Some people ask me : Knight, how come you know all this stuff. Mostly they are referring not to my intricate knowledge of quantum-mechanics and the fact that a cup of cappuchino holds the key to the secrets of the universe, but .. Other stuff.
I hate to disappoint their faces everyday when the come and run up to me with the hottest news on the web either about some new peace of software hitting the market, or for example, the juicy story behind Steve Balmer getting his eyebrows plucked. " Yeah .. I know" I answer them in a blasé way, only to give them the full details on the story. They look at me as if struck by lightning : How Do You Know All That. ?? they manage to mumble. I dramaticly turn my head , ruffle my nonexistant evil poncho and whisper ... " I have my Sources ".
One of those sources is a little elf that has been sitting on my shoulder, whispering information into my left ear whenever the sun hits the skyline every morning. Well , perhaps not an elf, but a loyal podcaster by the name of Andy McCaskey who religiously hosts a podcast called "Slashdot Review " (now christened SDR News) where he reads the headlines of the most popular geek news websites on the internet. For more then two years now I have been a daily listener. Most of my comutes start out with " This is Slashdot review for ...." as the first thing that pops out of my ipod. 15 minutes later , after andy has given me a quick roundup of the "real news" (not the one on the radio) I am mostly up to speed with the web as it exists today.
What is quite funny is that, through my membership of the Techpodcast Network , I've gotten to know Andy personally and he is the coolest geek alive. Being a gazillion time the age of most average geeks and podcasters, Andy is somewhat considered the "Godfather" of the TPN Scene, but his modesty prevents him from rolling out his powers and sending out his thousands of listeners to ... thrash Appelby's or something. I was very honored yesterday when the episode of SDR-news ( now with the headlines of Digg, Slashdot , and others) picked up my little story about Cyber archeologists . So if you are interested : Here is the link to the show.
Thus if you want to stay tuned to whats goin down on the digital frontier, be sure to subscribe to this one. Regular as clockwork, accurate as a laserscalpel and clear as mountain dew. Andy McCaskeys .. SDR News.
Great Story from Dave Gray , over at the Roosters Rail and The Global geek podcast blog about the player no one wants. The presumable Ipod Killer from Microsoft : The Zune. Welcome to the social is their catchphrase if you want to believe the Zune Homepage. But Balmer sports no love for us podcasters. Since no doe is to be made from the podpeople Podcasting is as nonexistant in the Zune software, as are its drivers in Vista. A vacuum in developement leaves room for : FEEDYOUZUNE.
Great As regular readers of this blog would know the Zune will ship without podcasting support software. But that is okay, what Microsoft could not or would not deliver an independent 3rd party developer has managed to do just fine. Not as hard as Microsoft would have you believe. But then podcasts are free quality content, there is no money in that. Feed Your Zuneô is a featured RSS reader and a media player. It has some great features and looks to be very slick and well designed. It is a pity there is not more about the features on the site or some larger screenshots. With this development so close to the release of the Zune it beats me why Microsoft failed to deliver a product that could give the user access to features such as:
Automated downloads of video and audio content and synchronisation to your Zune
RSS playback of Video Podcasts, supporting all video formats
Built in channel guides from Network2 and FireAnt (with the promise of more to follow)
Open web architecture supporting RSS, Bit Torrent and permalinks
The ability to create playlists, favourites and manage disk space
The program is a pretty hefty 12MB download. But it looks very shiny with a clean design and lots of functionality. The interface looks simple and uncluttered with a typical looking RSS feed layout. Clearly some time has been invested to bring a quality product. Did I mention that it is free? It even looks a bit like Windows Media Player 11, I wonder if this was a jibe. Or was it good marketing, to give the user a strong brand association with a product that they know? We talked about the Zune release on the latest episode of The Global Geek Podcast. My co-host Knightwise; suggested that perhaps the lack of Zune podcasting support was due to the fact that podcasts are free. Microsoft would not be interested in promoting free content when they are trying to push their own online music store. With the quick release and functionality of this client it does not seem to have been beyond the reach for Microsoft to have provided something like this on release. So perhaps his opinion has some weight. Money may well come first for Microsoft, at the expense of making podcasts more accessible to the user. This could also make way for other 3rd party applications to be developed in the near future. I hope so. As has been proven time and time again it is often the first iteration of a product in which users make their choice, anything else is a clone. Digg and YouTube are good examples of this trend. In which case users may well disregard and openly reject any offering from Microsoft that supports podcasting in favour of the applications that they are used to. Microsoft could have just shot themselves in the foot. Or will it be another case of the browser/operating system scenario? Where built in software overrides any other third party application to the point it is impossible to use anything but theirs. If nothing else it will make the space well worth watching. So until Microsoft decides to counter offer have a look at Feed Your Zuneô to keep your Zune happy and well fed.
