood tops on tables.

These are the blanks for the drawer handles. Another “first” on this project was to learn how to do pattern cutting with the router. Now that’s a gizmo! I can tell I’ll be having a lot of fun with that router bit in days to come.

Now the six “little boxes” are done and mounted. This dresser uses drawer-mounting hardware like you’d find in kitchen cabinets. I’m still a little too ham-handed to make a real dresser where the drawers fit in the dresser frame directly. Maybe some day, but only after I get better at square. One neat thing about this hardware is that it’s got a little gizmo that “self closes” the drawer in the last 3 inches of its travel — sorta like the trunks on fancy cars.

All done. I like it a lot, and Marcie does too. I’ve adjusted that one drawer-front that’s a little out of whack in this picture so everything’s looking pretty good unless you know exactly where to look for that dreaded eighth of an inch.

Blink – a cool "thin slicing" concept for intuitive managers like me

Malcome Gladwell (the guy that wrote The Tipping Point) has a new book out called “Blink.” The NYTimes just ran the first chapter of the book in their cunningly-named First Chapter section. Fersure hit this link to Blink on Gladwell's site where he outlines the broader themes of the book.

I like it. I've spent my whole career being accused of jumping to conclusions (so I've gotten better, although not great, at keeping my mouth shut until a little supporting data rolls in). I think a lot of us have run into the same problem. You know what the situation is, but if you blurt it out, you're likely to get beat up by people who need lots of supporting facts.

Maybe you've just got a really rich set of experiences that your subconscious is taking advantage of. Perhaps you're just good at “blink.” I like this book's premise because it reminds me to value those 2-second blinks, and gives me a way to rationalize those leaps of cognition to other people.