WombatNation

Eat your heart out, Sarah Jessica Parker. Now, these are shoes to die for.

My new Sidi Genius 4 Lorica cycling shoes are the closest thing I can imagine to a glove for your feet. Well, a glove with a really hard bottom surface, but the fit around the top and sides of my feet is absolutely perfect. I have high arches, but the compression strap running across the top allowed me to lock them down just right. I attempted to convince myself that a cheaper pair of shoes I tried on were good enough, but it was like comparing mittens to gloves. Okay, so maybe these shoes don't have separate toe sleeves, as one might expect for a "foot glove". Forget the analogy. They fit real good. Nuff said.

The only downside is I have SPD pedals, the Sidi G4s come only with Look adapters, and the store was out of SPD adapters. Hey, but that's what next day delivery is for.

To all my cycling buddies, your main view of these shoes will be the backs of the heels moving quickly away from you as you follow me up the Col du Pinehurst. More realistically, though, you'll probably see them on my feet while I'm standing on the side of the road trying to retain my lunch after racing up hills at a pace that far exceeds my fitness level. At least my feet will be looking marvelous.

The Digital Mix benefit last night for EFF was a highly entertaining mix of music, art, education, and motivation.

Ray Beldner, a local artist and educator, talked about the Illegal Art exhibit that has been showing at Fort Mason for the last three weeks. Unfortunately, today (Saturday the 26th) was the last day. Ray has created some very cool art works using US currency to emulate works by artists like Duchamp, Picasso, and Warhol. It turns out that defacing currency actually isn't illegal, at least not seriously so, unless you do it with the intent to defraud someone, e.g., by making a $1 bill look like a $100 bill. I wonder if he was disappointed when he learned that he wasn't as much of an outlaw as he thought he might have been. Of course, he's still under potential legal and financial pressure from the estates of the artists he has copied. Ray showed photos of some of his work and work by other artists at the exhibit. He told several cautionary tales about how many of the artists involved with this exhibit have been threatened with legal action that has forced them to destroy previous works and alter their plans for future works.

FreshBlend performed before Ray spoke, but I had arrived too late. The first musical performance of the night I did see/hear was the polka electronic death country musical stylings of Mochipet. Unfortunately, the sound level was way too high for the acoustics of that room, and most of the audience quickly made their way back to the front room. You can download some of David's music from his website.

Glenn Brown, the executive director of Creative Commons, gave an excellent summary of what Creative Commons is all about. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend watching the animated short at the CC website. That will give you a similar overview of the basics, at least.

Check out my previous post for an experiment with PhoneBlogger at the Digital Mix show. I tried to phoneblog one of the speakers, but the sound level wasn't high enough from where I was sitting. Obviously cellphone designers design the mic placement to pick up just the person speaking into the cellphone from a very close distance. In this case, what would normally be considered background noise was the desired signal.

I wish I had tried to phoneblog part of Cat Five's performance later that night. However, I didn't think my attempt with Uprock had succeeded, so I didn't even try. The audio quality of my telephone recording of Uprock isn't that great, but it will give you a decent feel for their music. The heavily saturated visuals were pretty cool, but they really needed more material, as the images repeated a little too frequently to keep things interesting.

Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the EFF, gave a very educational and motivational speech about why it is incredibly important that each of us act now to defend our digital rights. He's a really great speaker, which is obviously extremely important, given the vital litigation work he performs for the EFF. If you haven't donated to the EFF recently, do it soon. That means me, too. I was member number 323 when I joined back around 1990, the year the EFF was founded. I still have a 3.5" floppy disk labeled "EFF-Austin InfoDisk version 1.0 August 1992" that I picked up at a meeting along with a floppy disk Bruce Sterling gave me that is stamped Garbage In Garbage Out. EFF accidentally fell off my list of charities to donate to one year, and I kept forgetting to put them back on the list. Lazy, lazy, lazy. I won't forget this year, though.

Meanest Man Contest definitely stood out from the other performers, if for nothing else because of the vocals and the guitar, though the guy on the left didn't happen to be playing it when I took this photo. Check them out if you like intelligent rapping over sampled, cut-up music.

