Toward a Unified Software Platform?

XAML: Coming soon to Mac OS X.

"...a fascinating aspect of XAML, is that it’s getting Microsoft even closer to this ultimate abstraction layer of their User Interface Framework, that just might, beyond Mono and Cocoa#, dramatically simplify the process of “porting” a Vista application to Mac OS X, and other platforms."

Blogging is Cooler than a Firetruck?

not a chance in hell :) but still.

Rumor Has It ...

Tom Loves Google.

Bling Bling Barbie Doll

Bling Bling Barbie Doll for sale on Amazon. Sweet.

Katie Strand @ The Cat Club

Brandy and I just came back from watching an awesome performance by Katie Strand at The Cat Club on Sunset blvd. She's got an amazing voice, a unique sound, and an engaging collection of original songs.

Fear the Ninja

This made my day.

I wonder what The Ninja thinks of this.

Noteworthy Service Launches: Zillow-Killer, Frucall

RealEstateABC.com recently launched a Zillow-killing home valuation engine. I'm liking realestateabc.com better than Zillow.com because they work in Safari, their interfaces and features feel more intuitive and not nerdy. Oh and they do appear to have a little thing called a business model, imagine that: juicy realtor and home-lending referrals. The fact that they value my home slightly higher than Zillow ... doesn't hurt either heh. Kudos to Joe's team :)

Someone dropped me a note about Frucall. It lets you call them up from your cell phone to get comparison shopping information for just about any product. Sounds pretty useful! :)

News for Non-Nerds, Usable Stuff

This piece tries to understand design requirements for bringing usable applications of RSS content syndication and aggregation to a less tech-savvy crowd, not as quick to adapt to a flurry flexible and powerful features.

read more | digg story

hi

hi
Originally uploaded by chrisholland.

TV Listings Launch!

TV Listings have launched, thanks to the blood and sweat tirelessly poured by some incredibly cool dudes and dudettes i know :) Congrats guys :)

It's possibly one of the best broadcast programing trackers out there. It's supposed to get better though. Give it a whirl, register for free, share your thoughts in comments. If that "register" link doesn't work, just go here.

PhoneGnome Developer Community Launches

David Beckemeyer's PhoneGnome, a neat little box that makes your home phone actually useful, and gives you a slew of features phone companies typically charge you up to $30/month for, is launching its User-Contributed Library. It will feature a collection of tools built by enthusiastic developers leveraging PhoneGnome's open API, to get the most out of their little box.

The first contributor to the library is Dr. Mark Petrovic, with a little handheld phone interface to the Phone Gnome. In David's words:

This little demo app is an application of real-world convergence in the here (hear?) and now. I can use my mobile to access and control my home phone, to make calls using my PhoneGnome Internet plans, and to do stuff like send a voice message (click a contact, my phone rings, and I record a message into the phone and PhoneGnome sends it to that contact as a WAV attachment in an email). that way I can send a long message, say even when driving,
without getting into an accident trying to enter it into the phone keyboard.

---

See also:

Alec Saunders

Phoneoy

Mod_Expires: Apache httpd

Victor just pointed me to Mod_Expires (apache 2.0, apache 1.3).

This looks like a very simple and effective way to be very cache-friendly for certain resources.

I've really gotta spend some time catching-up on all the mods available:

apache 2.0 mods
apache 1.3 mods

Wacky Weather Weekend

CBS says "wacky weather" to hit the southland.

It's about 2am, and the wind is blowing very cold. It's getting nippy inside. Decent insulation would be useful just about ... now.

Where's Dennis Quaid when we need him!@

GMail Gone Mobile

Point your phone's web browser to http://m.gmail.com/

Going to this URL from your desktop computer's web browser will likely yield some weird results. That's because you're not supposed to access it from there. So don't. I know you want to. But don't.

It works on my Treo 650.

Rocket Boom Poised to Launch First Ads

Amanda and and Andrew are hard at work.

BarCamp Los Angeles Wrap-Up

Tags: barcamp - barcampla

Beyond getting my quick presentation out of the way, i got to meet a lot of cool people doing very interesting things, and missed a lot of good ones too.

Check out the BarCamp LA Wiki for what people presented, and hopefully they'll be updating the grid with links to their material.

Sean Bonner and Jillian Tate from Blogging.la have been thoroughly covering the event.

