San Francisco, February 28th 2008

March 1, 2008 on 7:47 pm | In wanderings | No Comments

Thursday was a wonderful day to be in San Francisco! The weather was warm and sunny, I got off to an early start, and I saw most of the areas of the city that I wanted to see before Choral Evensong at Grace Cathedral. I actually went to Grace Cathedral first, then to St. Mary’s to see the Ruffatti, and in following my nose towards a great dome that I thought would be a basilica (City Hall) I stumbled upon the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

The Asian Art Museum was simply amazing. Floor after floor and room after room of jade carvings, ornate weapons, embroidered robes, carved gods and goddesses, fine furniture, and more from China, Japan, Indonesia, Tibet, Thailand, and India. My jaw dropped many times at the sheer beauty of the collections, and I filled my camera’s 1GB SD card by the time I left.

In the afternoon I headed down to Chinatown looking for street food, then on to Little Italy and North Beach. Along the way I stopped in several churches and ran across L’Osteria del Forno, which advertised pumpkin ravioli, but only on Fridays and Saturdays. I walked on to the Marina district and headed back up Van Ness, on track for 5:15 evensong at Grace Cathedral.

Evensong was amazing as always. It’s webcast – listen for some poor gentleman’s hearing aid going crazy during the improvised prelude. The sun went down during evensong and I nearly froze waiting for the bus afterwards. Standing in a hoodie and shorts on top of Nob Hill in February! Evensong lasted longer than I had anticipated, otherwise I would have been in fine shape.

I turned in early to get my rest for the OpenLibrary conference the next day. After a day of traipsing all over the city, not even the noise from the bar next door could keep me from sleep.

San Francisco, February 27th 2008

February 28, 2008 on 9:15 am | In wanderings | No Comments

I flew to San Francisco yesterday to attend the Open Library meeting in my boss’ stead, and saved enough money not flying on the weekend to pay for an extra two days in the Bed and Breakfast. A 5-day trip for the price of 3 – yes!

I got off to a rocky start. My flights were delayed, I spent the extra time in the waiting area on the phone with AT&T trying to figure out why I couldn’t use my iPhone’s data plan, and I never would have thought that at age 31 sitting still in a seat for 5 hours without e-mail, phone, twitter or myspace would be so hard. Instead I alternated between reading Bart Ehrman’s book on the Gospel of Judas and comparing dining recommendations with the lady in the seat to my right. She grew up in LA and lives in NYC and loves SF restaurants. She says I can’t pass up The Slanted Door, now at the Ferry Building, or the vegetarian Greens at Fort Mason. Now I need a dinner partner!

Things started looking up once I touched down at SFO. My bags didn’t get lost even with the scrunched-up layover in Charlotte, Hector of the Red Line picked me up in the hotel shuttle just as he did for the Open Content Alliance meeting back in October, and we pulled away from the airport before there was any noticeable reason for the bomb squad’s mobile unit to have been parked right outside the front door.

My Bed and Breakfast is beautiful, an old row house upgraded into a perfectly decorated place to sleep in the perfect spot in town. Within walking distance of the Castro and Mission districts, and 1.5 blocks from the MUNI’s Castro Station, a hub of the city’s transportation lines. I wasn’t able to reserve the room I originally wanted, but the room assigned to me has its own bathroom. A smile from Providence which I hadn’t recognized at the time.

I’m directly across the street from Midnight Sun, Something Rainbow, Chaps, and hee hee, the Sit n Spin Laundromat. I know where to go if I need to do a load of laundry and sip a mean martini at a sidewalk table while I wait. I walked to the AT&T store on Mission and met Jen, who not only fixed my plan but recommended some great Caribbean places in the Latin Mission district. Her wife is a school teacher so she was really interested in hearing about ibiblio and the Open Library project and the Internet Archive. I left with her mobile number in case I had any more trouble with my phone, and in case I wanted to meet her friends out at several bars she recommended on Castro.

Back to the Bed n Breakfast for a shower and to decompress a bit. When I got onto the Bed n Breakfast’s stoop, the sounds of nail guns combined with the smell of weed from the contractors working on the building next door. Not a good combination. Good thing the door opens easily and quickly – no fumbling with the keys!

Time to work on having fun. I met the owner of the Up hair salon next door, his friends sitting outside the Mix bar, and spent some time in the Castro shops, picking up a shirt, a MUNI visitor passport, and yum, a coconut latte! I used my passport to hop on the historic F line streetcar, which stretches from the Castro down Market past Union Square, through the Financial District, past the Embarcadero and to Pier 39. An excellent way to rest and people-watch on a chilly evening.

I checked out Midnight Sun for its American Idol viewing party and met some really nice people. It was starting to get a little crowded, and the guy who came up to me made a point to tell me he earned 6 figures (right…), so after a drink or two I bounced over to Badlands, the Castro’s dance club. I was having fun but my body was beginning to complain, having been awake from 4 a.m. EST to 2 a.m. EST the next day. I came back and crashed. Now it’s 6:10 PST and I’m waiting for the continental breakfast that Dion serves out of the armoire in the BnB’s parlor. I may even be able to sleep for a bit longer!

