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As you know, I’m a fan of the DRM free music. In fact it seems that I’ve blogged about it each time I’ve discovered a new website that sells the stuff. And the latest discovery is emusic. They have hits and some misses.

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A long, long time ago in a corporate universe far, far away… I was admitted to an elite group. A group where the members each had a manifesto. Chris was a founding member of the group, and has since published his manifesto on his blog. I don’t quite know how I was deemed worthy for membership. My manifesto was unpublished, it was mostly unfinished, and it was unseen by all but me. Regardless, I was admitted. A fraud. Living a lie. For years I have lived with this shame.

At last all can be revealed, for here is my manifesto. Or as I originally called it, my List of Skills and Knowledge That All Developers Should Have. There are 9 items in no particular order, so I guess that makes it a set rather than a list for all you pedants in the audience (and I know you’re there).

The idea is to document a set of skills that every developer should have. That’s everyone who develops software professionally. Doesn’t matter what type of position or company or industry; this is my stab at a body of knowledge that every serious developer should have. Essentials, essentially.

It’s partly based on experience; specifically the experience of surprise I felt when a colleage, or random stranger on the internet, expressed ignorance at one of the items on this list. Other items on the list have come from an exacting process of posterior extraction. I’ll leave it to you to guess which is which, and who is who. Or at least skim the headings. Read on.

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This weekend, Peter and I built this:

It’s an Alien DAC; a USB to analogue audio converter that has a Burr-Brown PCM2702 chip at its heart.

I’ve been listening to it a bit today and am very impressed with the quality. In fact, to my ears it sounds even better than the DAC built into my Corda Move amplifier. Upon plugging it in I immediately noticed some musical details in the treble that I hadn’t noticed before. Of course, I haven’t double-blinded myself, so maybe I’m imagining it. Regardless, the Alien is certainly hard to fault. And from only $50 of parts.

I got the parts as a kit from Glass Jar Audio; recommended. I hate to think what a painstaking job it would be to collect so many parts from various suppliers for these type of kits.

Construction credit goes to Peter; I mostly just watched and made light conversation, with the exception of capacitor C16, with is mine dammit!

The surface-mount components are very difficult to solder. My hands just shake too much! (Got to cut down on the coffee apparently) With the pins on the PCM2702 itself, Peter had to solder them all together in one big blob and then soak up the excess solder using a wick. The increasing use of surface-mount components is apparently causing a bit of controversy in the homebrew-electronics community.

I must disclose that it didn’t quite work first time, but we found the problems by a fairly simple process of following the circuit diagram and checking the voltage with a multimeter at key points along the way (we didn’t get to C16 thankfully). In the end the problems were relatively simple cases of short-circuiting and easily fixed. I’m pretty certain this technique goes a long way in electronic kit troubleshooting.

It was great to watch someone who knows what they are doing, and I am inspired to build some more electronic components myself (though perhaps not surface-mount).

Over to the right — unless you are using one o’ them fancypants RSS aggree-gators — are the monthly archives for girtby.net, with a count of the number of articles posted for each month. Last month there was just the one and this month isn’t looking too promising either. That’s as good a measure as any that I’ve been, well, preoccupied.

It’s a pretty safe bet that if you see a semi-regular blogger (still not quite ready to label myself like that, but anyway) suddenly go quiet, then they have either had a baby or a new job. And so it is with great pleasure that I can announce that I am the proud parent of … a 5- and a 7-year-old, and also I have a new job!

I like it so far, there’s a lot of c++ coding about which I intend to blog copiously until every last remnant of a regular audience has fled for their lives. Whilst simultaneously, and endlessly, reciting the latest internet meme to jump the shark (eg “FAIL!”). Oh yes.

But not to worry because I promise not to drive you all away just yet - not until I have at returned from a 2 week northern hemisphere (just) vacation. Tomorrow, the family and I are on the next plane out of Sydney, and after seven flying hours we’ll be landing in Phuket. More interestingly we’re also venturing inland to a rather remote part of the country, staying in a villa about which you can read on their excellent website. In short, I’m very much looking forward to it.