One downside of seeing a live performance of laptop music is that most of what you usually see are a couple people seated at laptops with the backs of the laptops facing you. Other than watching them move around a mouse and tap on the keyboard, they might as well be behind a wall. Mochipet's performance would have been a lot more interesting if I they had projected the image from his laptop up onto the big screen. Some of the other groups has some interesting videos projected on a big screen behind them, which leads me to...

Cat Five walked out wearing fright wigs, settled in behind their Mac laptops, cranked up the dry ice smoke, and launched into "American Military Operations". The visual collage projected during their performance was a great backdrop for their music. This was definitely my favorite performance of the evening. The above photo has some weird artifact in between the two guys on the left. This is not a UFO, a ghost, a dinner plate, or a part of the show. Stuff like that sometimes happens with my camera when I try to take photos with way too low light levels. I had to crank the brightness way up from the original image. Anyway, Cat Five were very cool and you should definitely check them out if you get a chance.

This post was created with PhoneBlogger. Click to listen to the recorded message.

This was an experiment in audioblogging a live music performance. The music you hear is from a performance by Uprock at Digital Mix, a benefit for EFF.

I don't think that bands need to worry too much any time soon about people bootlegging shows this way, although my setup was by no means ideal.

1. I wasn't getting a strong signal from inside the performance space
2. I have a 3+ year-old Sanyo SCP-4000 cellphone
3. The acoustics in the performance space were not that great
4. I could definitely have picked a better spot from which to take the recording

and, of course, there's the roughly 4 KHz bandpass filter imposed by the telephone network. Nonetheless, I think this was a very promising experiment. Most importantly, I think it is a good justification for investing in a newer, better cellphone.

In a surprisingly forward looking ad campaign, King James I (a Stuart, I might add) struck out against the dangers of tobacco back in 1604.

A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.

You go, James. Nearly 400 years ago he knew what some tobacco company executives still refuse to admit.

I think this is a really smart move by HP. Scott McGlashan, the CTO and co-founder of PipeBeach, is one of the two chairs of the W3C Voice Browser working group. Before this move, HP was generally not considered to be a significant player in the VoiceXML market.

HP's existing OpenCall platform is targeted at telecom service providers. While they already had a VoiceXML browser suitable for use by service providers, PipeBeach gives them a better VoiceXML toolset and some desirable applications (e.g., email by phone and a voice portal) to immediately start selling through their Services group.

I think HP partners HeyAnita! and VoiceGenie have a lot to be concerned about by this move.

One mistake in the CNET article is that it talks about combining PipeBeach products with HP OpenCall speechWeb. SpeechWeb is PipeBeach's product. Of course, the press release makes it sound like OpenCall speechWeb already exists, although it actually will be a product of the merger.

I updated my install of Gallery to 1.3.4 last night. After a much too difficult upgrade, I finally got my photo gallery back online. I still think Gallery is a very nice online photo gallery program, I just wish it was a little easier to install.

When I installed Gallery 1.3.3 the first time, it was also a bit of a struggle. I carefully wrote down notes on each step of the install, and then cleaned them up after I figured out what worked and what didn't. After posting a link to these notes on the DreamHost customer support forums, my site started getting a lot of hits on that file, even though I didn't link to it from any other page on my site. If you end up on this page because you are trying to troubleshoot a Gallery install, definitely check out my notes. They are specific to an install on a shared server hosted by DreamHost, but you still might find them useful. I've updated them for a 1.3.4 install.

It appears that the friend of a friend was the driver in the terribly unfortunate tragedy in Santa Monica. I've been thinking about possibilities for Friendster and FOAF lately, and for some reason this sad event triggered a tangential idea - automated tools for tracking news about friends.

If many of your friends maintain weblogs, subscribing to their syndication feeds would obviously go a long ways towards keeping you up to date on their activities and ideas, or at least the ones that they considered blogworthy. Info in a syndication feed is fairly structured to begin with, and will likely become even more structured as Atom/Echo/Necho/Pie evolves and takes hold.