We were privy to some really cool demos of home-media-stuff that Yahoo is currently working on. Some sort of healthy, usable, alternative to Windows Media Center.

I got to chat with Travis from redswoosh.net. They were around way before dijjer, and are offering a very interesting framework for distributed content delivery, aka P2P CDN. Which is how i should have framed my dijjer review in the first place, versus pitting it straight against BitTorrent, which really fits different use cases. Travis mentioned they'll have a Linux and Mac OS X client available soon. Big name media companies are already leveraging them. They've built a business around turning the companies that used to sue them for billions, into rabid customers, by building a compelling framework that would cater to their needs, and to the needs of anybody who wishes to distribute content without footing high bandwidth bills.

Kent Nichols showed us all about AskANinja.com (AAN), and gave a very good presentation on various strategies to build podcasts with zero budget and focused ideas. AAN is insanely funny.

Matt Homann asked very pertinent questions on building effective conferences.

Chris Messina showed-off Flock. It's not a web browser. And that just may well be a very good thing. Its goal is to treat your online as an event stream, and Flock is meant to harness it, organize it.

Steve Myers showed-off a really cool Java-3D Peer-to-Peer application that leverages JXTA.

Debi Jones and Patrick Neeman led a very convivial discussion about myspace's popularity and some of its key drivers. One interesting thought i took away was that, for a certain younger demographic, being able to offer a highly personalized online representation of themselves matters more than just about anything else. No matter how unusable the page may be. See the report that sparked the discussion.

Eric, in his Things Left Incomplete presentation, showed us interesting work he's doing with RDF to model relationships from graphs, into an RDF store, managed and queried by custom-built perl tools, and presented thru XSLT transformations.

I caught some stuff on the Viral Marketing session, I need to go over the materials again, as soon as they put it online :)

I also caught a glimpse of Ilya's Web 2.0 without the web presentation. I really like his analysis, resonates spot-on by me. I'm also voting his presentation the coolest presentation format. I love it. Very effective.

Jason Calcanis wasn't there. With his really cool pooch. And he didn't call bullsh*t on a lot of companies and people out there doing bad stuff. None of this happened. In fact, i'm not even writing about this. ;)

Ian C. Rogers did a great presentation on physics of Media 2.0. I need to start reading-up on XIPF, XSPF.

I hope I can get my grubby paws on the material for most presentations I completely missed >:|

Additional shouts out to:

Nicole Simon, aus Deuthschland, for so-rightfuly pointing out that U.S. companies ought to be mindful of their international audiences when sponsoring podcasts, and brainstorming about some potentially nifty ways to help podcasters be in closer touch to their audience. Nicole didn't get to do her official presentation but has engaged many of her fellow geeks in thought-provoking discussions. Thanks Neezee :D

Jason Cosper, for showing me JabPhone, and showing a few lucky participants who hadn't gotten sucked into Jason Calcanis's rant (that didn't happen), how to get free sh*t for writing about stuff you like.

Ori Neidich for having attained UberGeekdom at Digital Domain, and for being The Curator of this guy's baby.

James Gross and the folks from Feedster.

Net Neutrality Bill Introduced by Sen. Wyden

IP & Democracy tells us about Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-OR) Net Neutrality Bill:

Broadband providers will not be allowed to interfere with, block, degrade, alter, modify or change traffic on the Internet;

Sounds good to me! :)

The telco lobby machine is probably going nuts ... just ... about ... now :)

via

Barcamp Los Angeles

i'll be presenting some random stuff at Bar Camp Los Angeles:March 4th-5, at the Little Radio Warehouse 1218 Long Beach Ave Los Angeles, CA 90021

Microsoft to Adopt Darwin - Nixes Vista

It would appear Microsoft is ready to truly embrace open-source.

Next-up, Scoble to be a guest speaker at the WWDC 2006 Keynote :)

Say Hello to Hero and Kickflip

South Korea is light-years ahead of us with their handheld device market.

Now we can do more than just envy them. Helio shows us how.

Play MPEG4 and H264 Movies on your phone? Yup. Music? Yup. Gaming? Oh yeah. WiFi? Coming soon.

big momma's ... what?! :o

big momma's ... what?! :o
Originally uploaded by chrisholland.

His Magazine

His Magazine
Originally uploaded by chrisholland.

Dijjer: Future of Online Media Distribution?

Josh just pointed me to Dijjer.