I’m very much looking forward to wandering around the city today – Haight/Ashbury, Chinatown and Grace Cathedral’s Thursday Evensong service are on my itinerary. Wish me luck!

i love getting my hair cut

December 5, 2007 on 3:31 pm | In ramblings | No Comments

so, i stopped in my favorite barbershop for a haircut after lunch.  today the barber was very animated – he had brought his registered, legal gun with him today, because he was going to find the gentleman who bought his old car from him and wasn’t making the payments.  he stopped cutting my hair at one point to call a friend of a friend to find out where this guy’s wife’s condominium complex was located.  he said as soon as he finished cutting my hair, he was going to go to the condo and get his car back.

i’ll definitely be checking the police reports tomorrow :)

how to play streaming quicktime videos on linux

November 15, 2007 on 11:41 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

In troubleshooting connectivity problems with our Folkstreams documentary site, I worked out playing Quicktime streams on my Fedora 8 desktop. Here’s a quick-n-dirty recipe (suggestions and cleanups welcome):

Gather the necessary sources:

mplayer: currently http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2
ffmpeg: SVN via $ svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
faac: currently http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=704
liveMedia: currently http://www.live555.com/liveMedia/public/live555-latest.tar.gz

Now, we compile:

  1. Let’s start with ffmpeg and faac first. The commands should be as simple as the following. Note that you will need to install gcc and the related automake/autoconf/libtool packages included with your distribution if you don’t have them already installed.  If your distribution includes packages for ffmpeg and faac (most likely will) go ahead and install them and skip to step 2.
    $ tar xvfj ffmpeg-export-snapshot.tar.bz2
    $ cd ffmpeg-export-<date>
    $ ./configure –prefix=/usr (the –prefix is optional, but my Linux distro keeps everything beneath /usr, so…)
    $ make
    $ sudo make install
    $ tar xvfz faac-1.25.tar.gz
    $ cd faac
    $ ./bootstrap
    $ ./configure –prefix=/usr
    $ make
    $ sudo make install
  2. Next we’ll install the liveMedia libraries courtesy of live555.com:
    $ tar xvfz live555-latest.tar.gz
    $ cd live
    $ ./genMakefiles linux
    $ make
    $ cd ..
    $ sudo mv live/ /usr/lib/
  3. Finally, we install mplayer:
    $ tar xvfj MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2
    $ cd MPlayer-1.0rc2
    $ ./configure –prefix=/usr
    Be sure that the enabled optional drivers’ “Input” line includes live555.
    $ make
    $ sudo make install

That should do it! For now, you will need to right-click on the Folkstreams MPEG link, save streams.php to a file, and copy-paste the movie URL into an MPlayer command line command. In my case, I needed to invoke MPlayer’s “rtsp-stream-over-tcp” option:

$ mplayer -rtsp-stream-over-tcp rtsp://audio-qt.ibiblio.org/folkstreams/video/music_district/music_district-mp4.mov

the week ahead

November 15, 2007 on 8:43 am | In disney, tech stoof, wanderings | No Comments

tomorrow i’ll be giving a lunch talk, a report on the proceedings from the 2007 meeting of the Open Content Alliance. on friday november 16th in manning 208 from noon until 1 p.m. then, i am quite literally going to disneyworld!

i’ll be driving to florida as it takes almost as long and way more money to fly, and then i wouldn’t have a car to go anywhere off property. i’m very much looking forward to some forced relaxation – no internet, no work, no housework… but i am bringing my running shoes :)

Open Content Alliance and the greater San Francisco area

November 5, 2007 on 10:28 am | In tech stoof, wanderings | No Comments

Back in October I flew to San Francisco to take notes the Open Content Alliance and spend a few days exploring the city!  Ugh, I’ve been soooo negligent in updating my blog.  I’m giving a little report on the OCA meeting to the SILS faculty on next Friday, so I’ll post the presentation notes here.

I have tons of pictures from San Francisco and need to get them organized and uploaded to Flickr, at some point.  A few observations on the trip:

  • MUNI passes are good things to have.  An $18, 3-day MUNI pass got us everywhere we want to go, and quickly!
  • Sweet Heat is gone from the Upper Haight :(   There was one in the Marina district as well, which is now the excellent Chinese restaurant, Country Sky.  So, so good!
  • The Thursday Evensong service at Grace Cathedral was the highlight of my trip, hands down.  Archie put up a fuss about going to a boring old church service, but once the service started he was almost as enchanted as I was.  The best part, for me, was that Grace allowed worshipers to sit up in the choir since the service was so small – and I got to sit behind the organ bench!  If I lived in San Francisco I would probably be at Grace for every service.
  • The NextBus placards are as inaccurate in San Francisco as they are in Chapel Hill.  I wonder if San Francisco’s installation tracks bus routes on days the buses aren’t running just like Chapel Hill’s installation does.
  • We ate breakfast at the over-priced Boudin’s on the Wharf.  On the morning before, Buena Vista provided a better breakfast at a much better price.  With the cable-car turn-around right outside our window!

