All the World's a Stage...For Windows Users

You can now enter Arden, Ed Castronova's virtual Shakespearian world:

Arden has yet to become the world that we have envisioned. What is available here in the current version is only a small prototype of what we believe Arden could eventually become. Richard III and The War of the Roses have provided a small starting template for what we hope you will help us improve. The works of Shakespeare are vast and provide us as developers with rich settings into which we can continue to expand the content of Arden.

Well, you can if you run Windows....

Is Debatepedia a Good Idea? Well, Yes and No....

It's always interesting to see how the basic wiki/Wikipedia idea can be extended. Here's one I'd not come across before, the more or less self-explanatory Debatepedia:

Debatepedia is a wiki project of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA) with the mission to act as the "Wikipedia of debate and reasoning". On it, debaters, students, experts, and citizens can all openly edit and co-create an encyclopedia of debates, pro and con arguments, bodies of supporting evidence (quotes, articles, studies...), and the stances of relevant actors. We encourage you to create an account (above), become an editor, and join this important social movement and community. Imagine the difference that this resource could make in improving reasoning globally.

Well, I think that's debatable.... (Via Joho the Blog.)

On-Demand OK, But How Demanding?

The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are to launch a joint on-demand service, which will bring together hundreds of hours of television programmes in one place.

The service is set to go live in 2008 and will offer viewers access to current shows and archive material.

Plans will have to be approved by the BBC Trust and the other broadcasters' boards, and a name for the service will be unveiled ahead of its launch.

The three broadcasters currently offer their own separate on-demand services.

The BBC's iPlayer, ITV's catch-up service and Channel 4oD will continue to exist along the new online "aggregator", which will provide a complement to the established providers.

But that still doesn't make clear what the platform requirements will be for viewing this new super-duper on-demand service: who thinks it might be Windows only....?

Update: Ashley has more details, but doesn't answer my question, although to my eyes there's an implication that the new aggregator will be even less platform agnostic than iPlayer - which Ashley says *will* support GNU/Linux....

Of Lost IDs, ID Cards and Biometric IDiocy

One of the many outrageous aspects of the recent loss by HMRC of crucial data about half the UK population is how the UK government immediately tried to spin this as a reason why we needed ID cards. This follows in a long and dishonourable tradition in this country whereby every failure by the police to catch terrorists/criminals using their extensive powers of surveillance is turned into a justification for giving them even more such powers, when it ought to mean the opposite.

Fortunately a crushing refutation of the faulty logic behind the ID card argument has now been provided by some top academic security expects, who write:

biometric checks at the time of usage do not of themselves make any difference whatsoever to the possibility of the type of disaster that has just occurred at HMRC. This type of data leakage, which occurs regularly across Government, will continue to occur until there is a radical change in the culture both of system designer and system users. The safety, security and privacy of personal data has to become the primary requirement in the design, implementation, operation and auditing of systems of this kind.

The inclusion of biometric data in one's NIR record would make such a record even more valuable to fraudsters and thieves as it would - if leaked or stolen - provide the 'key' to all uses of that individual's biometrics (e.g. accessing personal or business information on a laptop, biometric access to bank accounts, etc.) for the rest of his or her life. Once lost, it would be impossible to issue a person with new fingerprints. One cannot change one's fingers as one can a bank account.

(Via The Reg.)

Getting Organised for Grids

I've always liked the idea of grids - creating virtual supercomputers by hooking up often geographically distant systems. It goes almost without saying that free software rules the grid roost, notably in the form of the Globus Toolkit. Now there's a new meeting place for open source gridders, with the easy-to-remember URL grid.org:

Grid.org is intended to provide a single location where open-source cluster and grid information can be aggregated and where community members can exchange information, experiences, and ideas related to the complete open source cluster software stack. In particular, but not exclusively, Grid.org provides a community where users of Cluster Express, and the various open source components it comprises, can interact with each other and with the source code.