It looks fantastic. Here's why I think it's better than BitTorrent, keeping in mind i've only read their FAQ, and haven't done extensive testing of it.

BitTorrent doesn't work through NAT. It actually works, but only in leech-mode. Which means, if you're an average non-techy user behind a broadband router's default-configured NAT, install BitTorrent and download files from other peers, you actually do not contribute any bandwidth back to the rest of the network, because other machines on the Internet don't have a clue on how to reach you. Of course, it's very easy for someone with a little bit of tech savvy to do the necessary port forwarding. But realistically, on a large scale, who ever bothers?

update: ok it would appear the above paragraphs are angering armies of geeks. Take a deep breath as I concede your collective point with the following: Yes, if your BitTorrent client already has an active connection while downloading from a peer, that peer will be able to get data from you, and you're therefore indeed "contributing bandwidth" back, to some extent. I've experienced this first-hand. It's nice. But if I'm behind NAT, and I don't have port forwarding, and you're behind NAT, and you don't have port forwarding either, then our BitTorrent clients won't exchange data directly from each-other. Period. Is this a big deal? Obviously not, as there are enough people out there with properly set-up connectivity to keep BitTorrent a successful and vibrant community ... of mostly geeks who know what they're doing. I'm looking at a different market. I'd like to see a peer-to-peer solution that enables a wider audience to become first-rate bandwidth contributors. With some maturation and polishing, working out a few kinks, it would appear dijjer just might get us there.

It's not impossible to defeat the vast majority of NAT issues in the wild. The STUN protocol, released around 2003, tells us how to do it. Most SIP-enabled client software and devices make use of it, to avoid having to relay RTP packets between peers.

Dijjer claims to be able to defeat most NAT issues. And I wouldn't be surprised if it used many of the techniques outlined in the STUN protocol.

It also looks far easier to deploy than BitTorrent, as most of the work of finding peers seems to be handled by the clients. It may or may not be a good thing, it looks like they use some "seed peers" to establish initial contact. But they've removed the need for the content owner/deployer to create anything "special" on their server. They just need to link to their a file a bit differently. And as their FAQ mentions, the file's presence on the original HTTP server is used for policing its distribution over the dijjer network: If a file lives on your web server, and you decide to link to it via dijjer, then subsequently change your mind, you can just remove it from your server, and nobody on the dijjer network will be able to download it.

On the peer's machine, it appears to expose a lightweight http interface on a high port. When you're downloading a file, the browser actually retrieves it over normal http from localhost, over port 9115. If you've installed dijjer, try this URL: http://localhost:9115/. It seems to be a technique vaguely similar, in principle, to what certain "web accelerators" do. The fact that as a user, I don't have to "switch" to another application to merely download a file, before resuming web browsing back into the web browser, makes the whole experience more usable, less clunky, less nerdy.

It also opens the doors for 3rd-party applications to interface with Dijjer via straight HTTP, without having to write custom components that comply to a different protocol. These folks might one day likely be interested in switching from BitTorrent to Dijjer.

One thing to keep in mind is that dijjer wants to keep running in the background. When double-clicking that .jar in Mac OS X, it's not readily obvious that dijjer is running. You can easily shut it down via http://localhost:9115/, or, on the Mac, a "killall java" from the terminal. I haven't tested Linux and Windows yet. Their FAQ also mentioned that dijjer might pre-emptively start "caching" stuff on your hard drive, stuff you may have never requested, but that's useful to other people on the dijjer network. But again, a peek at http://localhost:9115/ tells you what it's doing, how much space on your hard drive is being used, and your download/upload activity. Before putting-on the tinfoil hats, remember that dijjer is 100% open-source, and verifiably crap-ware free.

In contrast, with BitTorrent, you'll only ever seed files you've previously downloaded, or are in the process of downloading. BitTorrent is very-much more of a "foreground" process.

Going forward, dijjer will likely mature and become more polished. It's already very usable, and very promising.

---

A few replies to some comments in the digg submission:

I *did say* you *can* make BitTorrent work through NAT to enable other peers to 1) discover you 2) connect to you without your having previously connected to them, *if* and only *if* you do port forwarding, as outlined in the BitTorrent FAQ which i linked to in the article. As i mentioned in my review, it is simple enough for us geeks, but not for your average newbie. Having out-of-the-box NAT traversal support dramatically increases your potential user base.

When you look at peer to peer frameworks, you've gotta distinguish a few aspects of the peer to peer features. Two of which are: 1) file and peer discovery. 2) distributed file transfer.