the basement of phillips hall

September 14, 2007 on 12:45 pm | In ramblings | No Comments

so, during the renovations of the steele building, the advising department had to move somewhere.  poor, poor academic advising.  they got moved temporarily into the basement of phillips hall!  the old machine room, still with raised floor, is now silent save the clacking of computer keys.  the secretaries, lacking any natural light, provide their own sunshine as they welcome new students, along with old OIT employees who pop their head in the door for old times’ sake.

the dumbwaiter is still in the office in the back hallway, as is the water-filled pit beneath the sub-basement.  trey harris used to throw rocks in there to listen to them sploosh.  anyone who worked in the basement of phillips should walk through – surreal to have plush chairs lining the walls and undergrads wandering around looking for their advisor.

web 2.0 conference, afternoon session

September 12, 2007 on 12:17 pm | In tech stoof | No Comments

i didn’t win the iPhone. more on wikinomics – the wisdom of the masses. the baby name wizard. segue into a demo of IBM’s “many eyes.” graphical representations: hostograms of the text of Genesis, US government expenses, etc.  very, very cool stuf!

web 2.0 conference, social computing session

September 12, 2007 on 10:38 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

rob, martha and frank are leading the social computing session. anyone who has teenagers knows exactly what we’re talking about. remember “get off the damned phone?” kids don’t use phones for minutes, just for texts. rob reads an obituary from wikinomics: “the bottom line is this: the immutable, stand-alone web is dead.” frank demos the lotus greenhouse using firefox on vista.

  • how do we use social computing in the workplace?
  • privacy issues / challenges in social software
  • which sites are best to use, for which purpose?
  • what makes social software and sites succeed or fail?
  • how to bring people out of the enterprise into social networks?

ESPN is the single most blocked site on the web. del.icio.us may be more likely for searches than google. everybody knows youtube and wikipedia. their overgrown stickies get yanked. plug many eyes, an alphaworks product. maybe a demo later. del.icio.us demo. RSS discussion.

frank talks about friendster, myspace and facebook. he tells us cautionary tales – employers stalk candidates before interviews, so be careful what you publish about yourself. frank’s myspace page includes comments from friends telling him he’s hot but warning that they’ll disown him if he marries any relatives now that he’s moved to the south. also his friend marley warns that he’s going to hell, and she’ll see him there.

Qatsup is a spam engine – you upload your address book, and they use it to spam your friends. rob recommends against it. twitter only gets 15 seconds. frank says twitter is brilliant. now we go for a lotus connections demo, but they’re down for maintenance.

on to engadget. techcrunch. digg. we begin to see information aggregates. “the whole concept of a blog makes a lot of sense.” on to the developerworks community — social networking for the enterprise. almost out of time. didn’t get to talk about security. AIM was insecure, so IBM came up with sametime. social pools face the same security problems. when you bring them inside the firewall, you can log them. studmuffin123 becomes rob@ibm.  second life discussion but no demo. IBM highlighters for the folks that piped up in discussion.

web 2.0 conference introduction

September 12, 2007 on 8:46 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

led by the evangelist for the emerging technologies group at IBM, the coolest job in the company. web 2.0 may still be vague for a lot of people, so a primer on jargon. plugging developerworks and alphaworks. developers love demos and hate slides. we’ll be talking to super-geeks today. two-way interaction makes web 2.0. google is all that, but myspace gets more hits. if IBM had sponsored wikipedia, it never would have happened. this is a beta of the 2.0 conference.

holds up a punch card with notes on it. who knows what this is? you can write on it, and it fits in your back pocket. IBM still stocks them because IBM has customers that still use them. 12 goes first, face down.

  • who invented DOS? tim patterson got about $10k for it.
  • why did DOS have 8.3 character filenames? to be compatible with CPM
  • when jobs left apple, where did john scully work before taking the helm? pepsi
  • before IBM, lou gershner worked for… nabisco
  • jobs spent over $1m designing the NeXT box. why? because he wanted a perfectly square cube with perfect corners

what’s happening on youtube? how can we do that in the enterprise? in colleges? governments? we’ll show you some lotus products to help you do this. welcome rod smith, IBM fellow.

rod smith takes over. web 2.0 means the technically savvy are more willing to experiment than before. speed geeking. people want to see instant value. siphoning a lot of technologies for the community. developerworks is the #2 site where developers go these days. syndication. smaller communities. IBMers don’t get to see one another until they meet when working with customers.

as web 2.0 comes along, business worry about disruption. who will buy a book from amazon without seeing positive comments about it? most corporate information is locked behind firewalls. how to get it out? high school wanted info from NOAA, invited NOAA officials to see their projects, and had completed tasks NOAA had been meaning to get done.

this brings us to mashups. before, it took us years to build applications. now, we do them in 30 days. iGoogle, netvisor, what IBM is doing, all will shorten time to market. all with social aspects. got bored with retail mashups using google maps, but maps were very valuable to customers.

more talk of AJAX, long tail, and handing out of lab coats to be worn at the conference. break for coffee and reconfig.

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