But, news sites typically contain less structured content, or at least the structure is wildly inconsistent from site to site. There are a few proposed XML standards like NewsML, but they are a long ways off from common adoption. Even once adopted, these standards will likely just simplify somewhat the search of the content. Of course, if enough of the news sites you want to search have syndication feeds, you could at least start with them.

Obviously, an incident such as the one in Santa Monica will draw a huge amount of publicity. If a friend of yours is involved in a major news event, you will likely find out soon enough. But, what about the smaller news stories? I want to know if any of my friends from high school or college are in the news, especially if it is good news, and even more so if it is a friend with whom I have lost close touch over the years.

On a less happy note, I want to know about the bad news, too, primarily to avoid putting my friends' families and housemates into uncomfortable situations. I would hate to call up an old friend in a cheery voice, only to have his or her spouse/partner/children/etc. have to explain to me why my friend won't be coming to the phone. It's not like this happens often or has actually ever happened to me, but I suspect when I get much older it will become more common. Maybe I'm just being paranoid. Don't worry, I don't lay awake at night worrying about things like this.

In addition, I don't want to manually search these feeds. I want a tool that will automatically search a large number of feeds. Feedster and other tools like it could be part of the solution. Google via the Google API could also play a role for sites that don't have feeds, but you will need to separate old news from new news. If you can use the API to search just Google News, that might help.

So how do Friendster and FOAF come in? Well, if you currently use them, you've already gone to the trouble to identify some of your friends in a very structured way. The tracking tool I'm imagining could use that info for the source of names. Of course, if you have a friend named Joe Smith, you'll probably get a lot of hits that aren't about the Joe Smith you know. So, the tool would use the profile of your friend to estimate the odds the story is actually about your friend. If a threshold is exceeded, the news story is included in your "Daily News about My Friends" page.

One relatively simple piece of useful data is geographical address. Let's say the Joe Smith you know lives in Des Moines. If the news story appears in the Des Moines newspaper, the score for this article would be increased. If you have included your friend's address in their profile and the story also mentions the street your friend lives on, the score goes way up. Any other matches between your friend's profile and the story would also add to the score.

Now, we can throw in some technology made famous by the war against Spam email - Bayesian filters. Next to each story on your "Daily News about My Friends" page, there would be a control for you to indicate if the story was or was not about your friend. Over time, the system would get better at distinguishing the Joe Smith you know from all the Joe Smiths you don't know.

So, is this a good idea, a scary idea, or a good and scary idea?

Friday, July 25th, the EFF will be hosting Digital Mix in Oakland as a benefit for the EFF and Creative Commons at the Oakland Box Theater (formerly the Black Box) at 1928 Telegraph Ave between 19th and 20th.

This very cool event will celebrate music, digital film, cyber-rights, and illegal art, with speeches by Fred von Lohmann (EFF), Glenn Otis Brown (Creative Commons), and Ray Beldner (Illegal Art) and performances by Kat5, Meanest Man Contest, Uprock, Mochipet, and Freshblend. I definitely plan to be there.

Microsoft has released a public beta of their Speech Server and a new beta of their Speech Application SDK.

Microsoft had previously teamed up primarily with Intel to propose a new standard called SALT that is somewhat competitive with VoiceXML. As of now, I contrast the two as:

SALT

useful for speech-enabling web applications

VoiceXML

useful for web-enabling speech applications

While this is an oversimplification, it reasonably reflects their current usage. Both VoiceXML and SALT based speech applications follow a similar pattern.

1. Prompt the user
2. Interpret the user's response
3. Act on the response

The action will often be to play/speak a new prompt.

The VoiceXML or SALT prompting tag will specify a recorded audio file or text that is synthesized by a text-to-speech engine. The user's response is always interpreted in the context of a grammar. The grammar specifies the allowable responses. Multiple utterances (yeah, un-huh, sure, yep) will often be treated as the same response (yes). Other VoiceXML and SALT tags (although SALT relies much more on existing HTML tags) act like a decision tree to determine the following action. A series of these prompts and responses is called a dialog.

