NYLUG member Robert Menes presented the Rockbox open source jukebox software at the most recent meeting. The software project started in late 2001 when Bjorn Stenberg became fed up with his ARCHON MP3 player and the software was first released in 2002. The software is designed to be installed directly onto MP3 players and to add to rather than replace the existing firmware, but there are many many different MP3 players, and the project supports them to varying degrees (details on the Rockbox website).
Counter)Induction DISPLACER Concert
May 22nd, 2011Counter)Induction had its most recent concert at the Tenri Institute on Friday, May 20, 2011. The room is small and intimate, and it contained eight speakers and a massive amount of cabling, as well as a couple of computers, a piano, a drum set, xylophone, chimes, and wooden blocks.
The speakers (and some sophisticated software to go with them) were from Viewsonic of Arlington, Va. Douglas Boyce, composer of the first piece to be performed, told me that the software has a fantastic GUI that allows musicians to move music around in a circle from speaker to speaker and add speakers as necessary.
Citysearch Allowing Fake Reviews
May 7th, 2011Check out the 1 star reviews for this company. Avoid them.
And shame on citysearch for allowing fake reviews.
Quick Note: A Great Google Analytics Tutorial
April 18th, 2011I have to explain Google Analytics to a client, and found this great video.
Time Management for System Adminstrators at NYLUG
March 18th, 2011Thomas Limoncelli is the author of the O’Reilly book Time Management for System Administrators and his talk at the New York Linux Users Group was less technical than most but no less important.
Every system administrator lacks the time to do everything that needs to be done. “I’m not good at time management,” Limoncelli said, “but I’ve created many coping mechanisms to deal with the problem.”
“It’s not your fault,” he added.
Part of the problem is evolution. The human brain may be suited to surviving in the wild, but it is not suited to time management. For example, one key time management skill is memorizing long lists, a skill not suited to the neocortex, which is roughly the most recently evolved part of the human brain. However, the neocortex is good at making tools. So use them: paper, pencils, smartphones.
Another part of the problem is infrastructure.
Privacy in Context: A Speech at Fordham Law School
February 18th, 2011Professor Helen Nissenbaum has made a career out of putting philosophy to work. In a CV replete with honors (and also filled with impressive grants), she has turned a doctorate in Philosophy from Stanford University into a career researching the privacy implications of the internet. She is currently professor of “Media, Culture, and Communication & Computer Science” at NYU. I heard her speak at the Fordham University Law School, where her talk focused on her latest book, Privacy in Context; Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life.
Nissenbaum said that she thought this would be the easiest book she’s ever written, because it was simply synthesizing many papers, but that in fact it was the hardest, and it took two years. In the book (and in her current work) she is building an analytical framework that would identify the aspect of an online transaction or interaction that causes social anxiety.
The miracle of the internet is about the rapid dissemination of information. This has delivered powerful economic benefits, and it has delivered freedom.
The internet has also enabled massive data repositories that have caused concern. Nissenbaum mentioned Choicepoint and you can see the concerns of the Electronic Privacy Information Center here. Nissenbaum also mentioned the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program of the federal government. Of TIA, EPIC wrote, “TSA has failed to meet its legal obligations for openness and transparency under the Freedom of Information Act and has violated the spirit of the Privacy Act for the protection of privacy rights.”
How The FCC Killed VoIP
February 6th, 2011Many people in the U.S. use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service today. But I contend that the FCC has killed the technology. How can I make this assertion? After all, there are over 20 million VoIP subscribers in the U.S.
However, the VoIP services that exist today are a shadow of what the technology makes possible. VoIP has been choked so that it no longer disrupts telephone service. VoIP has been fenced in by the FCC so that it offers no more than telephone, a move that was intended to protect cellular and wireline phone companies.
Wikileaks Shows: They Should Have Feared The End of Journalism
January 22nd, 2011Corporations and politicians have been assaulting journalists and journalism with the full force of their political and financial fury during the past two decades. For a time, a prostitute was invited to pose as a journalist in the sanctum sanctorum of U.S. journalism, the White House press room.
And so journalism declined.
The Federal Trade Commission, worried about the decline, considered trying to stop it by subsidizing newspapers, a move that many on both the left and right said confused “newspapers with journalism.”
In fact, there are journalists, but they no longer work for newspapers, and news is no longer broken by newspapers. News breaks on the internet.
Updated: Benoit Felten Trashes Cellular in Excellent Rant
December 13th, 2010Those who advocate for cellular as real broadband piss me off as much as they piss off Benoit Felten. See the video.
He says that advocating for cellular as a replacement for fixed network requires good writing skills — and technological ignorance.
I agree.
Update: Felton tweets: agold_stats Alex, just to clarify, I’m not thrashing cellular, I’m thrashing cellular ONLY.