Category Archives: good code

The OECD has released a fantastic new report on “Digital Broadband Content.” I saw a draft a while ago, but it was embargoed at the time, and then, delayed in its release by those who didn’t like its very balanced message. Unlike those pressing the “US view,” there’s lots in this document that advances the debate quite well. Some bits I would disagree with, and other bits, quibble with, but this is precisely the stuff this debate needs.
One issue that the document frames nicely, but doesn’t quite address: Notice the trade-off between (1) the way we choose to protect IP and (2) the kinds of creativity we encourage. (This is a point made well by Terry Fisher in his discussion of “semiotic democracy.”)
If we INDUCE and support the “per copy” model of copyright, for all content, especially video and music, and if we supplement that protection strong DRM, we pollute the opportunity for remix culture to develop. That should force us to ask: is there a way to protect the legitimate IP interests of the copyright holders, without polluting remix culture? Continue reading →

MSFT sues phishers. Continue reading →

A cool new (or I think they’re new) organization, outragedmoderates.org has posted a BitTorrent link of all the briefs filed in the Grokster case. Continue reading →

So my post about David Isenberg brought this very interesting history of a group David was a part of at AT&T, but which I’d never seen described so extensively. Continue reading →

Berklee College of Music and Berklee Press has now released The Future of Music by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard. It is fantastically interesting. Continue reading →

The famous David Isenberg, author of The Rise of the Stupid Network, and early mentor of mine, is organizing a fantastic (I’ve seen his conferences before) and important (I know this issue well) conference, The Freedom to Connect. Registration fees increase on March 1, so reserve early and often. Continue reading →

So in response to my request for a simple hack to enable me to advance a slide remotely, I got lots of great advice about installing VNC on whatever machine I wanted to do this on. That’s a great suggestion, but a bit of overkill (and likely to create some suspicion with some network administrators), though it did show me how to make it easy to help my Mom on the Mac I bought for her (and why doesn’t Apple sell a version of Apple Remote for kids helping parents learn how to use Macs?).
But what I was hoping for in a hack was something simpler than a system to take over all control of a machine. Murray suggests a Java solution, which seemed the right sort of solution. But Kevin Reynen of SidewalkTheory has written some scripts that get run through iChat. This is an elegant little solution to the problem — just facilitating the advance of the slides and allowing the iChat to be used for the voice part at the same time — and in exchange for my promising to give a talk to a class he’s in (via remote), he’s offered to make on for a Win platform as well. I’ve accepted, and I’ll post that code too when it’s done. But thanks to Kevin for giving me a real chance of more time with my kid. Continue reading →

I can’t express adequately how grateful I am for the help in response to my two questions. I intend to tinker through the suggestions I can (I work in a Mac environment, so Windows-only solutions won’t work for me), and report back on what I learn. I’m especially grateful to jb’s suggestion: Sure, I’ll make whatever I have available for people to work with however they want.
Meanwhile, give me some time to process this, and I’ll report back what I learn. And again, thank you. Continue reading →

In a comment to my last post, Is there such a hack?, Andrew Ducker writes,

If you’re going to be sending the presentation in advance and then synchronising it to your voice over the internet, why not shortcut the whole process and simply add your voice to the presentation. They can just watch/listen to the presentation and you can take questions “live” at the end. The other advantage there being that you can also allow people to download the presentations, giving you worldwide coverage!

Indeed, why don’t I? Because it is insanely hard to do — insanely, because it seems like such an obvious feature for, e.g., a PPT or Keynote presentation, but it just doesn’t exist now (with any sort of reliability). You can record a narration, e.g., in a ppt presentation, but there’s no guarantee that the narration will actually stay fixed with the slide advances. You can manually carve up a narration into individual MP3s that get attached to each slide, and fix the timing problem, but who has time for something like that? And though Keynote promised something like this, I’ve yet to see how it can be used to make a truly, stand-alone, presentation.
Flash seems the most obvious platform to do this in, but again, it took lots of work to get this to work. And while Keynote promises Flash export capability, the output is not the same as the input.
I’ve seen products that promise to convert ppt to Flash, but I’ve not seen one that gives you a source file that you can work with. But am I missing something? I’d give my right arm (though I am left handed) for a simple, automatic tool to produce stand-alone presentations, and I’d even commit to making every one of my presentations available for free one existed (which is incentive enough for some not to produce it perhaps), but so far, I’ve not found it. Has someone else? Continue reading →

So I travel too much, and leaving my family is now driving me insane. (Last year, 186 nights in hotels). Today I experimented with making a presentation remotely. If you’ve seen me, and my presentations, this actually might be better than me being present — all the action is on the screen.
The problem is technical. There’s no good way to stream a wide range of content — video, audio, slide presentations. And there’s no simple way to remotely run a computer.
But the latter seems the simpler hack: I’d like to be able to send a CD of my presentation to a place I’m to speak at, and then remotely control advancing the slides. So, e.g., my voice could come over the internet, and control of a remote computer could come over the internet.
There are lots of expensive ways to do this. (e.g., Apple Remote). But is there a cheap, simple, cross-platform compatible way to do this? Again, I want a mouse like control I can operate here that advances my presentation there. Continue reading →