Aaah, another great weekend has come and unfortunately gone. A weekend full of fun stuff, and also full of rest and relaxation. Some part of that relaxation was spent in front of the TV. Still a dominant channel of entertainment in most homes (i do say MOST homes) it offers sparse recreational value in the form of Sitcoms, Reality shows and of course movies. But being the digital sluts that we are, it has become hard for us to sit down in front of the tube, set our brains to runlevel one and start zapping or consuming this linear form of entertainment. Most of the time WHEN we even watch tv its allmost always with our laptops perched up in front of us. Peering over the computerscreen at the tv realy shows that it is only a secundary form of entertainment for us.
Old things and boomin stuff.
But sometimes we DO watch the weirdest things. Only yesterday, the Antiques roadshow on the BBC grabbed our attention. This is a show where people come with their old stuff and have it valued on tv. Most of the time THEY think its worth something while in reality it is not. Yet sometimes the roles are reversed and stuff that was deemed ripe for the looney bin gets estimated at thousands of pounds. Its about the nerdiest lamest show on the BBC, yet it caught our eye yesterday. After that it was a breathtaking documentary about the biggest eruption of mount PinaTubo in the Phillipines. Now National Geographic is a wonderfull source of info. But with this documentary the human mind just could not fathem the size of the event. The millions of tonns of ashes, the temperatures and the pressure that where associated with this eruption are just beyond the realm of imagination. The best quote to visualise the terrential rains mixing in with the ashes in the atmosphere was that " It rained concrete ". It kept us glued to the tube !
Google Lectures !!!!
So in hindsight i must say : We are information junkies. We like some brainless shit-com from time to time, but if you DO want to keep us occupied feed us some information. So why not go to the one stop information shop on the net ? Google ! I'm no G-slut (well , perhaps I am) but they offer their own internal educational lectures up on Google Video. This lets you be one of the boys over at google and watch lectures about all kinds of things. You can see a full list HERE. So thats pretty darn cool ! I've browsed through some topics and must say this is realy something to watch not only to spend the time, but to get smarter in the process. This information crack-whore is going to get her fix here ! You can even download them !
I'm one of the last people who likes to walk in the blue Microsoft line.Its not that i'm anti MS, I just think Steve Balmer in all his sweating glory foaming at the mouth while screaming 'Developers', looks like a walking EVIL version of Jaba the Hut. ( And let me point out : Evil version , Cause the Mighty Jabba is pretty cool). One of the things that bugs the crap out of me is when I "need' to walk in the blue line. I need to navigate my open-source-linux-mac-minded brain through the illogical reality that is the Microsoft Dominated world.
And so people send powerpoint presentations, create .doc files, and shower me in .wmv streams. And thanks to more then one year of "switching" experience, where I completely changed every computer in our house from Windows to Mac or an open source variant of Linux. Using operating systems like Ubuntu, Mac OS, but also free open source alternatives to most software like The Giimp, Neo-Office, Adium, Gaim, Skype and many many more.
But as much as you want to change the world , you can only start with yourself. So i'm stuck in a blue lined world where a lot of the people I know are using : MSN MESSENGER. Yes sure , it can be condemmed as the wire of the noobies but .. still . I don't hang out with geeks ALL the time. And the other 'normal' people just use msn.
Gone are the day of ICQ (THOSE where the days !), now everyone is on MSN. This program has evolved of being just another chat client to some kind of orgasmic over-pimped version of a lovechild between Myspace and a box of Play Doh . They call it : MSN LIVE. Populated by idiotic emoticons, flash animations and all kinds of horrible graphical extra's. Top it all off with some insane activex controls that alow people to shake your screen and you have a hackers ice cream sundae ! Needless to say . I despise having to USE msn even more then MSN itsself.
And not because its Microsoft. No , I hate the program because its a carcrash between Ali G and a drag queen. But I hate Microsoft for refusing to open up the one vital component that is a switchers dream : MSN Webcam support. Untill now the only reliable and fast way to set up a connectoin between two computers running the msn messenger protocol , is using MSN Messenger. If you are on LInux ? Tough luck, If you're on Mac, Tough luck. The only way to get it working properly is by using their lame excuse for a peace of software. Before ANYONE screams "Mercury" as an open source Webcam alternative for chatting to MSN Messenger users from a REAL computer, think again buddies, Mercury is a good stab at it .. nothing more.
Yet today these troubles are far from my mind, because Msn Messenger is DOWN , and it looks like its global. " Service temporarely unavaiilable' says the msn messenger website. And the social repercussions do seem to be quite farreaching. My MSN list (I use Adium) is populated but nobody is talking. Reason ? Somehow msn users are unable to send any messages to eachother. I'm experiencing not only a new social plain of existence ( I have no one talking to me) but a mental "maré tranquilatis" as I can work away unbothered. Surely MSN will be back in a bitt and the catter can commence ... I thought this small moment of instant messaging repose, was something worth mentioning.
