TJ alerts us all to The Southeast Electronic Music Festival taking place here in Chapel Hill this weekend April 7 and 8. The Fest is a multi-venue event with music at Avalon, NightLight, Fuse, Talulla’s, Local 506, and Penang.
Get out and dance.
Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 11 of 38)
Glyn Moody did a nice piece in the Linux Weekly News on Gutenberg 2.0: the birth of open content. Amongst the paragraphs are good bits about the early ibiblio participation in cooperative creation of open content and support of Gutenberg.
WillR reports that he saw the BBC-TV Blooker story last night. It’s online now (or for now). They did a cute trick with video effects that makes it look like you are seeing the series of interviews in a QT player on a large Mac OS X box. You may be, in fact. Well, almost — you can only watch the BBC stream in WinMedia or Real. Julie Powell, our Blooker winner is there, I am there, Russell Davies of Bacon, Egg, Chips & Beans, the anonymous Iraqi blogger (not Saleem Pax) and a rather confused editor from a traditional publisher in LA.
WillR sends this link which didn’t work so well for me. I did a search on Blooker on the BBC site and found the video link in this context which worked fine for me.
Tucker picked a gallon of violets and we converted them in to seven jars of violet jelly using the same procedures as last year, but we left off the wax and went for self-sealing jars this time.
Ken alerts us that IPv6 late-comer, Virgin Radio, is claiming that they are the first commercial radio station to simulcast using the IPv6 protoco. Unlike, WXYC and WCPE both of which have been on IPv6 since November 2004, Virgin is off the air after their servers have gone down in flames (according to their website).
They say:
These streams are temporarily unavailable.
Note that due to a serious fire, our IPv6 streams are currently down. Find our normal IPv4 ones by visiting our normal listen page.
Between returning from the University of Pennsylvania and heading up to Boone for the Odyssey of the Mind competition, I did a bit for Marketplace about the Blooker. Several of my collegues heard it, but not me. Stephen Fraser sent me the link to the story (my/Blooker part begins about 3:30 into the 8:24 segment. Lasts about 1 minute).
Not as bad as I feared.
UPDATE: Stephen sends this better link (if you only want to hear the Blooker segment).
It’s Monday somewhere. Specifically in the UK. Stephen Fraser is a little upset that the word of the winners is out already, but hey Lulu didn’t plan an awards ceremony so Monday is midnight GMT if you are a leading UK paper. The Telegraph has their story here. The Independent has theirs here. And USA Today has their story here.
Who was the overall winner? The person who worked as nanny to the only two-time winner of the Booker Prize.
I’m waiting til Monday here in NC to announce any more than that.
U.S. News and World Report’s Rankings of Schools of Information and Library Science are out. University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill’s School, where I am on faculty, finished Number One (again). We did tie with University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign and were a slight bit above Syracuse.
For rankings in speciality areas see the press release on the UNC SILS website and for other UNC Schools ranking see the UNC Press Release.
We’re on Boone for the Odyssey of the Mind state competition. Tucker’s team from Smith Middle School finished second in their division. As a result, they not only got medals and a trophy, but they will be going on to the World Competition in Ames, Iowa.
The teams has been wearing their very large medals around like, well, bling.
The Bling tag additional to HTML has already had an effect on me (see ibiblio home page for today). Yes, I too was surprized. I wondered how long I had lived a life without BLING.
BLING Team members, Joey, Jonathan and Dan say:
Much has been said in recent years regarding the imperative to separate the concerns of presentation and content. Mechanisms of presentation are subject to radical change, whether merely stylistic or mandated by technological progression. The Hyper-Text Markup Language that fulled the early days of the web revolution has been reincarnated as XHTML. It is joined by its newborn cousin, RSS, in heralding a new revolution that some have called Web 2.0.
Here at ibiblio, we take a more philosophical view regarding the separation of presentation and content. We cannot dismiss the importance of presentation as “mere style.” The aesthetic perception of an utterance is inextricably tied up with its semantics as well as its rhetorical impact. As Marshal McLuhan famously said: the medium is the message.
lulu’s Stephen Fraser is delighed to let us know that the Blooker gets a mention in today’s NYTimes Arts, Briefly column just after the section heading Da Vinci and the unstoppable Harry Potter:
Blogs, including the diary of a prostitute and a guide to Britain’s best greasy-spoon cafes, are on the short list of 16 for the inaugural Lulu Blooker Prize, to be announced on Monday, the BBC reported. Sponsored by the self-publishing site Lulu, the Blooker Prize honors blooks, or books from blogs, published in English anywhere in the world.
I note that the NYTimes remains a provincial paper, not doing original Blooker reporting but merely disgesting the news from the motherland (via BBC). The result is that great American finalists don’t get a mention but blooks on bad British habits get the bang.
Tor and his buddies at Yep Roc have released a free mp3 download with Billy Bragg. The Bush War Blues
Joey Carr’s favorite Onion article — You Know, I Used To Be Kind Of Cool Once By Sting
Will be live taping an interview with Peter Shevlin of BBC (Radio) Outlook before my talk at U of Penn law which requires shifting gears between blooks and Open Source and Law. The BBC show will run on Monday — when the Blooker Prize winners are announced.
Also just finished an email interview with Lee Sze Yong of the Straits Times in Singapore — blooker of course. Should show in the Life! and LifeStyle section.