Naturally I have some reading matter and some new toys to sustain me for the flight, and I will make a vague, non-committal promise to blog about one of these on my return.

Keep the internet warm for me while I’m gone, won’t you?

Specialised web forums are commonplace these days. They cover the entirety of the long tail, and are therefore indispensable for discussing obscure, and not-so-obscure, topics.

These days I wouldn’t consider making any serious purchase without at least a brief consulation of the relevant web forum. Technical problems with just about anything can usually be resolved with a well-crafted search through the appropriate forum. Put simply, the web forum is the basic unit of online community these days.

But despite their ubiquity and obvious utility they remain frustratingly limited in lots of ways. In this post I vent some of these frustrations.

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Those of you familiar with my propensity to succumb to temptation for the latest and greatest may have been looking at my setup, marvelling at the mildly dated hardware, rolling your eyes and thinking “that’s not going to last long”. And I’m happy to confirm that, in accordance with prophesy, the hardware upgrade juggernaut has finally rolled through my part of the world. Oh my word yes.

In the first week of January, Apple announced an upgrade to the Mac Pro line of workstations. They would have 8 cores as “standard”, through the use of two 4-core Harpertown Xeon CPUs. What they didn’t highlight was the fact that the “standard” configuration was actually customisable down to a mere single 2.8GHz 4-core CPU, making it available for a comparatively-quite-reasonable A$3300.

And naturally, I bought one. Read on for initial impressions.

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A few years ago I purchased an Arc-AAA led flashlight, mainly on the advice of Dan. It was an excellent piece of kit. Small enough to carry everywhere but bright enough to be useful. For years it was the only thing that hung off my keychain (besides keys of course). A month ago it died due to a battery leak.

I wasn’t hopeful of saving it. Since I bought my unit, the guy had stopped selling them for a while, and then been bought out by another company. Nevertheless I wrote to the new company and asked if it could be fixed. They said sure, send it in. A few weeks later, this arrived:

A brand new Arc-AAA, mysteriously labeled an Arc-P.

The new one is slightly heavier I think, but feels more rugged. The knurled metal case is that dull greenish-grey colour, as might be carried by Brown from Spook Country. The light is activated by twisting the head, and the new unit has a lot more resistance which makes it a lot less likely to turn on in your pocket. It’s at least as bright as the old Arc-AAA, in other words surprisingly good for the size (and capable of out-shining any AAA Maglite). If you want to get really mental I see there’s now a “premium” version which is even brighter.

The quality of the unit itself and of the support from the vendor gets two thumbs up from me.

Yesterday’s apology to the Stolen Generation was a very moving and hugely significant moment in Australian history. For most of my life the many problems of Aboriginal people in this country have seemed intractable, even hopeless. This is the first time in many, many years that visible and meaningful progress has been made. I hope the importance of the occasion is adequately reflected in the global news coverage.

The speech itself (video) deserves special mention I think. It pleases me greatly that Kevin Rudd found just the right words to represent my view and (I hope) that of most other right-thinking Australians. Worth a listen.

Local news coverage has of course been blanket, and peppered with the obligatory contrasting views.

The most famous of the contrary views is that of the ex-PM John Howard who notoriously claimed that he saw no reason to apologise for past deeds because they were committed by a previous generation. This has a simple, possibly obvious rebuttal, but I have not heard it mentioned in the media so I’ll state it here.

If (hypothetical) you wish to renounce the wrongdoings of the past, you are free to do so. However, to be consistent you must also renounce the achievements of the past.

Can you imagine John Howard renouncing the sacrifices and achievements of the ANZACs? His past sporting heroes? His hero Robert Menzies? No, I can’t either. However it is necessary to do so in order to avoid the responsibility for the Stolen Generation.

In simple terms, you have to take the good with the bad.

For Aboriginal Australia, the good has been in short supply of late, and it’s very gratifying to see signs of change.

I generally agree unequivocally with Bruce Schneier, but his recent column on vendor lock-in has me wanting to take issue with some of his points.