This has only just been (re-)launched, so content and community are still slightly thin on the ground, although it is already good on Cluster Express:

Cluster Express 3.0 is open source cluster management software that integrates best-of-breed open source technologies to provide everything one needs to run technical and advanced computing applications on a cluster.

Just What We Wanted to Hear...

...that releasing a film under a Creative Commons licence does not harm its prospects; on the contrary:

Lo que tú Quieras Oír, the phenomenal Spanish short film we talked about earlier here, has recentlly broken into the “All Time Most Viewed” list on YouTube with upwards of 38,000,000 views! Lo que tú Quieras Oír is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

Some major kudos are in order for the everyone involved in creating Lo que tú Quieras Oír and making it the success it is today. We can only hope that part of the short’s online success has been enhanced by this decision to utilize CC licensing, which allows its viewers to not only freely distribute the film, but also remix it as long as they give credit, do so with non-commercial intent, and share their new works under the same license.

Firefox: The Toronto Connection

Interesting factoid:

Those familiar with Mozilla and Firefox project will probably recognize names such as lead developer Mike Connor, user experience leader Mike Beltzner, and chief technology evangelist and Mozilla founding member Mike Shaver. All three Mikes work out of Mozilla's Toronto office.

"Mozilla's an interesting community because it's pretty global with employees all over the place, but the Toronto office is actually pretty sizable," Johnathan Nightingale, Firefox's security design lead of Toronto's Mozilla office, said. "It's not unusual to have eight to 10 people in the office, and for a company of about 100 employees, that's pretty significant."

(Via FSDaily.)

Anti-Social Networks

Although I've joined a couple of social networks, it's purely for the sake of some digital anthropology: I've never actually *used* them. In part, this is because I've always found their dynamics slightly unhealthy - this binary business (yes/no) of accepting someone as a "friend" seemed pretty adolescent, frankly.

Now Cory Doctorow has skewered and dissected the key problems in one of his well-written analyses:

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

Analogue Hackers

Hacking lies at the heart of free software, since hackers are people who love fiddling and fixing (and not to be confused with crackers who like break and steal). How about this for a group of analogue hackers? The Parisian "Untergunther":

whose members include architects and historians, rebuilt an abandoned 100-year-old French government bunker and renovated a 12th-century crypt, he said. They claim to be motivated by a desire to preserve Paris’s heritage.

Last year the Untergunther spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Zoho Gears Up for Offline Web Apps

Talking of Zoho, it seems it has beaten Google to the punch when it comes to using Google Gears for offline Web app word processing:

In August, we made Zoho Writer available offline. When we released it back then, the documents were available in read-only mode when offline. With today’s update, you’ll now be able to view and edit your documents offline. This functionality is based on Google’s open source project Google Gears. We thank them for the project and their support.|

For Zoho Writer to work offline, you’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed on your browser (works on Firefox 1.5+, IE 6+). Click on ‘Go Offline’ to access your documents offline. By default, we download 15 documents each from ‘My Docs’ and ‘Shared Docs’ section. You can change the default setting by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link. The documents are downloaded based on the ‘Sort Order’ in your ‘My Docs’ section.

When you are not connected to the internet, you can visit http://writer.zoho.com/offline to access and edit your documents offline. When you are back online, clicking on ‘Go Online’ will let you to synchronize the modified documents with the online versions.

A taste of things to come, when this will be standard for all Web apps. (Via Blognation.)

Here We Go Round the (Open) Mulberry Bush

Mulberry started off life as a software project that was really meant to help the author learn more about the internet and internet protocols used for email. However, it became much more than that and garnered support from a small (in internet terms) group of users and institutions many of whom relied on the product as their primary email tool.

Whilst it started as only an IMAP client and only on Mac OS, it has grown to cover not only other email protocols, but also calendaring and scheduling and is available on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux systems.

