Gary Robinson's Rants

The trouble with the world

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.[Bertrand Russell, by way of Dichotomy's Purgatory]

On the other hand, even the smart are too cocksure:

Gödel is best known for his proof of "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems". In 1931 he published these results in über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme. He proved fundamental results about axiomatic systems, showing in any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system. In particular the consistency of the axioms cannot be proved. This ended a hundred years of attempts to establish axioms which would put the whole of mathematics on an axiomatic basis. One major attempt had been by Bertrand Russell with Principia Mathematica (1910-13).[School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences
University of St Andrews]

Doubt would seem to be the more correct state. Doubt -- but with the proviso that when it's time to act, one absolutely must act according to one's best understanding, doubt or not. Wisdom, it may be argued, consists in large part in knowing when that time has come.

In a hole

In a hole in the ground there lived a dictator.

Canada officially legalizes downloads of copyrighted materials

In a ruling released Friday, Canadian copyright regulators said downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks appeared to be legal under that country's law, but they said uploading was still prohibited.

In the same decision, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $25 on iPod-like MP3 players, putting the devices in the same category as audio tapes and blank CDs. The money collected from levies on "recording mediums" goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying.[News.com]

That's pretty amazing in my book. So if someone sets up a server in a country not governed by music-industry-friendly copyright laws, Canadians can apparently download all the music they want without any question over its legality? Wow.

Music Industry Develops Centralized File-Sharing System

A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files. Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself. The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group backed by technology companies including Microsoft, is hoping the sharing file standard will be adopted by technology companies and incorporated into software music players." [Slashdot]

Commentary from Slashdot comments:

this is not content they are talking about putting on this sharing network. it is advertising - don't get the two confused!

the last ten years have seen the entertainment industry working very hard to blur the line between content and ads. people regard movie trailers as content, some in the movie industry are starting to regard the movies themselves as advertising (for merchandise like action figures and lunch boxes, which is where the big money is).

More:

If you RTFA, you'll see it's not about content sharing it's about advertising sharing. Users can share information about the content, but not the content itself. This is a non-event.

Five stars on VersionTracker

Earlier today we had some configuration issues on our server that caused it to time out a lot. Essentially, this was due to the user load growing faster than we expected, and we couldn't quite keep up with the tuning task. Many people couldn't connect to the system. One of them gave Goombah two stars on VersionTracker -- which was generous considering he couldn't use the software beyond looking at the layout.

But we focused on the server today and after some changes, it looks like no one has run into a problem since the changes went livew. And then we got our first VersionTracker review from someone who connect. Five stars in every category.

I like that. I'm going to go to bed smiling again tonight. :)

I've also tuned the recommendations algorithm some in light of the real-world data we're getting and expect to put out a new version of that tomorrow. All is well in the world.

Patents

This excellent Washington Post article on the patent situation is generating a lot of links from the blogosphere.

Acacia Research Corp. started by targeting dozens of adult entertainment companies, demanding royalties of as much as 4 percent of their revenue from audio and video streaming. Now the firm is seeking fees from universities that use Web video for remote learning, from companies that serve up movies to hotel rooms, from cable and satellite providers, and from major streaming-media companies such as RealNetworks Inc. and America Online Inc.

"It's pretty much the sky's the limit as to where the impact might fall," said a chagrined John H. Payne, director of educational technologies at the University of Virginia's division of continuing education, which uses online video for lectures and courses. "It's like patenting air. [Washington Post]

First bug-fix release

The first bug-fix release of Goombah, version 0.21, is online now.

* Some changes were made to recommendations. Note, we suggest you keep Preferences:Options:"closeness" of the recommendations all the way to the left until we get a more users. The niceties of recommendations technology don't really count until there is enough critical mass for the math to be meaningful.

* A number of people had their itunes data in a different place than we had it on ours. Yes we should have thought of that before. In any case, Goombah now looks in a couple of places for the the data, and if it isn't in either one, puts up a dialog so that the user can tell us where it is.

It's been quite a busy day working on bugs! Things are going really well, and I'm going to sleep with a smile on my face tonight.

Goodnight! :)

There's a reason we call it 0.2 beta testing!

We're running into a few fairly serious bugs that we hope to resolve in the next day or two. The main ones are

* a problem in the ordering of the recommendations

* a problem for people who have moved their iTunes database to a nonstandard location

* a problem where the server gets overloaded and so connections are refused (we think the server can handle the load at this point but that we have to adjust the number of threads)

Sorry for the inconveniences... we're working hard on it!

Goombah launched!

Well, something my company has been working on for quite some time has launched as of now. Go to goombah.emergentmusic.com to get it. From the press release:

Goombah is a new beta-stage software product that interacts with Apple iTunes Music Store on Mac OS X. Using distributed computing to analyze iTunes music libraries, it finds each user's "nearest neighbors" in musical taste. iTunes music libraries are revealed to neighbors, and used to generate reliable music recommendations. Other included functionality includes a music-oriented blogging service and various utilities to help search for music on the Web.

The complete release is here.

Obviously this program will be a subject for discussion in this blog as time goes on!

Goombah is a work in progress. Let me know what you think!

Microsoft patents

An interesting article in The Register. The idea is that Microsoft can probably attack Linux with patents but hasn't yet because it's been too busy just dealing with its own growth. But now it's "mature" and Office and Windows-based growth is slowing, so they need other forms of revenue -- hence their movements into digital watches, etc.

Enforcing patents will be one more form of such revenue. One of the early manifestations of this change is the recent announcement about licensing the FAT file system. But of course in the case of Linux, patent enforcement would not only be a source of revenue, but of threatening the competition.

Microsoft's actions so far don't constitute a full frontal attack on free software. It's often been rumored that Microsoft has a number of patents - the number varies - on the Linux kernel itself. [Register]

This could get ugly, folks.