SALT is used primarily to mark up documents that are interpreted in a web browser on a client side device. SALT consists of a very small set of tags that add multimodality to HTML/XHTML-based web applications.

VoiceXML is primarily used to create speech applications that run on a server and are accessed via a telephone. Although plenty of proprietary speech application languages preceded VoiceXML, VoiceXML was the first widely accepted and implemented standard and it greatly simplified the integration of speech applications with existing server side web applications.

With Speech Server, Microsoft is clearly moving SALT onto VoiceXML's turf. At the same time, IBM, Motorola, and Opera are proposing XHTML+Voice (a.k.a., X+V) as multimodal extensions to VoiceXML that would enable it to support the kinds of browser based applications that SALT now supports. Although Microsoft and IBM have been teaming up a lot on web services, they are very much in opposition with respect to the important speech technology standards.

Microsoft has developed their own speech recognition engine, but is partnering with SpeechWorks to supply a text -to-speech engine. In my experience with a previous version of the Microsoft speech recognition engine, I found it to be very mediocre. The only redeeming quality was that it was a free download.

Until now, third party interest in server side development with SALT has been extremely tepid in comparison with VoiceXML. I wonder if Microsoft will weave some of their developer magic with this server, or if it will be like one of their many other failed experiments. Of course, they're big enough that they can survive quite a few failures, as long as they occasionally hit the big home run. I think they will end up being a big player in speech technologies in the future, but I very much doubt that SALT will become a commonly accepted standard in its current form.

It's nice to read an opinion piece every now and then that you can completely identify with. Daniel Dennett's recent NY Times piece on having a naturalist world view really struck home for me. Dennett's name was a familiar one from philosophy courses I took long ago, particularly one taught by Derek Parfit and Christopher Peacocke.

I just wish the two people who came up with the name "bright" had brainstormed a bit longer or had a bit more creativity. Dennett's comment:

"Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view"

is one the rest of us will need to repeat over and over to minimize misunderstandings.

I'm not sure I can think of a much better name, though, so I will throw only small stones. Maybe, "inquisitive", and therefore, "Inquisitives". Obviously, we wouldn't be trying to make an exclusive claim on being inquisitive, but I think most people would find it far less insulting than a name that on first hearing appears to be putting a similar claim on intelligence. Naturalist wouldn't be too bad, although people might think you are just talking about your love of the outdoors, or they may confuse you with an au naturalist. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

AOL will give members three ways to update their blogs -- through an online template with blank boxes for text input, through AOL's instant-messaging system or by telephone. The phone option will be available only to subscribers to the extra-cost "AOL by Phone" service, who will be able to leave voice messages that will be posted as MP3 sound files.

Dang! I should have patented the invention of using a VoiceXML application to post to a blog by telephone when I had the chance. Actually, I would be pretty disappointed if the U.S. Patent Office granted a patent for phoneblogging. Nonetheless, given the kinds of ideas Amazon and others have recently been able to patent, I wouldn't have been shocked if they would have given me a patent for the invention. Based on estimates I have read that an independent inventor can expect to spend about $10,000 just for the US patenting process, there was no way I would have gone for the patent unless I planned to license it or turn it into a real business.

The AOL by Phone voice portal was spawned from AOL's purchase of Quack.com back in August 2000. I can't remember who TellMe and BeVocal's other competitors were back then. I didn't start doing VoiceXML development until sometime late in 2001.

I started working on PhoneBlogger in late October 2002 and released it in January 2003. Between vacation, my real job, and not having a real plan for what to do with PhoneBlogger, I took far too long to finish it up. If I had been able to work on it full time, I'm sure I could have completed it start to finish in less than two weeks, maybe even less than one. That's far more of a tribute to the richness of the code libraries and tools (VoiceXML, Python, xmlrpclib, TellMe VXML hosting service, Lame, SoX, etc.) I was able to use than my coding skills.