Vendor lock-in is real, but the example he gives of the iPhone is not a very good one. Why? Because it’s easy to switch: you call up the carrier (AT&T in this case) and say “I don’t like my iPhone, it’s too sleek and good looking and it’s user interface is too elegant. Instead I’d like to subject myself to some nonsense from the traditional handset vendors.” To which the AT&T person says “sure, we’ll charge you $X and ship out a new handset. When it arrives, just activate and transfer your contacts.” Bingo, you’re off the iPhone.

[Update: Andrew points out in comments that the 24-month contract may impede switching in this manner. I don’t know the details, but I’d be surprised if it was impossible to switch away from the iPhone, merely expensive. This is, to my mind anyway, not sufficient to justify the term “vendor lock-in”, but I suppose that depends on your definition. My definition is below.]

In Australia we have number portability which means that I can generally switch handset or carrier without too much fuss. I’m not sure about the situation in the US, but as illustrated above you are still free to switch handsets while keeping the same carrier. So if there’s lock-in at play here, it’s lock-in to AT&T, not the iPhone.

So what is vendor lock-in anyway? I would define it as the presence of constraints on a given product or service that are imposed by the vendor and which prevent you from switching to a different product. These constraints may take the form of missing features which would enable a switch, or of usage constraints imposed by licensing, or both. Either way there has been an explicit decision — technical or policy — by the vendor which prevents switching to a competitive product. Hence the term is a mild pejorative.

It’s a slightly confusing term because it applies to a product or service, and not to the vendor. So it’s quite possible for product X to exhibit vendor lock-in, but not product Y from the same vendor. “Vendor-imposed lock-in” might be a better term.

Note that there is an implicit assumption that the features and capabilities of the product in question are available elsewhere in the marketplace. In other words, there exists an equivalent product to switch to. This assumption does not always hold, and sometimes you may find yourself unable to switch to a different product, simply because there are no other products on the market with a given capability or feature. This does not, by my definition anyway, constitute vendor lock-in, because the inability to switch does not arise as a result of a decision from the vendor.

Does the lack of an SDK constitute vendor lock-in for the iPhone, as claimed by Schneier? Well, does the lack of this feature prevent switching to a different product? No, of course it doesn’t, as illustrated above.

In fact, it is the presence of an SDK which constitutes vendor lock-in, of a sort. Third-party applications written to the iPhone cannot, by definition, be easily be ported to other mobile platforms. If you suddenly decide you don’t like your iPhone any more, but have hundreds of third-party applications installed, you have a problem.

This problem is common to all computing platforms; vendor lock-in is a necessary consequence of all vendor-controlled SDKs and APIs.

Incidentally the delay in making an iPhone SDK available can quite easily be explained by the technical challenges involved, and does not neccesarily imply any policy decision by Apple to deliberately lock out third-party developers. Producing an SDK of any quality is a hard task, and the instant it is released it has to be supported for the life of the product. As Charles Miller puts it, “third party apps are for life, not just for Christmas”. It is quite understandable that Apple would make sure their SDK is just right before committing to it.

But where does the “no SDK == lock-in” idea come from anyway? I suspect that it arises from the expectation that we are able to install third-party applications on the iPhone. Where does the expectation come from? It comes from the disclosed fact that the iPhone runs OS X. If Apple had not divulged this fact, or if the iPhone ran some un-named OS — as is the case for all classic iPods, for example — there would be no expectation of third-party applications. It is for this reason no one is claiming that the lack of an iPod SDK exhibits vendor lock-in.

However, Schneier claims that there is* vendor lock-in on the iPod, due to the fact that “music purchased from Apple for your iPod won’t work on other brands of music players”. This is misleading; it is quite possible to purchase DRM-free music from Apple for the iPod and other players. Again, he’s incorrectly identified the source of the vendor lock-in, which in this case is *certain music from the iTunes Store and not the iPod.

To reiterate, vendor lock-in is real and is important. It is contrary to the idea of Free Data and deserves to be more widely discussed. However, let’s first understand what we are talking about, so that we can think critically.

To justify my occasional lapses into Apple fanboy-ism, I offer the following for your consideration.

Exhibit A: Apple, 24 years ago

Exhibit B: Microsoft, today

Yeah, I know, who cares about packaging? But howcome so few companies get it right?