Some peer to peer frameworks have a highly decentralized file and peer discovery mechanism, and those are nicely suited for illegal sharing of files.

Other peer to peer frameworks, such as BitTorrent and Dijjer do not seek to make the file discovery aspect decentralized, because their designers didn't seek to build a rebel or illegal file sharing network. That's why it's so easy for the RIAA to go after torrent sites today. And Dijjer is even more tightly coupled to the source than BitTorrent is, as it is a feature.

There are people out there who don't use peer to peer technology to share illegal content.

The folks (Nicholas Reville, of downhillbattle.org fame and many more) behind http://getdemocracy.com/ have embedded their own BitTorrent client within their TV player to save bandwidth for the various content providers. And that's already very cool. Integrating Dijjer instead of (or in addition to?) BitTorrent into their client might make their platform even more efficient. One of their developers has mentioned to me they've indeed been looking at dijjer.

The end-game of legal use of peer to peer technologies is a new framework for content distribution. Profound disruptions of today's media. Pretend for a second that something such as dijjer, or something better, gets wide adoption, among the masses. And i'm talking about the real masses, our Moms and Dads, with their home broadband connectivity and plenty of bandwidth to share.

Say you suddenly decide to become your own movie producer and director, and you manage to make movies people are actually interested in watching, and perhaps eventually buying. In a dijjer-enabled world, you could likely serve your movie from any normal web account with a low bandwidth quota, but link to it through a dijjer-ised link.

Unlike with bittorrent, you didn't have to purchase a special hosting account at a BitTorrent provider (prodigem are cool guys), nor did you have to set-up your own BitTorrent server/tracker. You just uploaded the file to your web account, but instead of giving this url to your friends: http://someisp.com/youraccount/mymovie.mov , you gave them this url: http://dijjer.org/get/http://someisp.com/youraccount/mymovie.mov .

I'm interested in peer to peer technologies to replace traditional media. Not to illegally share the crap they shove at my TV. Hence the title of this blog post.

Esme Vos, Wireless Warrior

The Wall Street Journal offers a great introduction of Esme Vos, possibly the most effective advocate of Municipal Wireless efforts in the World. I know she helped us out advocate our way past Cable and Phone Companies-backed fear-mongering, back when we first deployed our WiFi Network in Hermosa Beach in 2004.

In the future, she sees wireless networks nearly everywhere, not just for Web access but for voice services as well. "It will shrink the traditional business model dramatically," she says. Traditional telecom companies, she argues, will be forced to form partnerships with Internet companies to offer next-generation services. "They'll have to change," she says.

The article gives you a good insight into how far your local Telco will go to protect their monopoly, and offers good counterpoints to their typical rhetoric.

See also: Net Neutrality and the Sorry State of U.S. Broadband

Videobomb.com launches - by ParticipatoryCulture.org

The good folks from http://www.participatoryculture.org/ have just launched VideoBomb.com.

Net Neutrality and the Sorry State of U.S. Broadband

Most French citizens can get 24Mbps/2Mbps Internet connectivity that includes unlimited local/long distance calling, plus TV and Cable channels, for 30 Euros per month. Japan? Fiber everywhere. All those services are available from many fiercely competing companies. Just take a walk in Parisian subways and look at the various "Haut Debit" (high speed) advertisements to see just what i'm talking about: Wanadoo. Free.fr. Club-Internet. Neuf.fr. Cegetel. Claranet. To name a very few.

Many countries such as Japan and France have succeeded in the broadband field, paradoxically, precisely because of Government intervention: at some point they decreed that copper phone lines to their constituents' houses were no-longer the sole operating property of the local phone company. After all, phone companies have in most countries throughout history consistently enjoyed comfortable government subsidies to deploy their infrastructure, when not owned and operated by governments themselves.

The Industry jargon defines this process as Local Loop Unbundling. It provides a framework for allowing competing companies to leverage today's infrastructure to offer their own broadband-internet-powered services: Voice and Video communications, interactive, custom-tailored entertainment. E-mail and "the Web" are "so" 1995 and no-longer the "killer applications" of the Internet. They're insanely useful starting points.

Having enjoyed comfortable taxpayer-subsidized monopolies for the better part of a century, such competitive landscapes are a direct conflict of interest for the traditional phone companies.

