Yeah, everyone one else’s eyes were glazing over after checking out their 999th HDTV (this one has a background glow! This one has extra bright pixels! This one only costs $11,000!). Meanwhile all I want is one of those Sony ebook readers. Sony initially released this in Japan, but with an absolutely draconion DRM scheme which boiled down to ‘your $500 ebook reader can only read our stuff.’ They’ve apparently learned a little bit of a lesson since then, and the US model will cost less (between $3-400) and will allow you to import pdf and txt files onto the device.

Most folks look at it and think ‘black and white? feh!’ My reaction is: how many full color paperback books do you have? You’re missing the point of the device. It’s still a little spendy, even at $300, but the tradeoff is you can carry your entire library around with you, and unlike a laptop it’s very light, has a much higher contrast screen, and the batteries last for at least 10 hours. I would use this thing constantly, it’s an evolution of the form (the book) that appeals to me tremendously. I do have two criticisms though. First and most damning: there is no search feature. None. One of the primary strengths of an ebook over paper is search! Forget who a character/place/thing is in a book? A quick search later and you remember. How Sony could opt not to include it is beyond me. My other criticism is more of a hunch – the press release refers to sony software you use to move content onto the device, and sony has an absolutely atrocious record in this department. Apparently their marketing folks haven’t yet noticed that no one is buying their mp3 players. Or maybe they have and they just haven’t figured out is the reason is because of assinine DRM and awful software which compounds the problem. So I tremble to think of what their ebook management software will look like.

Hopefully either they’ll have learned their lesson and made sure their software is decent by the time the device arrives here (this spring), or the hackers will take care of it for us. Either way I have my eyes on these, I really really want a digital book. I’ve been tinkering with another Tablet PC as the solution to this, and in many ways they work very well, but they have two fundamental problems: weight and battery charge.

Oh, and I have one wish as well, not that I have much hope it will come true. It would be excellent of the device came with some form of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), which I’ve written about before. If you haven’t tried it, check out Dictator for an example of the form. The project is inactive but the software is free, open source, and relatively easy to install.

Feeddemon’s unfortunate pairing with Newsgator has left me looking for alternatives. I’ve nothing against the move and am happy for Brad, but I don’t want my data tied to a commercial provider who can opt to change their terms of service, so I’ve been casting about for something else to use. Ironically the issue that drove Feeddemon to partner up with Newsgator was a need for persistent storage of ‘feed state’ – if I read my feeds at work then want to check them again at home, I don’t want to see the same data all over again. Feeddemon turned to Newsgator for a solution to this problem. I’m turning elsewhere. I’ve tried a variety of things, most notably RSSowl, which is really a pretty decent aggregator, but it lacks a couple of features I’ve come to rely on and lacks an elegant ‘feed state’ solution.

Enter gregarius, a php/mysql-based server side RSS aggregator. It’s still in the relatively early stages of development and is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s entirely usable, such that I’ve been using it as my primary aggregator for the last 3 weeks. You can check out my instance of it if you want to play around with a copy (or get a glimpse into where the bulk of the content of this site ultimately comes from, for that matter). You won’t be able to see the administrative back end but you can get a sense of how it works.

It’s somewhat slower than using Feeddemon is, and I still haven’t gotten feed filtering working as I’d like, but at this point I’ve concluded it’s good enough for my daily use. Kudos to the developers for an excellent project (but please, use your devlog! 😉

This is mostly an uber geeky post for my own uses, though one or two of the folks who stop by here might find it interesting. The musings aren’t mine, they’re vmunix’s, and they’re excellent. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about current best of breed we app development environments, for reasons I hope to be able to talk about in a week or two. Today I happened across vmunix’s post, which is a discussion of where the future of FastCGI, SCGI and apache may lie. This is a huge issue in that mostly what I’ve been concluding is that the new MVC frameworks that have emerged over the last year are really the way to go, but deployment of apps based on these frameworks is hampered by their poor integration with apache/2. The question then is what to do, and the answers are less than satisfying. The rails camp, for example, will basically tell you to switch to lighthttpd. I’ve got nothing against lighthttpd in principle (and really it gets great reviews all around) but I have over a decade invested in apache and an attendant nest of code tied to it, so switching isn’t a trivial undertaking and the payoff has to be worth the investment it would take to migrate everything. I’m not convinced it is. Vmlinux’s take is that ultimately either fastcgi or scgi will become a core apache module in the same way that mod_php did, but he also makes the observation that it might make more sense to simply use mod_proxy and proxy requests from apache to a distinct webapp server, taking his cues from how the Java and Zope camps ended up where they are. This is excellent stuff and well worth a read for anyone managing web services or curious about where things are potentially headed.