And in the long run, I think it *is* important. The message you send with the packaging of your product is one of the care you have put in to producing it. And of the importance of the customer’s time in getting up and running quickly.

Message received, Apple.

Some prominent bloggers have recently asked the question “Why don’t people care about freedom 0?” To me this just raises the question “What is this freedom 0 stuff anyway?” Herewith the (lengthy) results of my own attempts to find out the answers to both of these questions, and even raise some of my own.

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Herewith, some comments apropos of the Macworld 08 Keynote, specifically Randy Newman’s performance at the end.

Firstly, the Keynote as a whole seems to have moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment. Apple are simply leading the pack, and I expect Microsoft and others to follow (e.g. Bill Gates’s CES keynote). At the end of the Keynote, Randy Newman sang a couple of songs and rambled (fairly incoherently I thought). Part of the monologue was related to Apple as he said that “this company” wasn’t like the others; although it was sufficiently vague that he could have been talking about Pixar instead. And aside from this one mention, Newman could have been playing a set on a late night chat show or something.

The convergence of entertainment with marketing is taken to an extreme in Jon Armstrong’s excellent and hilarious novel Grey (available for free on audio podcast from his site). Without giving away too much, in the world of Grey, corporate marketing includes “publicity dates” between members of the respective CEOs families, the resulting courtship is eagerly devoured by a gossip-hungry public, and actual information about the products or the company is completely ignored. In a similar vein, future MacWorld Keynotes could easily include dance routines from Steve Jobs’ offspring. OK maybe not, but you have to wonder where it will end.

My second point is that the flavour of entertainment on display at the Macworld 08 show was particularly inappropriate I thought. The message came through pretty loud and clear: Randy Newman doesn’t like the Bush administration. The song A few words in defense of our country makes the case that the current US government is bad, but not as bad as it could have been, in comparison to the Roman Caesars for example (setting the bar rather low I would have thought).

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch?

To those apparently many people at the launch who were pleased with Newman’s performance; please ask yourself how you would have felt if the entertainment had taken a position contrary to your own. Mark Nottingham described this exact situation a few years back. I have been in a similar situation, albeit on a smaller scale; prior to the Iraq invasion I was at a business meeting where one of the attendees made his clear pro-Bush views known, much to my discomfort.

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

Broadcast radio is changing. It’s going digital, and with this change broadcasters are likely to start embedding watermarks in the audio stream (if they haven’t already). Podcasters, and other internet music publishers are likely to do the same. Watermarks are inaudible markers that uniquely identify the broadcaster, and are also the key enabling technology of a great new business venture that I’ve just thought of, and will now share with you, in the hope that someone, if not me, implements it.

The elevator pitch: music insurance. Insurance against hearing music that you hate.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you wake up one day with a revelation. “I would,” you think to yourself, “pay good money to never have to hear Meat Loaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light ever again. I would pay until the end of time, should it hurry up and arrive.” Or words to that effect.

Pick whatever example you want here: maybe the Crazy Frog song might be your choice instead? Or Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You? I-I-I-I-I-I-eee-I-I-eee-I-I don’t wont to go on, I’m sure everyone has at least one song that is disliked to the point of justifying financial outlay. (For me it would be the majority of the AOR canon, which could get expensive, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

So you take out insurance against accidentally hearing this song, whatever it might be. Like most insurance policies you pay a premium, and when you hear one of the covered songs, you make a claim and receive some financial compensation to ease the pain. All you have to do is prove that the music was broadcasted publicly and you couldn’t escape it. This guards against fraudulent claims, and is where technology comes in.

We need to make two simplifying assumptions. Firstly we require the music to be broadcast by a radio station or similar public broadcaster, who are motivated to watermark their broadcasts in the interest of asserting their license to do so. This precludes the private playing of insured music; in other words, you’re not allowed to play Celine Dion CDs to yourself and claim on them.

Secondly we require the insured to be in a public place, or specifically nominated private places, for the claim to be valid. This might be at work, at a pub, restaurant, or wherever you have no control over what radio station is played. This precludes you claiming against family members who play music too loud, but I’m sorry no insurer is going to go anywhere near that sort of dispute.