The biggest nightmare by far in developing PhoneBlogger was dealing with XML documents in JavaScript. I estimate that I spent about 1/4 of the total time writing code and unit tests and then debugging what should have been some really simple code for reading and parsing XML. JavaScript desperately needs better APIs than the DOM. In hindsight, I would have figured out another way to deal with the config info, but I kept feeling I was just a couple lines of code away from getting it to work. One of the hardest decisions for a developer to make is when to abandon an approach. This time I let stubborness get the better of me.

via Audioblog/Mobileblogging News via Joho Blog

Tim Bray writes:

Adam Curry posted a note on Monday that I found pretty surprising. In the future, will you have to pay to get into RSS aggregators? Ouch.

Apparently, about a year and a half ago Mr. Curry purchased Radio and Frontier licenses, and then paid Userland $10,000 to be included in the feeds that the products come pre-loaded with.

...

I was emailing with Brent Simmons about this (by the way, his NetNewsWire comes with no paid-to-play entries). We both seemed to think that this kind of thing is OK, as long as it’s clearly marked as such, like the little labels in your newspaper that say “advertisement” when there’s an ad dressed up to look like a newspaper story.

When I originally started using Radio for a blog tool (since replaced with Movable Type) and a news aggregator (since replaced with NewsMonster and NewsDesk), I wondered why Adam Curry's feed was one of the built-in feeds. His feed was one of the first feeds I deleted.

I'm sure someone finds Adam's blog interesting, but I found the signal to noise ratio to be even lower than for Dave's blog. Way too many posts consisted primarily of fawning worship of Radio and Dave. Of course, the ego stroking from a celebrity might have been enough for nearly any news aggregator developer to make it a built-in feed, but there are several other blogs that highly praise functionality in Radio that didn't make the cut. So why this one?

Now that Adam reveals he paid $10,000 for what was essentially an advertisement that was not marked as such, everything makes sense. Whether or not Adam thinks Radio is any good (and I don't question that he does appear to sincerely like it), he needed to protect his investment. If enough people claim Radio is great, that will create a buzz that will lead more people to try it. That, of course, leads to more consumers being directed to Adam's "cult of personality" blog. Again, that's fine. I'm sure that some people are extremely happy to have discovered his blog via the built-in feed. But, the disclosure of the payment has come far too late.

Now, he feels ripped off because he is afraid RSS will die out and he will lose his captive audience. So, he's launching a personal campaign to reward aggregator developers only if they refuse to support the newer syndication format that frightens him. Wouldn't it be simpler and more reasonable just to add another feed for the new format?

My wife surprised me with a Canon S400 digital camera a few months ago. Overall, I'm very satisfied with it. The picture quality is great and the camera is tiny.

One of the features I hadn't tried out yet was the ability to record movies. This amazing camera can record 15 frames/second video at either 320x240 or 160x120 resolution with audio. Each movie clip can be up to three minutes in length.

While we were watching the Oakland A's come from behind in the bottom of the 11th inning to beat the Seattle Mariners 3-2 Tuesday night, I decided to finally record a movie clip. I would have recorded more segments, but the people in front of me kept moving in the way. Next time, I sneak in the poison darts.

So, here's a clip of Eric Chavez hitting a foul with Tejada running to second. Sorry it couldn't be more exciting. Next time I will record more bits in hope of grabbing something better, like a fight between the team mascots or a very large person being cut off at the Krispy Kreme stand after the 7th inning. The clip is a 1.4 MB AVI file at 320x240 resolution and lasts about 5 seconds. I've used QuickTime to view AVI files (including this one) on Mac OS X and Windows XP and I've used xine to view AVI files on Linux.

Back in April I mentioned that Norri Kageki interviewed me for a column on Silicon Valley engineers who use weblogs for personal and business purposes. The June issue of IT Professionals containing this column came out about a month ago, but I have been slow about getting the text translated by a friend and then scanning in the relevant bits. Thanks to Norri for sending me a copy of the magazine and thanks to my friend Atsushi for the translation!

The column that Norri writes for IT Professionals covers interesting trends in the USA. Below is the table of contents entry for this month's column. I'm not the person pictured in the column.

My name as written in Japanese is highlighted in the passage to the right. Atsushi's translation (with a few minor edits by me) of this section of the column is below.