Not something I use myself, but good to see it going open source, not least because calendaring and scheduling is an area where free software offerings are still rather thin on the ground:

The full code for Mulberry (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux) is now available as open source under an Apache 2 License. Full details available on the wiki.

(Via heise online.)

Why Javascript, not Flash? - Ask Zoho

I've only just come across this, perhaps the best summary of why using Flash is the wrong way to create Web apps:

1. Native to the Web

A real web application should natively support web standards - HTML & CSS are pretty much synonymous with “web standards”. The biggest reason we started out with Javascript is that it is native to the web - in the sense its core object model for Javascript is the HTML/CSS Document Object Model. The DOM is a gift to web applications. Even with the annoying browser differences in DOM (which sophisticated libraries increasingly hide), it is still far better to have the DOM than not have it. Flash, for all its advantages, sits in a separate space from the browser. In that sense, Flash is not that different from Java-on-the-client. In fact, Flash is Java-on-the-client-done-right.

I am sure Flash will eventually find a way to natively integrate with the browser but it is not there yet.

2. Open Source Library Support

This is a big one. The depth and variety of libraries available in Javascript just keep getting better. It is mind boggling just how much open source development is going on in Javascript. Developers keep pushing the envelope. For one example, look at the jQuery solar system demo. It shocked me the first time I saw it. Pretty impressive that Javascript could do that, right? The capabilities of Javascript exceed the client requirements of office productivity applications today, and there are tons more innovations coming.

3. Vector Graphics in Browsers

This is another big one. Vector graphics formats like SVG (Firefox, Opera), VML (IE), and HTML Canvas (Firefox, Safari, Opera), are becoming ubiquitous in browsers. Yeah, it sucks that IE doesn’t support SVG, but that can be worked around. Even cooler is the fact that SVG & VML are XML and very Javascript friendly. You can do real magic.

Obviously, number 2 is the heart of the matter: Javascript is just going to keep getting better, faster, thanks to the open development process. With Flash, you're dependent on the skills of one company (now, where have I heard that before?)

Open Bookshelf: Real-Time and Embedded Linux

Real-time and embedded Linux is an iceberg: for all its low visibility, it's pretty big below the surface, and getting bigger. If you want to get to know this world better - and you know you do - here's a bumper crop of light reading for you:

LinuxDevices.com is pleased to publish an overview and papers from the Ninth Real-Time Linux Workshop held in Linz, Austria, Nov. 2-3, 2007. The papers, available for free download without registration, span a broad range of topics, ranging from fundamental real-time technologies to applications, hardware, and tools.

(Via Linux Today.)

Soaraway Open Source

Rupert Murdoch's tabloid Sun newspaper, better known for its fascination with chest-tops rather than laptops, is nonetheless starting to grok the Joy of Linux, thanks to the Asus EEE PC:

The crucial thing about the Eee is rather than running on Windows, it uses a Linux operating system. Now I'm a Microsoft man through and through, I've never been able to face switching from XP or Vista to the likes of OS X on an Apple. There's safety in what you know.

I'd certainly never consider running Linux on my home PC but by slimming down the software on this gadget, it allows it to have a much longer battery life - crucial for a product designed to be used on the move. It will also run faster and has instant on and off.

As I've said elsewhere, the Asus could really prove to be a breakthrough machine for GNU/Linux among general users. (Via FSDaily.)

Andy Updegrove on the War of the Words

The ODF/OOXML struggle has been one of the pivotal stories for the world of open source, open data and open standards. I've written about here and elsewhere many times. But the person best placed to analysis it fully from a standards viewpoint - which is what it is all about, at heart - is undoubtedly Andy Updegrove, who is one of those fine individuals obsessed with an area most people find slightly, er, soporific, and capable of making it thrilling stuff.

News that he's embarked on an e-book about this continuing saga is therefore extremely welcome: I can't imagine anyone doing a finer job. You can read the first instalment now, with the rest following in tantalising dribs and drabs, following highly-successful precedents set by Dickens and others. With the difference, of course, that this book - entitled ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words - is about fact, not fiction, and that the events it describes have not even finished yet.