Looking at it, its the oddesd of things. This flimsy plastic box with two round holes in it, seems to come from another age. A brown warn little plastic tape worms itsself from one side of the container to the other. Only 20 some years old , the cassette is as obsolete as the dinosaurs. Yet a few weeks ago my dear aunt called me up in a panic, telling the tale how the evil old cassette player she had owned for so many years had 'eaten' a cassete with a recording on it of my late grandmother singing. I of course offered to go ahead and fix it. After half an hour of poking and prodding with a pair of tweezers and some sticky tape I managed to get the cassette back together. Now I just had to find a cassette player to play it on... It was at that moment i realised .. I did not have one anymore. The thought propped up to me that we store so much information these days on so many carriers, but yet all these media are futile and soon we won't be able to recover anything we stored 10 years ago because technology moves so fast. Will we need cyber archeologists in the future ?
Media are futile.
There are few media that survive the test of time. Even paper turns to dust after so many hundred years, depending on how it is stored. And so are the media we store stuff on today. The average lifespan of a cassette tape, a cd-recordable, a dat tape or even a floppy disk does not even come close to the lifespan of paper. Yet while a single peace of paper can hold out for a hundred years, a DVD rom with all the collected works of Plato won't last a hundred years at all. The loss off information that can occur when our media turn sour is only multiplied by the enormous amounts of data they can carry. To loose a single sheet of paper over the course of a thousand years might be a loss, To loose a thousand documents on a single cd-rom after 10 years is even worse. So what is there to do but to transfer information from medium to medium in order to let it stand the test of time ? Or what if we find the carrier that will last us to infinity.. What format must we use to write our data ?
Formats are fleeting
If your average DLT tape will turn brittle and break in a hundred years you might just have been lucky. Think not of the medium the information is written on , think of the format the information is stored in. Format types like .doc , .xls and so on are even more fleeting then their carriers. You can make your programs backward compatible into the extreme , supporting exotic fileformats of days long gone is a painfull task. Some, like .html, .txt .pdf and .rdf, might be supported for years to come, but what about other, exotic and propriatary standards, formats of backup programs and so on. One might hold a treasured box of data in ones hand but if the fileformat is no longer supported .. How can we ever access it ? Perhaps we will find the key to the format .. but what about the system it was written for ?
Systems are fleeting
It can be even worse. Say we have salvaged the medium and have somewhere found the original application to read it with. What if it only runs on specific hardware ? An evolution that is even faster then the formats and the media , must be the hardware ! What if the information we need only runs on some ancient system like say for example a commodore 64 ? Where to find one ? and even more importantly : where to find the parts if something breaks. Even to this day some "legacy' programs that are still being used in production, run on hardware that is no longer supported by the manufacturer. So what do we have to do ? Store both the information, the media, the original application AND the hardware it runs on in our archives ? What can be so important that we need to go through all this hassle ?
what is important
"So what .." I hear you say ? What if we loose that excell file thats 8 years old ? Who cares ? ... But that is just it. We might know what information is important today, but we will never be able to tell what information is pivotal or trivial in the future. The first posting by Linus Torvalds on usenet might have been unimportant, Yett only history will tell wether this one event might be something for the historybooks. The fact is we store more and more information these days on systems, media and in formats that might not stand the test of time. Wether or not something will be important in the future is impossible to tell at this time, thus we risk turning the digital era we live in today, into tomorrows informational dark ages , from which nothing will be remembered in the future.
Cyber archaeologists
I see a new profession emerging. Perhaps starting out as a niche market, later to evolve in something that will turn into an exact science. People who spend their time looking through old digital archives. Who have the skills to work with old legacy hardware, know which side is up on a floppy disk , and God forbid, even speak the language of the old commodore 64. Cyber-archeologists digging through our digital past, being able to unlock and uncover the secrets of the past and bring them back in the light of whatever modern civilisation there might be. A proffesion that holds both the keys to FINDING information and being able to ACCESS it aswell. A trait of archeologists not speaking of the jurrasic but of the "basic" or the "x86" period of the past ...
Epîlogue
As evolution speeds up .. so does the regression of the past into oblivion.
I for one do think we will have them in the future. Experts in finding what was stored but yet was lost. Keepers of keys that can unlock the files from our past and bring them back. With the amount of information we produce, the digital legacy we leave behind... its unthinkable that these things would be lost forever in a period of only a few decenia. Prove me wrong .. Digg into your past and find the first digital document you ever made ? Perhaps you"ll need a cyber-archaeologists to complete the task.
