Accept no substitutes

Month: June 2006 (Page 4 of 4)

I hear what you hear!

In less than 24 hours, I’ve learned about two different ambient audio sampling and matching projects that I had never heard of. They sound a little like magic but audio fingerprints even, or especially, very small ones are very information rich and unique in many ways. So samplers beware.

The first is immi.com or Integrated Media Measurement Inc a market research firm that gives you a cell phone, if you are one of their “panelists” The phone then takes small random audio samples of the ambient audio in the phone’s reach, packs it into a fingerprint and sends it up to a database to be matched. Their How It Works section explains the process from panel selection to data analysis. Their reported panelist retention is as amazing as their technologies.

Now TechCrunch reports that Google Research is working in the same area. The Google Research papers are more about fingerprint creation and matching (the real magic here as audio is so wonderfully compressable if you don’t mind loss and if you are after a finerprint loss is fine).

A bit from TechCrunch here:

Google Research team members Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja along with Michael Fink of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Center for Neural Computation were given the best paper award for their report on the system at the the Euro ITV (interactive television) conference last week. (“Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification” 10 pg PDF, see also the Google Research blog post on the paper.)

But unlike IMMI.com, Google is sampling from “your home computer” instead of a special cell phone and it’s unclear how the matched information will be used, that is there are a lot of suggestions that don’t make sense to me.

Net Neutrality UPDATE from Google

Our CEO Eric Schmidt believes this situation is so important that he has written an open letter to Google users asking them to speak out on this issue. We urge all of you to read his letter and call your representative in Congress at 202-224-3121. For more information on the issue, and more ways to make your voice be heard, visit It’sOurNet.org.

Update: For those following this debate closely, the key House vote is happening Thursday night or Friday morning on the Markey-Boucher-Eshoo-Inslee Amendment, which would add meaningful net neutrality provisions to H.R. 5252, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act. We believe anything less that this amendment would be a loss for freedom and innovation on the Internet.

BarCampRDU invite

Fred has posted an invite to BarCampRDU to be circulated as widely as possible:

Dear Brilliant Geek/Author/Businessperson/Coder/Hacker/Artist/Musician/Guru,

You’re invited to BarCampRDU!

A BarCamp is an free, open-source unconference, where folks gather to learn, teach and geek out. What’s an unconference? Unconferences are like a regular conference, except that anyone can lead a session. As a result, a wide range of interests and skill levels are represented – making for an fun and unconventional teaching and learning experience.

BarCampRDU will be held on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at the Raleigh, NC headquarters of Red Hat, located on the NC State Centennial Campus. BarCampRDU is free to attend, but we’re limited to the first 150 folks who sign up. To sign up to attend, add your name to the BarCampRDU wiki. The conference is already almost 1/3 full of a lot of names you’ll recognize!

As BarCamp is a free event, we’ll need sponsors to cover the costs of feeding, hydrating and caffeinating the campers. If you or your company would like to sponsor BarCamp, contact Fred Stutzman at fred@metalab.unc.edu or leave your contact info on the wiki. Sponsors are absolutely crucial for making this event a success, so please consider sponsorship.

Thanks for thinking about attending BarCampRDU. It is going to be a great event, and we look forward to seeing you there.

Thanks,
Brilliant Geek/Author/Businessperson/Coder/Hacker/Artist/Musician/Guru

Reading and being sick

I’m stuck at home with so many books I wish I had time to read and several that I’ve started but not finished. Everytime, I’m home sick I think I’ll at least get some of those books read. I can’t do much else. But a slight fever or whatever fatigue this flu and other diseases give me make it impossible to read anything more challenging than a newspaper article or a New Yorker review (at best) or anime (Hikaru No Go). It’s not fair.

Ugh!

Sally caught something in Iowa. I held it off for a week, but now it’s getting me down. Ugh!! Bring on the vitamin C.

