I've been on the job with this client for over 2 years now, and things don't look like they're going to slow down any time soon. My job description can best be summed up as "Platform Architect" - designing this company's next generation architecture. The work involves a lot of research, tinkering, exploring, and learning - the deliverables are rarely better defined than "Come up with a way we can do X"

On the one hand, I get a very open and free schedule, with no hard deliverable deadlines, no "What? You're leaving at 4:55?", and all the long lunches I could want. On the other hand, I don't get the typical office interactiveness most folks take for granted. My 'office' at home is an L shaped desk with all my computers on it, which is all of 3' from my bed. A 'break' is walking from there to the kitchen to make coffee. It can get a little lonely.

Fortunately I have lots of folks I chat with on IRC and interesting stuff to research, but sometimes I just Gotta Get Out.

My current favorite watering hole is Panera Bread in Framingham, MA. It's all of 3 miles from the house, conveniently on the way to Zach's school, and they provide free wireless. That, combined with a $1.50 cup of coffee that can be infinitely refilled and a set of comfy chairs by a fireplace, makes for my Office Away from Home for the times I just need to get out.

This evening had me settled into said Comfy Chairs[tm] working on long and vexing problem trying to... (if you're averse to long strings of corporate buzzwords, technology references, and other geeky-hoi-palloi, you might want to skip to the next paragraph)... trying to get JBoss AS, running under EasyEclipse to fire up in a standard configuration, allowing for a Terracotta server to act as a DSO cluster server for instrumented classes as distributed in an EJB3 based SOA. The twitch was getting JVM versions to match so the boot-class wrapper for the JVM would allow for the Terracotta cluster to come up, and be accessible remotely from the JBoss hosted app.

Got that? Okay - the nutshell of this was - I got it working. With not a little help from the Terracotta folks on IRC. The baselien concept for this stuff is fascinating, but implementation, when much of this is still in 'beta' form, can be maddeningly difficult to get working. In the end, it's all running, and now I have enough structure in place to actually learn the system.

What made this interesting was about halfway through this intense mishmash of XML configuration files, crashing applications, and "wait, what version of what is where?", I heard a familiar voice in the background... after a few minutes I looked around, and chanced to run into Dwight, who was picking up some edibles for his family. It's unusual for me to see someone I recognize during my 'work day' (even though it was in fact about 6pm), but I found myself sort of pleased at the interaction.

What does this have to do with my future? A lot, since sometime in the next 3 months, Mosaic will be breaking ground. This means that soon my home office will include our common house, where I'll happily be able to sit in front of a fireplace on a comfy couch, and pretty much everyone I see wandering by will be someone I know very well.

How wonderful.

But how do you get a young one into these environments nowadays?

There's been various attempts at a 'kids' software environment, things like Logo and the like. The problem is nowadays finding implementations that are either free or useful. The only real Logo environment I've been happy with is KTurtle, a Logo implemention for the KDE desktop. On the one hand, I'm terribly amused that by far the best Logo setup I've seen REQUIRES Linux to run, and at the moment, Zach doesn't have a Linux desktop to work with. This sorely tempts me to set it up for him, I have to admit.

But Logo has limitations as a fully useful programming environment. In the modern age of "games a click away", kids really want to start writing adventures and excitement right off the bat. We all remember spending weeks debugging "PICK A NUMBER FROM 1 TO 10" programs. How do you code Tetris in a few weeks when you're still learning your multiplication tables?

A long time ago I read an article on SmallTalk in BYTE magazine (yes, a REALLY long time ago, like 1980). It was a discussion about object oriented languages and environments, and described the model of "Everything is an object". At the time, it was somewhat of an intellectual oddity, though many folks really got into it.

Apparently there is an outstanding opensource project to build a comfortable Smalltalk based environment that can be geared toward kids. It's called Squeak, and I first learned about it associated with the One Laptop Per Child project, which incorporates some of the Squeak environment. Once I got past some of the initial environment oddities, I found that Squeak provides a platform independent runtime environment, where object-oriented programs can be run compeltely independent of the OS they're running under. This means apps written on a Mac will work fine on a PC or a Linux box.

Squeak really isn't something ready to take on the Windows desktop or an environment to write accounting packages in. However, in educational circles, distributions in Squeak have really gotten quite a following. The Squeakland site is designed for educators who are looking for Squeak based information.

I'll be writing more about Squeak as I get more and more comfortable with it, but unless someone else tells me about another educational / intro to programming environment that's available for kids, that does NOT require a commercial license, Squeak is where I'm going to put my energy.

I have gotten in the habit of picking up each book as I go on my regular road trips. I usually finish one per visit, and there's something like 14 books, so things are moving along nicely. I had also heard that Weber had published all the books onto CD, which sounded like a mighty inexpensive way of getting the material, but I didn't relish having to haul my laptop around to read a story over a slice of pizza.

The other night I came across the Baen Free Library, a series of books that are available, for free, from the publisher. I highly recommend folks take a look at this page, where Eric Flint has an excellent commentary on copyright and why the current "brass knuckles" approach to enforcement is the wrong way to go.