When you sign up for the policy you will download a small application to install on your mobile phone. When you hear an offensive song, you whip out your phone and start the application. This records a sample of the music, the date and time, and the place (either manually entered or from the GPS receiver). This information is transmitted (via internet, SMS, or whatever) to the insurer’s servers. These servers will automatically extract the music sample, match it against the sender’s insured songs, verify its authenticity using the watermark and location data. The watermark is verified against a known list of broadcasters, and the location data against a set of covered locations. If after this, the claim is determined to be valid, the insured amount would be paid.

Of course there is still a potential for fraudulent claims, but — without meaning to oversimplify the actuarial art — this can be countered by conventional risk management techniques. Claiming against Achy Breaky Heart when you’re *at* a Billy Ray Cyrus concert is obviously fraudulent, for example. And as with all insurance policies, the premiums and claim amounts can be adjusted in relation to specific risk factors, including the potential for fraud in a given situation. I am not an actuary, but feel free to chime in if you are (or can impersonate one on the internet).

Now I know it’s a great idea, but if you make millions from selling musical insurance policies, I don’t even want a cut. I just want you to cover me. Come on in and cover me.

I’m still in holiday mode and have not spent much time online studying the reaction to the idiotic mandatory filtering proposals from the new Rudd government, but I expect this editorial published in the Australian is mostly representative. I disagree with none of it.

However I just can’t help passing further comment, mainly because there is a lengthy discussion in the previously-mentioned Lessig book which outlines what I would consider an acceptable regulatory framework for controlling access to content online. So please feel free to peruse it for yourself (the section titled “Regulating Net-Porn” in particular), but it might be summarised as requiring publishers to rate their content in accordance with pre-existing legal standards (eg a “harmful to minors” HTML tag), which would in turn create a market for end-user filtering technology.

But instead of this, what are we getting? Mandatory (but perhaps a per-customer ‘opt-out’ ability) filtering of some vaguely defined standard using not-at-all defined technology and with not-at-all defined procedures for redress of inappropriate filtering. Just like the internet connection at work, in other words.

The point that strikes me upon reading Lessig’s book is that *if* filtering is to be performed (and I reiterate the point that I am not against it) it is better that it be performed by the government, in accordance with acknowledged moral standards, with process transparency and accountability. None of these are guaranteed (nor likely) if private interests are involved in filtering our content. As Lessig says:

It has taken key civil rights organizations too long to recognize this private threat to free-speech values. The tradition of civil rights is focused directly on government action alone. I would be the last to say that there’s not great danger from government misbehavior. But there is also danger to free speech from private misbehavior.

But in handing the filtering problem to the ISPs, the government is effectively absolving themselves of the responsibility to implement it as intended. ISPs will of course implement the content filtering using the cheapest solution they can find, even if the false-positive rate is 99.5%.

On the other hand they could require the ISPs to block sites on ACMA’s blacklist. And we all know how well that will work, right kids? But the point is that at least with ACMA you have some recourse.

I think that requiring government accountability is the key to ensuring an acceptable outcome. If they are serious about the problem of content finding an inappropriate audience, lets see them own that problem, not just outsource it to the ISPs and hope for the best.

So I recently finished Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0 and I am compelled to pass some sort of comment on it. Book reviews aren’t really my strength, but this one definitely deserves attention of some sort.

First the easy stuff. This book is a new edition of an earlier book with the obvious title. The changes and updates have been through an interesting process whereby the entire text of the book was posted on a wiki and anonymous contributions were invited to produce the successor. This might make you a bit wary about the overall continuity and structure of the book but I’m happy to report this is not a problem at all. Follow the link above and you’ll note that the entire text of the book is still available online, and indeed contributions are currently being sought for Code 3.0.

As you might expect from a Creative Commons founder, Lessig is putting his money where his mouth is by putting it all online under a CC license. Notwithstanding this, you’ll probably want a paper version. I bought my copy through my usual source, the Book Depository (£8.40 shipped anywhere).

OK so it’s already an interesting book, but what is it about? (You may be wondering) Let me see if I can do it some kind of justice.

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