At the end of this week, March 31, I’ll be the kick off speaker at the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s symposium on Open Source in the International Marketplace: What the Open Source Intellectual Property Movement Means for the Developed and Developing Worlds sponsored by The University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law.
My topic is “Open IP Practice and its Discontents: Open Source, Open Content, and Open Access vs Contracts, Laws and Treaties.” I’ll contend that the need for openness in content and in access is perhaps better understood in some developing than in those with strong intellectual property regimes. Open source software could be very easily understood in such cultures and they could and will likely be the engines of FLOSS development as we have seen in Brazil and India and with the recent explosion of Ubantu Linux in and from Africa. But barriers and confusion caused by the ladder of restrictions in IP from End User License Agreements to difficult local laws to complex international law to one-sided treaties that supercede national sovereignty place contributors and users of software in an awkward bind. Should they just break the contract/law/treaty? Or should they innovate? What can be done to encourage more innovation if IP as practiced does not? Can FLOSS move from a quasi-political movement to a better, if not well, understood business practice? Can national databases on both patented and copyrighted materials as well as open prior art be coordinated better and more effeciently and in a way that a group of software developers spread around the world can depend on a common pool of resources?
One quick story: At a panel on IP held at UNC Law this fall, Cory Doctorow suggested to Mary Beth Peters and John Whealan that perhaps developing nations should follow the US example when it comes to IP. The US of the 19th Century, when we were developing ourselves. That is strong protection for national actors; almost no protection for foreign actors. “Worked well for the USA” said Cory.
Also want to point to how much Jamie Boyle’s Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society influenced my thinking on all of this. Jamie remembers that I gave him grief over the book being over 1/3 footnotes. Now we have more footnotes, he reminds me. And yes those footnotes inform me as they accumulate, but how does the message translate to others who would be developers and users of FLOSS?
What to say about how restraints like Digital Rights Management however badly done cripple innovation? There is almost too much to say in fact.
Dykki says that Intra is “eveloping a comprehensive FOSS package for Human Resources for Health Information Systems for Ministries of Health. We are currently actively developing HRIS strengthening activities in Bangladesh, Rwanda, Uganda, Lesotho, Swaziland, and now Tanzania/Zanzibar, with Kenya, Namibia, Zambia, Ghana, Senegal and Armenia (?!) expressing interest.
Of course, we are using Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP as the core architecture. One system focuses on public sector HRH management. Another on whole-country HRH training, registration and licensure. The
third is a workforce planning tool that uses predictive modeling to project actuals, needs and models interventions to close the gaps.”
Dykki and I wrote about how hard it can be to get people to gain skills and innovate when they can simply steal software — as I saw in Russia and in Africa.
http://wiki.africasource2.tacticaltech.org/ is an African conference that looks like it was very productive (but how does it address this topic?
Richard Schafer suggests that Open Source software could have a function in the IT area much like generic drugs do in the pharma area, that is, closed source vendors would have to deliver obvious quality differences in their products in order to compete and/or drop their prices (as the invisible hand would dictate).
Who is the author? What is the work? Who is the inventor? What is the invention? How do those basic questions play out in FLOSS and in non-European cultures?
Ruby alerts us via the OrangePolitics crowd to the Billy Sugarfix and Brian Risk Custom Serenade — It’s Carrboro!
You love it you know you do. And it’s under Creative Commons license (as befits Carrboroness).
And only one slash. In an interview with Brian Runciman of the British Computer Society, the person hereafter known as Lee-Berners Tim Sir opines on the state of the Net including a note that he wishes he had done a few things differently. Dropping one slash (who cares most browers will add http:// anyhow) and that he had used the British name notation going from the more general to the more specific instead of the European/American model which goes like a mail address from specific to general and which by the way LBT Sir was very widely sided before you created the Web. Not complaining about your contributions but clarifying that the Net was well along and much established before the first http was typed. Pretty good interview overall.
At least one surprise, he wishes he had not included SGML folks:
Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?
I would have skipped on the double slash – there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order – in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:/uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary.
Later
Going back to the idea of anything I would change, I remember Dan Connolly – who really understood SGML – asking me if HTML was SGML. I really wanted the SGML people on board so I said yes.
I should have said no – and we would have developed XML a lot sooner. This all happened at the beginning of the Web, in a pub in Edinburgh. This May there’ll be discussions in pubs in Edinburgh again, where we can talk about what we’ll need to change now – it’ll be a blast.
Thanks to Sayan for the initial pointer.
This morning on page C7 or online. In fact, a lot of news is covering Justin on this one.
JJB announces a new 0.20 release of the ibiblio-developed Open Source Multi-User Blog Environment, Lyceum.
Test it here. Download it here. And be sure to sign on the mailing list for updates and let us know your experiences with Lyceum.
Lyceum is a multi-blog derivative of WordPress, suitable for installations with 2 or 200,000 blogs!
Just learned that Charles Edward Eaton has died at age 89. I’ve delighted in Eaton’s poetry for many years. His relaxed formalism and his subject matter which is at once refined and sensual has been not only a joy but a guide. I found his “Work of the Sun” online tonight which while it does not show his favorite form — long relaxed lines rhyming in surprising ways — demonstrates much of his pleasures (and ours).
The first stanza of The Work of the Sun:
Verlaine said the poem slowly rises like the sun,
Spreads over the landscape, a bird that hovers,
Moves on to find and bless a pair of lovers:
The work of the sun is never done.
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