At any rate, navigating around, I happily found the next book in the series I was looking for, and went "Hmm, I guess this should be put onto my Treo. I've been meaning to give this a shot..."

Off to Mobipocket to pick up an e-book reader. A quick sync later, and lo, I have the new book, and a reader, on my Treo.

How well does it work?
Surprisingly well. I admit I was a little leery of trying to read what has always been a paperback-sized book on a screen only 3"x3" in size. Mobipocket does a good job of making it as painless as possible. I found myself settling into a comfortable reading pattern once I had made some small preference settings (go full screen, when scrolling to the next page don't overlap lines - show the entire next page, etc etc). I think my one nudge is that a screen only holds about 1/4 of a page of text, so to read a single page, I have to 'tap' somewhere on the treo to tell it to go to the next page. Fine if I'm holding it in my hand, but when I'm eating lunch, it's tedious to have to reach out and tap the screen or hit a button every 15 seconds or so. If there were a way to make it, oh, I don't know, change pages when I tap my foot or something, that would be something. I guess I'll have to wait on that toe-interface.

Commentaries on E-Books
So, it comes back to E-books. There's been chatter for years about the idea that electronic book readers would replace paper books. Folks could just download the books they want into their reader, and they'd never need a paper version. Why hasn't it really caught on? There is an electronic book market, but it's tiny compared to the volume of paperbacks in the wild.

For me, it's a combination of DRM and pure practicality. If I spend $6 on a paperback, I have it, I own it, it's there. I can read it anytime I want, I can toss it on the shelf, come back to it in 10 years, and read it again. I can loan it to a friend, I can make notes in it, I can let my son read it. If I spill a drink on it, it gets wet. Then I dry it off, and read it again. If I run over it with the car, I can still read it, though it might be a bit mooshed.

If I spend $6 on an e-book, I have... a file. That file is most likely encrypted, and cannot be moved or copied around freely. I have to store it somewhere, perhaps on my Treo. I will not have this Treo in 10 years, so what do I do with the book? Store it on a CD? Okay now I have to make copies of it to a CD, and store that CD on a shelf. In 10 years, will anyone actually own CD readers that can read the filesystem on it? How about in 20 years? 30?

Or, if I download the book, put it on my Treo, and oops! I've mistakenly deleted it. Or the file got corrupted. Poof, it's gone. The publishers will happily say "No problem! Just re-download the file" - assuming you can prove you own it, and the publisher is still in business, and you have the license key. Try that in 5 years. Or 15.

No, I don't see E-books replacing paperbacks. The DRM issue is first and foremost a dead end roadblock, because there's no working around these problems. The physical issues of 'keeping track of media' is something people can work on, and come up with their own solutions, but unless the media is free, there's really no point in investing in a book collection where someone else holds the keys.

First, I've been down sick for the last 2+ days. It started late Friday night after a lovely evening in town at Knitcetera. I was feeling a little sluggish on the way home, and by Saturday morning I knew I had Some Nasty Thing. I've been running a fever, doing the 'really painful sinuses' thing, and coughing off and on all weekend.

Due to the magic of Nyquil, I actually got about 6 hours of sleep last night, so I'm feeling almost human this morning, but that nice sheen of sweat is still with me. Gotta love it.

Further geekiness shall ensue when I can actually focus on something for more than 5 minutes. Lots of nifty projects going on, as well as updates on past ongoing doodles.

Stay tuned, campers!

The finest internet radio station on the net, Radio Paradise, is under threat of being legislated out of existence, due to the big record companies' influence on the US copyright office.

As stated on RP's home page:

For some time, we've suffered with a system where we pay a large chunk (10%-12%) of our income to the Big 5 record companies - while FM stations and radio conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing. Now they want even more. In our case, an amount equal to 125% of our income. Our only hope is to create as much public awareness and outrage about this staggeringly unfair situation as possible. Neither the record industry nor Congress are ready to listen to us at this point. But members of the media may well be, and we need to get their attention.

Please click through to Radio Paradise to see what you can do to prevent fantastic stations like RP from being pushed off the public networks. For a more detailed analysis of the rulings from the copyright office, see Kurt Hanson's analysis.

And, in the process of writing this entry, I just found out I'm a mere 3 days older than him.

Tonight, though, I had my first 'walkabout' with the player, listening to it as I went on a hike. Once I had figured out it's sort of odd 'Group' structure for music, I was able to set up my albums and playlists on the one disk I had filled (well, to 700meg) with MP3's. All works just as it's supposed to. I once again have a perfectly useable, long battery life, high sound quality portable MP3 player that has the added bonus of having removeable media, be able to do high end recording, AND is the half the size and weight of an ipod.

But that's not what I'm here to tell you about.

While it's true the new Hi-MD Minidiscs use a non-standard format for their filesystem, that doesn't mean the new player doesn't function well with others. In fact, I randomly plugged the unit into my Linux box, to see if I could see my music filesystem.

