Some recommended weekend reading for you:
Why the net should stay neutral by Bill Thompson:
A canal has no idea what is being carried in the narrow boats, and it doesn’t really care.
and John’s column in The Observer highlights what happens when market forces go wrong.
I like iPhoto, but I haven’t really used the keyword facility much. Creating and assigning keywords is just a bit too much hassle.
So I was pleased to discover Ken Ferry’s Keyword Assistant. Much easier.
Update: Keyword Assistant doesn’t work on the more recent versions of iPhoto, but there are some tips here which can get it going again.
I was interviewed on the BBC’s Go Digital programme about Ndiyo a few days ago. More info on the Ndiyo site if you’re interested!
Barcelona has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, often right next door to some of the ugliest.
The outskirts of the city seem to be mile upon mile of dull apartment blocks, and reminded me of nowhere so much as Moscow, though admittedly these ones looked a bit better kept!
But the centre of the city is a real jewel. I loved it. I spent ages burrowing my way into these little medieval streets and getting pretty lost and then I’d suddenly come around the corner and find a cathedral or an archway or a plaza which took my breath away.
Ndiyo has just installed its first system in Bangladesh.
You can read about it on our news page. And there’s a movie, too. I wonder if our server will cope…!
A couple of weeks ago we had the interesting news that Apple’s market cap. exceeded Dell’s.
They’ve crept ahead in another way too. According to this MacWorld UK article, Apple now has more of the education market in western Europe, at just over 15%.
In Switzerland, they have 54%!
Benji Smith wrote a nice piece on Why I Hate Frameworks. Recommended reading for any coders out there, if only for amusement.
He has a follow-up amongst the comments, too, so it’s worth scrolling down a bit.
The problem with his argument, I think, is that programming always tends to move towards higher-level constructs. Assembly-language programming with macros was a great framework for those who had previously had to flick switches on the front of their PDP-8. And C offered greater productivity again, but is now considered pretty low-level. The scripting languages of yesterday become the programming languages of tomorrow.
But he draws a distinction between libraries and frameworks.
A library is something *contained* in my code. A framework is a *container* for my application.
And it’s true to say that many frameworks have come and gone which try to exert too much control over the code. (Anyone remember CASE tools?) Many frameworks put the programmer in a box and say, “Here’s where you can put your little bit of contribution to my mighty machine”. And programmers don’t like that. They like to know what’s happening when and feel that they’re in control of it.
This is the nice thing about software libraries: they’re servants which do your bidding and then return power to you. Frameworks are like big companies in which you must first find your office, and then work out what you are allowed to do in it. Both have their role. But I suspect that today’s libraries will become tomorrow’s programming languages.
Thanks to Frazer for the link. Oh, and P.S. Apple has a tendency to package up its libraries nicely and call them frameworks, but they’re still libraries in the sense of this article.
Want to be an anonymous police informer, or call somebody and demand a ransom? SpoofCard.com lets you choose the caller-ID that appears on the destination phone, and can also modify your voice… I see a whole new life of crime stretching out before me, starting at just $10…
The NYT reports that the iPod accessory market is a $1bn business. And that’s without counting the
ultimate iPod accessory…
Doc Searls’ Suitwatch newsletter is often a good read, but I thought he had some of the more interesting feedback from the CES show in his Feb 2nd edition.
I’m getting more and more fond of Gizmo. If you haven’t met it, Gizmo is very similar to Skype, but based on open standards. It hasn’t always got Skype’s firewall-traversing capabilities and sound quality, but it’s pretty close, getting better all the time, and in some ways is nicer to use.
It’s hard to argue with Skype’s 60M registered users, though, 6M of whom are typically online at any one time, and I use and like Skype too. So why do I think Gizmo is important?
It’s because I see a fairly clear analogy here between Skype and the walled-garden approaches of online systems such as AOL in the past. David Beckemeyer made this point in his e-Tel talk; AOL could never hire enough people to compete with the innovation happening on the internet, and in the end they had to let their customers out of the garden. Skype is in the same position, and they are smart enough that they must know this. In fact, they may even be using AOL as their model: start closed, get a few million on board, and then open things up when you’ve built a big enough brand.
In the meantime, most of the innovation in telephony is happening around Asterisk, which is to telephony what Apache is to the web. Everything that happened with text and graphics in the early days of the web is starting to happen now with voice. I can do all sorts of really fun stuff with the Asterisk server I have at home, and the e-Tel conference has been full of other people doing other fun stuff with it.
But I cannot connect to it using Skype, not without paying, anyway, and it cannot connect to my Skype session. Gizmo, on the other hand, is perhaps the Netscape/Mozilla of this new world, and I can do so much more with it. I have UK phone numbers which will forward to my Gizmo session here in California. For free. I can use Gizmo to call up my Asterisk server and listen to MP3 files and podcasts stored on my hard disk. For free. I can connect directly to Google Talk, or to dedicated VoIP phones. For free. Some of this I would have to pay for with Skype – much of it I could not do at all.
The Skype guys deserve their success, for showing people that VoIP works, and can work well, and doesn’t have to be complicated. But as with the web, open standards will win in the end, and keywords like SIP, IAX, Asterisk and XMPP are the ones to watch out for if you want to see the next big thing coming.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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