Category Archives: good code

Leon Felipe Sanchez has produced smaller versions of my Google Book Search talk. He’s got a (1) full, but light, a (2) small, and (3) and iPod Video version at his site. Thank you, Leon. Continue reading →

I’ve been a big fan of Second Life for a long time. Next Wednesday evening, I’ll be visiting. Continue reading →

So the other thing I wanted to try with this presentation was bitTorrent distribution. As I said, I used Prodigem‘s hosted bitTorrent service. Prodigem seeds the file if there are not at least 3 other seeds out there.

In the first day, there was about 120445 MB of completed traffic. Prodigem had transmitted 908 MB. Thus, 99% of the cost of distributing this was born by the audience. (Thanks!)

Right now, more than 1600 copies have been distributed. There are about 90 peers open.

Thus the meaning of: BitTorrent is a free speech tool. Continue reading →

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been looking for a simple way to make presentations that link my slides with my voice. Leonard Lin did it originally with my OSCON speech in 2002. He even built a simple way to take timings from PowerPoint and include them in the import into Flash. But that proved too cumbersome for this sad soul to use, and so for four years, requests for copies of my talks have come in, but I’ve had no easy way to provide them.

I may, however, have made some progress. Phil Pickering suggested (comment 7) the idea at Doug Kaye’s Blogarithms. I implemented it, using Keynote and iMovie, as follows:

(1) print the slides from Keynote so you can see what’s coming
(2) export the slides as JPEGs
(3) import the slides into iMovie
(4) import the audio into iMovie
(5) using the bookmark function, listen to the audio, and bookmark where there is to be a slide change
(6) marking all the slides, extend their length to the maximum (30 seconds)
(7) then starting from the beginning, advance to the next bookmark; split the image (apple+T); delete the half to the right; and repeat to the end
(8) Export to mp4

Once I programmed the keystrokes, this turned out to be pretty easy. The first completed example is a talk I gave about whether Google Book Search is “fair use.” Here’s a torrent for the (large) mp4 file. The torrent is hosted by Prodigem. (Get your BitTorrent client here. As the BitTorrent beautifully puts it: “BitTorrent is a free speech tool.”)

The only difficult part about this was listening to myself again (and again) as I built this. The bubbling inarticulateness in it terrifies me. But anyway, in the spirit of the experiment, here it is.

My hope is to put every presentation I’ve made, with audio and the source files, up for anyone to do with as they wish. That turns out to be harder than it should be. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Meanwhile, here’s my wishlist for technology to do this (Keynote developers — please please please):

(1) The ideal would be a simple SMIL like technology that would make it trivial to synchronize audio and images
(2) It would produce a flash-like output that would be small (unlike the MPEG4 video I’ve produced). In principle, there’s no reason it needs to be big, since there’s just a smallish number of images and an audio file
(3) The tool would enable simple bookmarking of transition points
(4) It would then automatically map slides to those transition points
(5) It would allow me to dump the resulting presentation in any format (so, e.g., I don’t have to watch it across the web)
(6) It would run on many platforms
(7) It would allow me to run the audio at a slow speed when indicating the bookmarks
(8) It would not require me to buy a huge new system to do it.

What’s distinctive about my style, as you’ll see, is that I have MANY slides. Some are just one or two words. Some are on the screen for just 1 or 2 seconds. Systems that imagine cutting up the audio and attaching it to the slides (i.e., PowerPoint) won’t cut it. ” Continue reading →

So heavy handed lobbying in France has backfired. Upon a payment of $8.50 a month, file sharing music would be legal.

(Thanks Mike!) Continue reading →

I’ve started a new podcast series with Leo Laporte and John Dvorak called “Triangulation.” The idea is totally John’s: pick a topic on which we all three roughly agree, and then spend 30 minutes drilling down on the layers of the subject. It is intended to be the opposite of Crossfire like malarky. Here’s the first on Google Book Search. Continue reading →

Wiki-Law has launched. It is exactly what you think (well, we can’t all edit the laws, but you understand what I mean). It is licensed under a dual GFDL and CC-Wiki license. First steps toward interoperability. Bravo on the launch! Continue reading →

Things are about to get very interesting. Sun’s got a cool (actually CoolThreads) new technology. Here’s the announcement. But here’s the really cool part: “Plans to Open Source Processor Technology to Developer Communities.” “Open source” hardware? What’s that mean? Stay tuned … Continue reading →

The University of Massachusetts launches Cyberweek Sunday. The discussion series is hosted by the Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution (odr.info), and covers a wide range of ethics and eLawyering topics. Continue reading →

So everyone is hotly contesting questions about Internet governance. I know lots are conflicted about this. But notice some good news from the Europeans: The European Statement to the United Nations explicitly mentions and defends the “end-to-end” principle.

(Thanks, Bernard!) Continue reading →