Feel Free to Squeak

I don't know much about the open source programming language Squeak, but it does sound rather cool:

Squeak is a highly portable, open-source Smalltalk with powerful multimedia facilities. Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from educational platforms to commercial web application development.

...

Squeak stands alone as a practical environment in which a developer, researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk.

Our diverse and very active community includes teachers, students, business application developers, researchers, music performers, interactive media artists, web developers and many others. Those individuals use Squeak for a wide variety of computing tasks, ranging from child education to innovative research in computer science, or the creation of advanced dynamic web sites using the highly acclaimed continuation based Seaside framework.

Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. Any image file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).

Now, though, it seems there is no excuse not to find out more:

To help more people get familiar with Squeak's very powerful programming environment, the new book Squeak by Example is now being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It's intended for both students and developers and guides readers through the Squeak language and development environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. This is very useful to those who wish to become more familiar with the Croquet programming environment. You can either download the PDF for free, or you can buy a softcover copy from lulu.com.

What a classic combination: CC digital download, or an analogue version from Lulu.com.

Update 1: Alas, it seems you can't squeak freely - see comment below.

Update 2: Or maybe you can - see other comments below.

(Copyright) Darkness Visible

The benighted policy of extending copyright terms again and again is made visible in a nice graphic accompanying this post:

The term of copyright has steadily expanded under U.S. law. The first federal copyright legislation, the 1790 Copyright Act, set the maximum term at fourteen years plus a renewal term (subject to certain conditions) of fourteen years. The 1831 Copyright Act doubled the initial term and retained the conditional renewal term, allowing a total of up to forty-two years of protection. Lawmakers doubled the renewal term in 1909, letting copyrights run for up to fifty-six years. The 1976 Copyright Act changed the measure of the default copyright term to life of the author plus fifty years. Recent amendments to the Copyright Act expanded the term yet again, letting it run for the life of the author plus seventy years.

What's wrong with this picture?

The Supreme Court has held that legislative trick constitutional, notwithstanding copyright’s policy implied aim of stimulating new authorship—not simply rewarding extant authors.

Open EMR

He beat me to it.

Another Reason Why China is the Future...

...or rather *a* future:

Chinese trust the Internet over mainstream media and all sources of information according to a study done by Harris Interactive for Edelman.

(Via RConversation.)

Live Documents and Let Live Documents

It's not really clear whether we need yet another online office suite, but at least Live Documents seems to have understood the importance of freeing users from dependence on a certain offline one:

"From a technology and utility perspective, Live Documents offers two valuable improvements - firstly, it break's Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office and secondly, our solution matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007) such as macros, table styles and databar conditional formatting in Excel 2007 and live preview of changes in PowerPoint 2007. Thus, Live Documents lets consumers and businesses to derive the benefits of Office 2007 without having to upgrade," said Adarsh Kini, Chief Technology Officer, InstaColl.

KOffice Made Simpler

The high-profile nature of OpenOffice.org means that KOffice tends not to get the respect it deserves. Maybe the latest iteration will change that, because it offers an interesting addition:

Over two years ago, Inge Wallin proposed a simplified word processor to be used in school for kids. Thomas Zander, the KWord lead developer, made a proof of concept of this using the infrastructure of KOffice 2. This proved simpler than even Thomas would have believed, and KOffice 2.0 Alpha 5 now contains a first version of the KOffice for kids. Note that only the GUI is simplified, and that it still contains the full power of KOffice. This means that it can save and load the OpenDocment Format, which will make it easy to interact with other users of OpenOffice.org or the full KOffice suite.

These are precisely the kind of innovations that free software makes so easy: hacking together a quick prototype and then polishing it. Let's hope that other simplified versions follow, since an "Easy" Office would be useful far beyond its original target market, education.

