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The High Cost Of Innovation: Vonage’s Patent Woes

Vonage will be in court again tomorrow defending itself against Verizon’s claims of patent infringement. The innovative VoIP company had lost the trial and was ordered to pay $58 Million in damages in early March, when a jury found them to have violated thee of seven related patents held by Verizon. Vonage appealed of course, […] » about 300 words

Eco-Friendly Web Design For Earth Day

Mark Ontkush at ecoIron did some math starting with the Department of Energy data that showed CRT monitors consume less power displaying dark colors than light and determined that redesigning Google’s site in black would save 750 megawatt-hours per year (assuming that 25% of computer users still haven’t upgraded to LCDs and are using power-hungry […] » about 200 words

WordPress, Permalinks, Mod_Rewrite, and Avoiding 404s

I made a mistake in changing my WordPress permalinks, but by the time I’d discovered it my blog had already been indexed. Fixing the permalinks meant breaking those indexed URLs, leading to a bad user experience, but leaving them as is wasn’t really an option. Last night, after getting 404’d while using Google to search […] » about 400 words

Some Needs, Some Of The Time

I don’t know why I love this quote from a post in panlibus:

serve some needs of some parts of the population, some of the time

…though my love for the quote may have something to do with my embrace of what OpenSearch creator DeWitt Clinton describes as the “80% case,” the solution that would work for the great majority of applications most of the time.

It’s one of those things that’s easy to see in retrospect, but difficult to aim for: building a tool that is specific enough to be useful, but not too specific. A hammer is a wonderfully versatile tool, but a ball-peen hammer is really only useful for metal work.

My interest in all this is in the ecology of formats, standards, and protocols and in what makes some things work while others just sputter about.

Joost Brings Television To The Internet Age (Finally)

On demand internet TV has been just around the corner since the dawn of the popular internet, but like flying cars, it’s still not here. The problem is how TV streams clog the internet’s tubes. Bandwidth may be cheap, but there’s still never enough of it. Well, that’s true if your metaphor for the internet […] » about 300 words

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v7)

Contentsbsuite FeaturesFixed/Changed/AddedInstallationUpgradingCommandsClear bsuite_speedcacheRebuild bsuite tag indexOptionsMinimum userlevel to view bsuite reportsOutput default CSSDefault pulse graph styleSuggest related entries in postTag input formatHighlight search words and offer search helpFilter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist wordsIgnore hits from registered users at or above userlevelIgnore hits from these IP numbersTag SupportUsing bsuite FunctionsKnown BugsMoney GrubbingWork […] » about 800 words

I’m A Fonero, Are You A Fonero Too?

Now that I’ve moved I’ve finally set up my Fonera. I had hoped to offer a story about the process, but it was so simple I can’t really say much more than “I plugged it in, I registered it, it worked.” The Fonera is a tiny little router/WiFi access point that looks worlds better than […] » about 500 words

Google MyMaps and GeoRSS

O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference isn’t until the end of May, but Google just released two sweet new map-related features: GeoRSS support and MyMaps. The GeoRSS support means that any application that can output it’s geocoding — as simple as <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point> — can now be linked to a live map with no more effort than […] » about 300 words

Twitter Twitter Anti-Twitter

My own feelings about Twitter have gone back and forth across indecision street for a while, and despite a moment of excitement it’s still not part of my life-kit. So I was amused to see Blyberg pointing out Kathy Sierra’s poo-poo-ing of Twitter. Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling […] » about 200 words

Dawn Of The Citizen Professor?

It should be no surprise that journalists are talking about citizen journalism, but what of the disintermediation of other industries? Man-on-the-street Mark Georgiev told Marketplace: I didn’t want a certificate, I didn’t want any kind of accreditation, I really just wanted the knowledge. And I also wanted to work at my own pace. Georgiev, the […] » about 300 words

Economics Of Open Source

Two fairly old papers on the economics of open source. The news recently has been that open source allows companies to bring in better, more innovative talent and saves marketing costs, but these papers are interesting nonetheless. The Simple Economics of Open Source: The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe […] » about 300 words

“Smart Networks” Are A Stupid-Bad Idea

This story in MIT Technology Review scares me. Instead of letting all computers within the network communicate freely, Ethane is designed so that communication privileges within the network have to be explicitly set; that way, only those activities deemed safe are permitted. “With hindsight, it’s a very obvious thing to do,” McKeown says. No matter […] » about 600 words

