TECH-fidel

As you know, I'm a pipe addict. Let me explain some of the value of yahoo pipes, or mashups in general. First, you can create a useful mashup very quickly. You could consider them 'throw away.' This has value in and of itself. A pipe can be transient but powerful during its heyday- take those focusing on current news, like the 2007 wildfires in California. This type of pipe soon becomes historical and will have less value. But they are so easy to build you just have to do it. It is important to get some news out to people.

I came up with another use for pipes which I think is unique. The standard tools allow for you to use a translation module. It of course is horrible and can't handle anything but single words and very common terms. I turned that weakness into strength by creating a pipe that only translates a term at  time from the NY Times and translates it into Spanish. The output RSS document is created entirely by my pipe. The title property is changed to show the English and Spanish versions of the same term, creating a simple tool to assist in learning Spanish vocabularly.

These are 2 of my pipes that are being run regularly by denizens of the web and illustrate the points discussed above.

Wildfires in California

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=RIuSHE6C3BGakzE3JphxuA

Learn Spanish with pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=MpsxsU_G3BGPdPIfmijV_Q 

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We need a new rule for handsets:

If you create content, you must be able to easily send it.

This is basic telecommunication. We still have numerous phones that fail this simple test. For example, I can record voice memos on my Motorola Q but there is no menu item for sending them via email.

You have to ask yourself why some features do not exist. Sometimes it is because the service provider has another, more costly way, for you to do the same thing (such as MMS- multimedia messaging, in the case of sending a voice memo). Yes, phone features are controlled not by what is best and easiest for the user, but often times by how the carrier wants them used.

Open Source phones will change this, if they can get on the network. Customers will become more educated about their options and start to want something better. This is kind of like how AOL dumb-downed the Internet for so long and added little value and then started losing millions of customers a year.

Imagine a network and a phone that was friendly to users first, not only when convenient. A different business model for making money on the handset would allow this paradigm shift. The iPhone did not do it, but it has made a difference and shown that features (like their 'new' voice mail, ignored for years by other carriers and thought to be too expensive) do matter. Perhaps the rumored Google Phone will shake things up to the customers advantage. One can hope.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The November 07 issue of Wired has a great article by Daniel Pink on Manga. (see http://www.danpink.com/archives/2007/10/manga_monday.php ) He lays out a thesis for how the new business model of allowing fans of Manga to illegally use the intellectual property of the publishers (namely, their characters) will help save Manga from its current decline in Japan.

1) taking care of customers-- understand and meet their needs

2) find new talent

3) cheap market research

I saw a parallel between these ideas and really good software development. Public beta (or alpha) testing helps with points 1 and 2, when the data is collected properly. Any well-run web community for software developers addresses all three areas- look at Amazon, Programmable Web, Sprint, etc. Open source and communities like the IETF or W3C clearly help find new talent. By definition, Open source helps meet customer needs.

The common thread is community- with support for rating, collaborating, tagging, good search tools, visualization tools (even a tag cloud). Web 2.0 is the enabler of such a dynamic community.

How do you get around the illegal use problem? New licensing rules. GNU. FSF. Creative Commons. Limited use licenses that allow developers to do cool new things with your product, but no economic harm.

What do the publishers have to do to allow this? Provide well-designed and open API's. Test servers for developers. Community sites. Providing community help. Many have been doing this for years. Many don't, so open source efforts or user-created communities plug the void. And companies should put money into open source, not just legal staffs trying to protect against it.

Let people mod your games. Let them mash things up. Let them use a web API without making them screen scrape. Let smart non-developers develop.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some game and music CD's are just hard to copy. The publishers make it that way to protect themselves, but cause the end user trouble. Luckily, I like trouble.

My kids lost Lego Star Wars II (what a great game!) before I made a backup. That teaches you a lesson. I figured I better backup the other popular games we have.

I'm focusing on microsoft game CD's. When trying to make a disc image of Age of Empires 2 the Conquerors Expansion, I got an error message:

There was a problem reading the disc you are trying to copy. Please make sure your disc is free of fingerprints, scratches, or dust then try again.

This was a lie, and happened with several other Microsoft titles. Truth is, the disc was fine. This was some low-level trick Microsoft uses to prevent disc copying. Clever! Since this must be part of the driver or some higher-level OS API for CD reading, I decided to eliminate the problem by eliminating the OS and using Linux (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn). Guess what? No more error and the image was copied just fine.

Another problem appeared, though- Ubuntu could not burn the image to disc. It said the image was invalid. Huh? I can't explain that one, but I have the workaround. I went back to windows and simply burned the image using Sonic Record Now and it worked fine. Ironically, this was the same software that reported the 'error' when trying to read the image in the first place.

I can't install linux to copy a CD! There is a slightly easier way- find a friend with a Mac. Or use Knoppix. Just run it from a CD- you can download a bootable image of it, which is very cool. Could probably even boot off a USB drive. http://www.knoppix.org/ You can take over any computer with Knoppix... but that's another story.

It must be a real bummer to be the guy that comes up with these 'security systems'. I hope they don't spend too much time on it. This must be a junior programmer job.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My 3 year old knows that Daddy can fix anything. (It's pretty much true- I worked for many years as an engineer ) All it takes is tape or glue. Now you and I know that tape and glue don't really fix anything- they just hold it together for a little while longer. I realized, though, that 3 year olds don't see it that way. They believe it is fixed, and why not?

Imagine if tape or glue could fix anything. I can. The tape or glue of the future will be the raw materials for nanomachines which will analyze the surface material, find the crack or hole, and then consume and tranmogrify the tape or glue into the correct molecular structure to create a permanent repair. Now, I'm not going to say they can will create new elements- just new molecules from the right set of basic materials that maximize the number of common things that can be fixed. You might need a metal tape, a wood tape, a plastic tape, a fabric tape for the old easy chair etc., to simplify (Ha!) the problem.

No more jokes about men and duct tape!

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't seen such a powerful and fast tool for creating useful information EVER. In short, pipes allow you to mix, search, and filter RSS feeds. See http://pipes.yahoo.com  I'm probably bugging their staff with my suggestions, but the potential is enormous for this tool.

Here is a timely pipe I made about the disaster in Southern California. It gives you a map showing story locations about the wildfires. Also includes related video and photos from flickr on the disaster http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=RIuSHE6C3BGakzE3JphxuA This took about 2 hours to pull together, and most of that time was spent finding the right news RSS feeds.

So what is the semantic web? It's all about giving meaning to web content so that a computer can understand and process it. Why? This makes it easier for people to find and use information. RSS and XML in general are tools for enabling it. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ provides more info.

There are other web mashup tools out there- Google mashup editor, Intel mashmaker (http://mashmaker.intel.com))- I'll hit them all.

Want more mashups? Check out http://www.programmableweb.com

Did I mention I was addicted to yahoo pipes?

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)