It would also be a nice riposte to never-ending complexification of Microsoft's own products, which are forced to add more and more obscure features - whether or not users what them - in a desperate attempt to justify yet another paid-for upgrade. Free software is under no such pressure, and can therefore downgrade applications when that might appropriate, as here. Microsoft, by contrast, is trapped by its ratchet-based business model.

MS Explorer Is Sinking...

...no, really. Talk about symbolism.

We Demand Books on Demand

One of the interesting results of the move to digital texts is a growing realisation that analogue books still have a role to play. Similarly, it's clear that analogue books serve different functions, and that feeds into their particular physical form. So some books may be created as works of art, produced to the very highest physical standards, while others may simply be convenient analogue instantiations of digital text.

Public domain books are likely to fall into the latter class, which means that ideally there should be an easy way to turn such e-texts into physical copies. Here's one:

This is an experiment to see what the demand for reprints of public domain books would be. This free service can take any book from the Internet Archive (that is in public domain) and reprint it using Lulu.com. Prices of the books are rounded up from Lulu.com cost prices to the nearest $0.99 to cover the bandwidth and processing power that we rent from Amazon using their EC2 service. There is also a short post on my blog about it.

How Does It Work

Anyone with an email address can place a request on this page using an Internet Archive link or ID. Your request will be forwarded to our conversion server which will convert the appropriate book to printable form, and sends it off to Lulu.com. When the book has been uploaded, it will be made for immideate ordering and shipping, and you will receive a link to it via email. Currently, only soft cover books are supported in 6"x9", 6.625"x10.25" or 8"x11" trim sizes.

Interesting to see Lulu.com here, confirming its important place as a mediator between the digital and analogue worlds. (Via Open Access News.)

Openness: Purity of Essence

I wrote a piece for Linux Journal recently warning that Microsoft was beginning to hijack the meaning of the phrase "open source". But the problem is much bigger than this: the other opens face similar pressures, as Peter Murray-Rust notes.

In some ways it's even more serious for fledgling movements like open access and open data: there, the real meaning has barely been established, and so defending it is harder than for open source, which has had a well-defined definition for some time. Given the importance of labels, this is a matter that needs to be addressed with some urgency before "open access" and "open data" become little more than bland marketing terms.

Thank You, FOSS

Via GigaOM, I came across a link to this love-letter to Facebook:

Thinking about it, I've rarely used a service that has brought me so much emotional satisfaction...connecting with good friends is a feel-good thing and it is this emotional value that makes Facebook hard to beat in terms of the gratification other services can provide. So much so, here I am even writing a thank you note to the service (I can't remember doing that for any service...I've written about how "cool" stuff is, or how useful some service might be...but "thank you"? Never).

Although I think that Facebook is interesting - but not unproblematic, especially its recent moves - I'd never see it in this light. But it set me wondering whether there was anything comparable for me - a place of digital belonging of the kind offered by Facebook. And I realised there was, but not one that was crystallised in a single service. Rather, I feel this same sense of "connecting with good friends" with respect to the much larger, and more diffuse free software community.

This isn't a new thing. Back in the early years of this century, when I was writing Rebel Code, I was astonished at how helpful everyone was that I spoke to in that world. That stood in stark contrast to the traditional computing milieu, where many was full of their own (false) self-importance, and rather too fixated on making lots of money.

It seems I'm not alone in this sense of hacker camaraderie:

The key thing here is that in all the details, spats, debates, differences in direction and nitty-gritty, it is easy to forget that the core ingredients in this community are enthusiastic, smart, decent people who volunteer their time and energy to make Open Source happen. As Open Source continues to explode, and as we continue to see such huge growth and success as it spreads across the world and into different industries, we all need to remember that the raw ingredients that make this happen are enthusiastic, smart, decent people, and I for one feel privileged to spend every day with these people.

To paraphrase W.H.Auden:

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, FOSS.