EMI and Apple/iTunes To Offer DRM-Free Music Downloads

Following Steve Jobs’ ant-DRM post, people began to wonder if Apple was just pointing fingers or really willing to distribute DRM-free music via their online store. Yesterday we learned the answer. Apple and EMI announced yesterday they would offer DRM-free 256bit AAC premium downloads, priced at $1.29 each. Apple, DRM, DRM-free, EMI, ITMS, digital restrictions […] » about 100 words

APIs Are Big Business

ProgrammableWeb pointed out an InformationWeek story that claimed 28% of Amazon’s sales in early 2005 were attributable to Amazon affiliates. And C|net claims Amazon now has 180,000 AWS developers (up from the 140,000 Amazon was claiming about a year ago).

(Note: not every Amazon affiliate/associate is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer, but Amazon hasn’t shared more specific numbers.)

These slides, from Amazon’s AWS developer relations team explain a lot about what AWS is.

My Personal Crisis of Digital Preservation

For a long time I was a big fan of Dantz Retrospect Backup. For while I was so committed that I would do an incremental backup of my laptop and most every other computer in my house every day, but I’ve been using it one way or another since 1999 or 2000 or so. All […] » about 300 words

UC Berkeley Proud Of PowerPoint

Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student, conceived PowerPoint originally as an easy-to-use presentation program. He hired a software developer, Dennis Austin, in 1984 to build a prototype program that they called “Presenter,” later changing the name to PowerPoint for trademark reasons. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform; later that […] » about 200 words

Twittter Twittter Twittter

Ryan tried to tell me about it a month ago, Jessamyn gets the idea but uses Facebook instead, DeWitt fell for it, Ross said it tipped the tuna, and now I’m finally checking Twitter out. I signed up yesterday and immediately went looking for ways to connect Twitter, Plazes, and iChat.

Tweet is an AppleScript that works with Quicksilver (a launcher) and Twitterrific (a desktop Twitter client) to make updating even easier. Matt Matteson updated it to set iChat status, and Ruben Broman added Plazes integration.

What’s it good for? Think of it like a snack-sized micro mini blog if you want. Or think of it like chatting with your 500 (or 5 million) closest friends. Or think of it as another way of extending personal presence in the electronic age, little bits of information that exist in the environment.

OSS Saves Marketing Costs, Protects Business

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS

In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”

“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model. The people who create great software can now reach the rest of the world.”

Businesses get the most protection from the GPL, he insisted. “They get protection from competition.” The license’s insistence on reciprocity means no one can take the code you wrote, tweak it, then compete with you.

Linux Leads On World’s Top Supercomputers

The real map of the world’s top 100 supercomputers isn’t nearly as US-centric as my screenshot suggests, but the operating system stats are seriously tilted toward Linux. Over 400 of the top 500 supercomputers in the November 2006 report run some form of the free operating system. Generic “Linux” leads the pack, but Redhat and […] » about 200 words

Spam Getting More Personal?

The Viagra and Cialis knock-offs being pushed in so much of the spam I get may be directed at things the recipients feel very personally about, but the message itself has never been personal. Well, it had never seemed personal to me, anyway, until now. Clay Shirky pointed out what I’ve started to see, and […] » about 500 words

Damn Daylight Saving Doesn’t Save

NPR covered it like an eclipse or astronomic curiosity, and did little to question the claimed energy saving benefits. But, as Michael Downing asks in Spring Forward, how can something understood by so few be done by so many? And why go through this twice annual madness? Supposedly, we subject ourselves to the rule of […] » about 300 words

Charges Put Internet Radio On Pause

In early 2002 the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) set royalty rates for webcasters that were twice as high as for regular radio broadcasts. The Library of Congress reset those rates in late summer (yes, the LoC oversees those things).

Now it’s 2007, and the RIAA is at it again. Techdirt reports the Copyright Royalty Board is adopting royalty rates the RIAA has been asking for, “and making them effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006 — meaning that many small independent webcasters are now facing a tremendous royalty bill they’re unlikely to be able to afford.” Here, listen to the story on PRI’s Marketplace.

Save the Streams is following the issue, and Kurt Hanson tells us Congress is paying attention.