Lyceum – Smallwood Press Release

The news is going out on the Smallwood gift to ibiblio and the Lyceum project. I actually said/wrote some of what I’m quoted as saying. Thanks to Kelly and Wanda and especially to the Smallwood folks and to the Lyceum developers — here at ibiblio that’s JJB, Fred and Jameson.

Lyceum—innovative software for blogging

By KELLY MURPHY and WANDA MONROE
UNC School of Information and Library Science

Chapel Hill – Great news for those who create or wish to create two or many thousands of blogs (Web logs) with just one installation! Staff and students of ibiblio, located in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are developing innovative blogging software that allows individual communication exchange as well as large and varied group communication.
A powerful Web publishing system, Lyceum builds on WordPress software and allows for ease of use while maintaining high performance and security.
Lyceum, the multi-blog WordPress derivative, may accommodate installations with two or 200,000 blogs. It is ideal for corporate intranets or universities that need secure, manageable, and high performance blogging services for thousands of users. It expands on the familiar features, interface and tools of WordPress for users and administrators.
“As the Internet has grown and evolved, it has become a place of collaboration, a forum for discussion and a medium used to exchange information at the click of a button,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio. “This growth is exemplified by the open source software, blogs and other communication tools being used every day on the Web. What better way to expand on enhancing these opportunities to share ideas and thoughts than to offer software to make it easy to create and install blogs?”
The emerging generation of Web tools is often described as Web 2.0. According to the O’Reilly Network, which spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazine, and conferences, the concept of Web 2.0 emerged during a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Web 2.0 is an emerging generation of Web tools and one of its components is “social software.” Among this new software are blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting and videoblogs.
A gift of $25,000 was awarded to SILS to create a fellowship in open source. The fellowship will be used to continue the development of the Lyceum blogging system, which is open source. The funding provided by the Frances C. and William P. Smallwood Foundation, a grant-making foundation that promotes technology and education, will assist in refining the program and making it available to users around the world.
“The visionary gift from the Smallwood Foundation will allow us to take the next steps in innovation with Lyceum, that is to move the project from an early test state to software that can be widely used by a vibrant contributing community,” said Jones.
The $25,000 gift counts toward the university’s Carolina First Campaign goal of $2 billion. Carolina First is a comprehensive, multi-year, private fund-raising campaign to support Carolina’s vision of becoming the nation’s leading public university.
Home to one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To access the collections of ibiblio, visit the Web site at: www.ibiblio.org
To test the Lyceum software, visit the “Lyceum Demo Installation” site at: http://demo.lyceum.ibiblio.org

Mugshot testers?

Want to be a Mugshot tester?
I have a few invites that I will share under some not too onerous conditions:

  1. You should be someone I actually know.
  2. You should join the ibiblio group so we can be in touch.
  3. You should be able to use the client — that means for now that you are running Windows XP or Linux Fedora (this makes me sad).
  4. You should then actually use Mugshot for a while.
  5. You should let me know what you think of it and how we might make use of Mugshot here at ibiblio.

That’s it. Drop me a note if interested. Supplies are limited.

Cuisine of my hometown

Just to show that I have no place criticising Iowa, I improved on the Spam.com factiod that my hometown Charlotte was full to the brim with Spam eaters when I found this bit:

Charlotteans consume more Beanie Weenies than anywhere else in the world, boast the highest per capita consumption of Spam and the highest per capita consumption of ketchup in the world

[…]

As the Carolinas’ largest urban area, it continues to be a culinary forerunner.

A favorite Spam church potluck recipe from Charlotte involved Spam topped with a heavily sugared pineapple slice then baked in the juice from the pineapple can and that from a jar of red candied cherries. The cherries were later used to fill the pineapple holes. Yumm good! I found a variation of that sugary treat as the winner of the 2004 Dixie Classic Fair; the variation is a casserole (of course).

Mugshot (not for Mac yet)

Ken is having at Mugshot with my invite. I used to have lots of computer with lots of different OSes, but after Mac OS X I gave up all but my Powerbook G4. Mugshot is not yet there for Macs. But Ken is on the Linux case.

More news as it happens.

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