In the U.S., they've been rabidly lobbying to keep their monopolies intact, under the guise of preserving our cherished capitalistic principles, by parroting feel-good phrases in the wrong context: "Government Involvement is bad! Let market forces do their thing!". But in this case, we're talking about network infrastructure. It makes perfect sense for local government to largely subsidize and work with the private sector on the deployment of such infrastructure, and lease access to it, at cost, to all businesses willing to compete. It is a far more efficient approach, at long last enabled by today's technological advances and the Internet Protocol.

Consider another type of infrastructure: sidewalks. A municipality might happily front costs, or work with private developers to build sidewalks in an affluent area to attract new tax-revenue-generating businesses. In today's broadband landscape, we're looking at a narrow sidewalk with a 2-story Verizon shopping center on it, and perhaps an SBC shop 2 miles down the road.

As we blindly grant "right-of-way" to companies such as Verizon, letting them pony-up all the costs of digging trenches in our streets to deploy fiber connectivity in a few lucrative areas, we can't refuse them the right to solely own and operate this network. But few, if no other companies can afford similar deployments on their own, and Verizon will hence have very little incentive to compete on the quality of services they offer, because after all, they're the only ones in the game.

Nothing will prevent them to limit what it is we can do with the bandwidth they offer us, such as obtaining phone or video service from 3rd-party providers.

And this touches on the issue of Net Neutrality which Dave Coustan is covering quite well over at EarthLing.

See also: Fire your Phone Company. Today.

See also: Net Neutrality, Clear Disclosure?

See also: If we build it, they will come.

update: 2/15 See also: this great comment on somebody else's blog:

v) Network neutrality
I don’t know if you misunderstood the network neutrality concept or not, but your analogy is way off. If major airlines were allowed to act like telcos on network neutrality then the airline would be allowed to charge different prices on the same seat on the same flight depending on your FINAL destination. “Going to France after spending the weekend in NY with your sister? That’ll be $500 extra, ’cause we don’t like them frogs at United.”

Fire Your Phone Company. Today.

If you live in Dallas, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle, you're in luck. Unlike the rest of us, you have the effortless opportunity to fire your phone company today. More cities are coming soon.

For the computers in your house:

• 8Mbps downstream DSL Service (i think the upstream is 1Mbps)
• comprehensive computer protection suite (virus, spyware, spam, phishers, popups, firewall, etc.) (earthlink protection control center)
• and the works: 8 virtual accounts, each with their own e-mail, SIP address/free online calling, web space, start page, etc.

For the humans who like to chat in your house:

• Unlimited Local and Long Distance Calling
• And the works: Voicemail, Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, 3-Way Calling, Online Account Management, Call Blocking, etc.

All you need is a phone jack and $70/month, to cover all of your home hyper-speed Internet connectivity, computer security, and communications needs.

The meat: It's a partnership between Covad, and EarthLink. This service is also known as "LPV" or Line-Powered Voice. It leverages Covad's newly-rolled-out "ADSL2" network. Essentially, EarthLink and Covad become your phone service provider, when the "switch" is made.

Just keep your phones plugged-in their normal phone sockets, no nerdy setup, nothing. Then pick-up your phone, as you normally do, hear the same dial-tone as always, and dial-away. No additional hardware is required for your phones. You'll just get a special superfast broadband modem for your in-house computer network.

Blam, you're done.

Phone companies have enjoyed sweet local monopolies for far too long. This is about to change. Big time. Covad is wheeling and dealing with many local DSL providers. Expect ferocious competition in this field.

See also Net Neutrality and the Sorry State of U.S. Broadband

Sewage Spill at the Beach

So apparently a sewage station failed today in Manhattan Beach, sending tons of sh*t flowing into the Ocean, rendering a good chunk of the SoCal California coast not safe to swim in.

If i was a seal, a dolphin, a 'gull, or a fish, i'd be pretty frickin' pissed right now.

USC Cheerleader: Priceless

This was just e-mailed to me, and goes out to my good friend The Oakmonster :)


USC Cheerleader: Priceless
Originally uploaded by chrisholland.

Cheerleading, tumbling lessons and camps since age 3: $30,000

Annual cost of attending USC: $ 40,000

Annual cost for staying just the right shade of blonde: $1,200

Being a USC Cheerleader and cheering for the Longhorns when they score at the National Championship game and having your photo taken of it for millions to see: Priceless

Seven Years

Here's to another one :)