Aehso’s Output

I only just noticed Dave Winer is using the Wordpress theme (Ocadia) as I am in his wordpress blog and I can’t compete with that. Besides, it is a bit weird seeing typos on his pages; I always get the impulse to find the Edit link to fix them. Perhaps a colour scheme change or even something more drastic is in order.  [Update, changed to FastTrack for the moment]
I should really start posting some decent content here too. <ahem>

Animé music video (AMV) is another one of those facinating internet subcultures that should be allowed to grow and influence mainstream media in the future (just as machinima will). If you are a fan of Daft Punk’s One More Time video then this stuff is right down your alley. The creativity and skill exhibited in some of the remixes produced by these amateur artists really is a sight (and sound!) to behold. Cowboy Bebop 007 and Euphoria are two excellent examples of these Anime/Music mashups. (hint: register on the AMV site above to get full access to the download links).

Alas, as Lawrence Lessig points out in his recent article in FT.com, the powers that be (copyright holders) don’t like this creativity one bit and their reactions is predicitable - they are threatening the AMV community. But what exactly are they scared of? Free promotion of their content? As Lessig surmises,

But perhaps a beginning would be a question that one might imagine asking the lawyer, or better, the chief executive, at Wind Up Records:
“Now that you’ve succeeded in stopping thousands of kids from spending hundreds of thousands of hours to make fantastically creative content that promotes your work for free, do you really expect to sell more records next year?”

Johnny K recommended using Mint for site stats ages ago so I’ve been playing with it for a while - it’s an excellent package, simple, extensible, readable. I don’t normally pay much attention to the metrics but I do keep an eye on the trend in Firefox usage showing in my User Agent Pie. Today, that balance reached what I hope is the point of no return:

I should point out that the data set only spans back to last Nov when I upgraded to Mint v121, accidently clobbering my stats db in the process - maybe that’s why it became more noticeable to me. Anyway, this is well ahead of the trend (probably because of the geek-ish audience) but it is good to see. Keep spreading the word…

[Update 26/01/06: Chomsky’s lecture is now available as a podcast from NewsTalk 106]

Noam Chomsky’s interview on Newstalk 106 (podcast RSS) this morning was interesting although I didn’t care much for Dunphy’s incessant attempts to put words into Chomsky’s mouth (nor did Chomsky for that matter but he dealt with it without breaking his stride, as usual.) Despite what Dunphy might think in that little shrivelled head of his, he was way out of his depth interviewing a titan like Chomsky.

Chomsky’s passing references to ongoing interference by the West in the affairs of Latin American states was an interesting part of the conversation so todays link from BoingBoing to Kathryn Cramer’s attempts to find out more about a US-expat-owned mercenary army that is operating in Haiti grabbed my attention this lunch-time.
Her story is worth a read (and presumably is not over yet). The organization in question calls itself the “Consultants Advisory Group”. It has no office address, wants to be known as a ‘management consultancy’ and is apparently conducting covert surveillance of public debates between Haiti’s presidential candidates, posing as journalists. It is run by former “agency” and military personnel. I hope she finds those people who have disappeared.

If you want to find some new music to listen to, you can build your own radio stations try using Pandora - a great Flash application that alows you to ‘tune’ the playlist selection to your preferences.  The interface is simple:

Positive votes leave the song playing (and hints to Pandora that you’d like more of the same), negative votes moves to the next song in the queue (and again hints to Pandora).  You’d be surprised how quickly it tunes to your tastes/mood…

If you use the Adblock extension for Firefox, then you might want to install the Adblock Filterset.G Updater plugin - it periodically downloads and installs the Filterset.G list of filters into Adblock. (Note: it does preserve your personal list of filters.) For the regexp-aware readers, here’s the current filter set - there are quite a few ad servers out there!

Why isn’t this integrated into the Adblock plugin itself? My suspicion is the license is restricting integration. Shame that.

So, it’s official, Ireland will host Les Bleus at Croker! I’d imagine the atmosphere will be unreal.

I have to get tickets for this game. Every year, I have been close to getting tickets when France visited Lansdowne but they never came through on the day. With 35,000 extra tickets floating around next year, surely some kind soul will be send one(two?) my way? And, there’s also the Lansdowne faithful to consider - some will refuse to step north of the Liffey…there should be plenty of tickets going around!

Stumbling across the same piece of hardware three times (on the Web!) in three days qualifies it for a blog entry I think. The Linksys NSLU2 (commonly referred to as “The Slug”) is a tiny network node that allows you to connect USB 2.0 Disk Drives to your home network. It’s a cheap and cheerful alternative to massively overspeced and overpriced 1U units. Hey, who has a rack in their house anyway?(I bet I’ll regret asking that)

The NSLU2 allows you to plug in two USB drives (housed in external enclosures presumably) and make them available to any other box else on your network. It sounds good for remote archiving and backup, although a SATA controller would be a worthy hardware addition to the spec. It’d also be good if it supported NFS, I thought…

A day later, I stumble across the curious (and skilled!) hacker. The box runs Linux and has a suitable large back door that can be used to install, well pretty much anything that will run on a headless linux server.  In theory it could be adapted to run NFS, FTP, HTTP daemons. How about a print server? I don’t see why not (although I admit I do already have an Airport Extreme doing exactly this at home). There are already two replacement firmware images available, OpenSlug and Unslung that allow you to do things like attach more than two drives, use it as a PBX or very interestingly, (apparently!) hook up a Hauppage WinTV-PVR USB2 to the Slug. By now I’m getting very curious - can anyone say “cheap PVR”?

Another day later and I stumble across someone who is trying to get an OSGi stack running on it. Not for any particular reason, just, you know, to see if it could be done. An interesting exercise at the very least, unfortunately, there the trail grows cold, I’m not sure if he succeeded.

Oh dear, yet another DRM implementation. As if two incompatable DRM systems wasn’t enough.

Lattix LDM is a very cool tool for visualising, analysing and constraining dependencies in Java code (check out an online demo). Interestingly, it generates Design Structure Matrix based models to represent (and manipulate) dependencies.

Standalone analysis tools like these are great (I like Headway Structure 101 too) but Lattix piqued my interest when I heard they are joining Eclipse.org. Capabilities like this built into an Eclipse would be fantastic but I’d be interested to find out how deep the integration will go - will they change from analysing bytecode and build on the JDT core Java Model instead? If they did, then we’d be able to analyse and refactor at the same time. Hmmm.

Alas, it’s worth remebering that tools like this cannot easily spot dynamic dependencies introduced by use of the Reflection API and IOC containers, both powerful and very popular facilities used in many modern enterprise projects…