As to my own conclusions on the subject, I have nothing firm yet. The contention is it’s easier to manage distinct app servers (an instance of lighthttpd with fastcgi for rails apps, with mod_proxy pushing requests over from apache, for example) than it is to build the one apache binary to fit them all. I’ve felt that pain of complex apache recompiles and seemingly irreconcilable dependencies so I know from whence this comes, but I also get leery of this conglomeration of configuration files you’ll then be left managing, such that when an app breaks down you wander around in the disk trying to figure out where the fault is. The bottom line is I need to get some hands on time with a configuration just like this, actually put my hands on it, before I draw any firm conclusions, as well as bounce it off a couple of folks whose opinions I value.

Finally, someone seems to have a rational approach to online music distribution. Allofmp3.com allows you to buy tracks in a variety of lossless formats (FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, etc etc) and charges a flat rate for the track plus a floating rate based on the size of the generated file you select. For example, say you wanted to buy Sigur Ros’s (). You could buy it encoded to 192kb mp3 for $2.02, or you could buy the album in lossless FLAC for just under $10. The former is great for your mp3 player but not so good if you have a $2500 home theater setup, the latter is good for ALL formats you choose to play your music in. This is pretty much exactly what I have been wishing for. There are only two problems – first, not all albums are available in lossless formats. Second, while at this point in time use of the system in the US appears to be legal, it’s under attack from, you guessed it, the RIAA (as well as their counterparts in other countries and a host of related IP companies and institutions). So how long this lasts remains to be seen.

It’s really really freaking aggravating that the only way to obtain digital music unencumbered by retarded DRM schemes (think they’re not retarded? Name one person on EARTH they’re stopping from obtaining the music! It is so completely trivial to obtain music illegally that grandmoms are doing it!) is by taking advantage of obscure loopholes in foreign country’s copyright laws. I don’t really see a clear way out of this mess. What I do see is, this is how a digital music system ought to work. The pricing is rational, you can actually obtain lossless quality tracks, and the music isn’t mucked up with DRM (grandma can go steal all of frank sinatra’s music off kazaa, or she can buy it off of some other system, then god help her try and figure out how to play it in her car. You tell me which system is better).

I’ll also note allofmp3.com has a 20% off sale through January 14th. I bought the album linked above and had it on my computer about 45 minutes later in lossless flac.

I’ll also observe that if you can listen to Sigur Ros’s:

and it doesn’t bring a huge grin to your face, there’s something wrong with you. Beautiful beautiful stuff.

Another example of a meme I’ve touched on several times (how RSS and torrents have the potential to replace traditional tv distribution) – btseasonpass.com, a web service that lets you define rules for the torrents you’d like to download, enabling you to grab episodes of tv programs sort of like you would using, say, your tivo. Sign up, develop your viewing rules, and wait for the shows to come in. Registration is free.

If you’re skeptical about the whole notion, I’ll observe: despite having one of the best PVR applications available (beyondtv), I still use mechanisms like this to retrieve video materials because they’re simply more convenient than bothering to configure the PVR, and the shows I get generally come with the added benefit of the advertising already having been stripped out. I watched the last season of Battlestar Galactica and The Shield this way, and I’ll be doing the same for the upcoming season of The Shield as well.

(and a side note to the broadcasters who freak when they hear about the ads being ripped out – what, you were under the impression I was watching your ads? At any point in the last 10 years or more? You lost your audience with the advent of cable and the remote control. Don’t fall into the trap the RIAA is in – find your new business model instead of clinging desperately to your old one).

Just closed a tab in firefox accidentally and now you’re cursing as you dig through your history trying to find the site again? Install the How’d I get here extension and never face this problem again. Note that this is firefox 1.5 only.

If you think slashdot’s too narrowly focused on technology news and you’ve tried digg but the juvenile commenters have turned you off, you might enjoy reddit.com. It doesn’t have as many subscribers as Digg or Slashdot, at least not yet, but in some ways that’s an advantage – there’s a higher signal to noise ratio, for example. It’s also got a better design than Digg in that it doesn’t bring firefox to a creeping crawl. Worth a look if you want to play around with another ‘remix the web’ site. Oh, and their favicon/mascot is cool too.

Check out this superb javascript image magnification technique. Works across all the major browsers and it’s simple to implement. Make sure to scroll down to the bottom to check out a really large photo and how the technique works on it, and also try the keyboard commands (ie, use your arrow keys). Slick!

This is pretty cool – provide tagcloud.com with a collection of RSS feeds you monitor and it will build you a tag cloud for you. A tag cloud can be useful as a sort of content analysis tool – watch all the major gaming blog feeds, for example, and you’ll get a sense of what’s popular and what folks are talking about at any particular point in time. Tagcloud is free and easy as pie to setup and play around with, it just requires registration.