I hate to disappoint their faces everyday when the come and run up to me with the hottest news on the web either about some new peace of software hitting the market, or for example, the juicy story behind Steve Balmer getting his eyebrows plucked. " Yeah .. I know" I answer them in a blasé way, only to give them the full details on the story. They look at me as if struck by lightning : How Do You Know All That. ?? they manage to mumble. I dramaticly turn my head , ruffle my nonexistant evil poncho and whisper ... " I have my Sources ".
One of those sources is a little elf that has been sitting on my shoulder, whispering information into my left ear whenever the sun hits the skyline every morning. Well , perhaps not an elf, but a loyal podcaster by the name of Andy McCaskey who religiously hosts a podcast called "
Great As regular readers of this blog would know the 
But sometimes we DO watch the weirdest things. Only yesterday, the 
I'm one of the last people who likes to walk in the blue Microsoft line. Its not that i'm anti MS, I just think Steve Balmer in all his sweating glory foaming at the mouth while screaming 'Developers', looks like a walking EVIL version of Jaba the Hut. ( And let me point out : Evil version , Cause the Mighty Jabba is pretty cool). One of the things that bugs the crap out of me is when I "need' to walk in the blue line. I need to navigate my open-source-linux-mac-minded brain through the illogical reality that is the Microsoft Dominated world. 
And not because its Microsoft. No , I hate the program because its a carcrash between Ali G and a drag queen. But I hate Microsoft for refusing to open up the one vital component that is a switchers dream : MSN Webcam support. Untill now the only reliable and fast way to set up a connectoin between two computers running the msn messenger protocol , is using MSN Messenger. If you are on LInux ? Tough luck, If you're on Mac, Tough luck. The only way to get it working properly is by using their lame excuse for a peace of software. Before ANYONE screams "Mercury" as an open source Webcam alternative for chatting to MSN Messenger users from a REAL computer, think again buddies, Mercury is a good stab at it .. nothing more.
Looking at it, its the oddesd of things. This flimsy plastic box with two round holes in it, seems to come from another age. A brown warn little plastic tape worms itsself from one side of the container to the other. Only 20 some years old , the cassette is as obsolete as the dinosaurs. Yet a few weeks ago my dear aunt called me up in a panic, telling the tale how the evil old cassette player she had owned for so many years had 'eaten' a cassete with a recording on it of my late grandmother singing. I of course offered to go ahead and fix it. After half an hour of poking and prodding with a pair of tweezers and some sticky tape I managed to get the cassette back together. Now I just had to find a cassette player to play it on... It was at that moment i realised .. I did not have one anymore. The thought propped up to me that we store so much information these days on so many carriers, but yet all these media are futile and soon we won't be able to recover anything we stored 10 years ago because technology moves so fast. Will we need cyber archeologists in the future ? 
There are few media that survive the test of time. Even paper turns to dust after so many hundred years, depending on how it is stored. And so are the media we store stuff on today. The average lifespan of a cassette tape, a cd-recordable, a dat tape or even a floppy disk does not even come close to the lifespan of paper. Yet while a single peace of paper can hold out for a hundred years, a DVD rom with all the collected works of Plato won't last a hundred years at all. The loss off information that can occur when our media turn sour is only multiplied by the enormous amounts of data they can carry. To loose a single sheet of paper over the course of a thousand years might be a loss, To loose a thousand documents on a single cd-rom after 10 years is even worse. So what is there to do but to transfer information from medium to medium in order to let it stand the test of time ? Or what if we find the carrier that will last us to infinity.. What format must we use to write our data ? 
It can be even worse. Say we have salvaged the medium and have somewhere found the original application to read it with. What if it only runs on specific hardware ? An evolution that is even faster then the formats and the media , must be the hardware ! What if the information we need only runs on some ancient system like say for example a commodore 64 ? Where to find one ? and even more importantly : where to find the parts if something breaks. Even to this day some "legacy' programs that are still being used in production, run on hardware that is no longer supported by the manufacturer. So what do we have to do ? Store both the information, the media, the original application AND the hardware it runs on in our archives ? What can be so important that we need to go through all this hassle ?
I see a new profession emerging. Perhaps starting out as a niche market, later to evolve in something that will turn into an exact science. People who spend their time looking through old digital archives. Who have the skills to work with old legacy hardware, know which side is up on a floppy disk , and God forbid, even speak the language of the old commodore 64. Cyber-archeologists digging through our digital past, being able to unlock and uncover the secrets of the past and bring them back in the light of whatever modern civilisation there might be. A proffesion that holds both the keys to FINDING information and being able to ACCESS it aswell. A trait of archeologists not speaking of the jurrasic but of the "basic" or the "x86" period of the past ...