[19860885.124000] usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
[19860885.260000] usb 4-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[19860885.456000] scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[19860885.456000] usb-storage: device found at 6
[19860885.456000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[19860890.456000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[19860890.460000]   Vendor: SONY      Model: Hi-MD WALKMAN     Rev: 1000
[19860890.460000]   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
[19860890.476000] SCSI device sdc: 494023 2048-byte hdwr sectors (1012 MB)
[19860890.476000] sdc: Write Protect is off
[19860890.476000] sdc: Mode Sense: 00 2a 44 00
[19860890.476000] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[19860890.492000] SCSI device sdc: 494023 2048-byte hdwr sectors (1012 MB)
[19860890.496000] sdc: Write Protect is off
[19860890.496000] sdc: Mode Sense: 00 2a 44 00
[19860890.496000] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[19860890.496000]  sdc: unknown partition table
[19860890.672000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
[19860890.672000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[19860895.184000] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, 
filesystem will be case sensitive!

Well this certainly looks promising. And look! I have a new filesystem mounted!

dbs@yawl:~$ cd /media/usbdisk-1
dbs@yawl:/media/usbdisk-1$ df -k .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc                987904    665728    322176  68% /media/usbdisk-1
dbs@yawl:/media/usbdisk-1$ ls -l
total 32
-r-x------ 1 dbs dbs     0 2007-02-21 19:15 HI-MD.IND
drwx------ 2 dbs dbs 32768 2007-02-27 20:07 HMDHIFI

Alas, it's not quite trivial to browse the music I've stored on the disk, as it appears Sony has their own way of clustering music. But, I'm okay with this. Sony has finally removed all the DRM insanity that has plagued the Minidiscs since their inception over a decade ago, and now the format is actually useful - in fact, it's downright sexy.

Stay tuned for a more indepth review of the unit. I need to go play some more.

I haven't rebooted yet, but I'm just getting that little shiver of "Oh, this can't bode well."

I'll file further reports as events warrant. But for the moment, I need to reboot. I'll be back after start the computer.

Update - It rebooted fine, and the Sony software came up as expected. 20 minutes later I have a gig of data on the MD player, all sourced as MP3's, loaded onto a disc without a problem, and without corruption. Whee!

Mosaic Commons has received it's building permit, and will be starting construction this fall. Even if you're not ready to commit to Mosaic or not even sure about cohousing in general, come to our meeting and get the FULL PICTURE of what it's all about.

As the saying goes... "All knowledge is worth having". Learn about cohousing!

A recent post however had me all teary reading it. Thomas describes a moment in 1985 working with Stevie Wonder. I heartily recommend anyone who relishes those 'moments' when playing, to give it a read. It certainly made my morning.

About a year ago, I posted about foxnews spamming. I've continued to receive these posts fairly regularly, but decided to look a little deeper.

Today I got this posting - this is in the format I receive in email when someone posts to any of my blogs:

IP Address: 206.15.101.44
Name: qwdqws
Email Address: qwsdq@aaa.com
URL:
Comments:

dwsqw

<A HREF="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251660,00.html">Iraq to
Close Borders With Syria, Iran for 72 Hours in Security Crackdown</A>

Looks pretty similar. Hey, that IP address looks similar as well. I wonder....

dbs@yawl:~$ whois 206.15.101.0

OrgName: News Corporation
OrgID: NEWSC
Address: 1211 Avenue of the Americas
Address: 7th Floor
City: New York
StateProv: NY
PostalCode: 10036
Country: US

NetRange: 206.15.96.0 - 206.15.127.255
CIDR: 206.15.96.0/19
NetName: NAI-NET-BLOCK
NetHandle: NET-206-15-96-0-1
Parent: NET-206-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1-142.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-15.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-163.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-218.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USC2.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USE2.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USW3.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USW5.AKAM.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 1997-01-24
Updated: 2006-01-19

OrgTechHandle: JJR10-ARIN
OrgTechName: Ripkey, Jason J
OrgTechPhone: +1-212-852-7000
OrgTechEmail: jripkey@newscorp.com

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-02-12 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

Yes folks, not only is FoxNews blogspamming the world trying to get their google rankings up, but they're doing it FROM THEIR OWN OFFICES. Remember these are the "Fair and Balanced" folks. Yet more evidence of the hypocrisy of that statement.

Fortunately, their whois record provides a direct phone number and a contact at Fox News.

The reactable, is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Thanks to HackADay.

This evening we've received confirmation that our cohousing project, Mosaic Commons, has cleared the final regulatory hurdle between us and our building permit. As of 7pm tonight, we officially have a permit to continue with construction and development of our property in Berlin, MA.

This has been a year long complex process, involving the town, lawyers, committees, and constant legal wrangling. There were setbackes, and stresses, not without a few moments of despair. We are incredibly relieved to be done with it, and looking forward to seeing our homes and our vision for our community becoming a reality over the next 18 months.

Curious how we're doing? Keep an eye on our blog for updates and details into what we're doing.