How do proponents of open source philosophies (software, democracy, etc.), often boosters for cheap massively-adopted technology (aka. linux-everything devices), rationalize the obvious conflict with China’s dominant role in production of these devices?

I’m not picking on them, as I love open source software. But it seems like a disconnect in the fundamental philosophy used to promote the open source philosophy, or bang on Google/Yahoo for their dealing with China.

Can a piece of technology be certified China-free? My latest phone claims to Made in the Netherlands, or was it just assembled there?

Just a thought. But it seems an important one.

With the advice of a good friend at Nokia, I picked up a Nokia 9300 from a local shop. Just couldn’t handle the DTs encountered after dumping the Blackberry.

In short, this is an excellent phone and e-mail/sms device.

• Excellent sound
• MP3 playback
• QWERTY keyboard
• No camera
• Strong signal selection
• Bright and harp screen

• No stereo output for use in the car (see MP3 playback above)
• Keyboard could use optimizing. Fro example, Shift+2 for the @, when using thumbs, is a bit of a stretch.
• Hard to find carrying cases – locally at least
• Doesn’t include a memory card
• No iSync support (without 3rd party software or hacks)

Not sure I would call it perfect, but it is an excellent phone – so far.

On a recent Gilmour Daily podcast, Steve Gilmour and Doc Searls discussed DRM.

During the conversation, the concept of triggering the memory of a commercially encumbered work in the listener, as a way of by-passing the music companies stranglehold on distribution, was suggested.

AKA. The all-too-familiar tune in my head solution.

Could you trigger the memory of the song, without actually distributing it and avoid paying the music companies.

As usual I jumped in the shower and my brain would not let go of the issue at the heart of this problem.

What if, creators were able to embed tags as bookmarks throughout a podcast? Perhaps ID3 tags as bookmarks?

Essentially, tag the podcast with what they were thinking, intending or expecting listeners to hear (feel?) at precise points in the recording.

As the podcast played, the playback application would locate the relevant track based on the tag, inserted it or play it at the intended location, and then pick-up right where it left off after the new content was inserted.

With a vast amount of content already distributed to billions of devices and households, in the form of CD collections ripped to disk and content purchased legally, why not take advantage of the material residing locally?

Player applications, like iTunes, could be tweaked to scan podcasts for these tags and pre-load/mix content before or during playback.

Syncing applications could do the same for detached devices like iPods.

Recording applications could automate the process, by creating these tags or bookmarks, as the intended material was queued during recording or in post-production.

This would effectively route-around the media industries copyright war-zone, freeing up producers and consumers to create, share and mash-up content as they like. A side benefit, this technique would save a huge amount of bandwidth.

But, what if the specified content was missing from the local device?

In the case of iTunes, a user might specify a set of rules to replace missing content with content from the artist, genre or preview of the track from the iTunes music store.

If nothing appropriate is available it might just skip over the tag, or insert a sexy english voice stating, “The content suggested is not available. Visit this podcast’s site for more details”.

Consumers and producers might want a random tag, used to insert random content by artist or genre. Thereby creating a unique experience every time the podcast is replayed.

Imagine if the consumer could specify the content for the advertising/promos in podcasts?

This would radically differentiate the advertising model emerging in podcasting from the old school media companies. Consumers selecting the type of ads or promos they want to hear, perhaps?

A whole new business could be created hosting and distribute content for insertion into podcasts, at the playback level.

Content-shifting inside time-shifted media, The next innovation in podcasting, in my opinion.

Seeing how the Net Neutrality bill S-2917 making its way through the senate can have a huge impact on businesses like mine, I called my Senators office to find out how he was voting.

Does anyone know how to get around the receptionist to someone who will answer the question of a real constituent with something other than, we will get in touch with you? Or, the senator is reviewing his options?

Maybe its time to make a trip to see my Senator, in person? If that is even possible.

Having fought the good fight at the server level for several years, I know there is no perfect solution.

You can get darn close with careful tuning, meshing different filtering techniques together, but it will never be perfect.

over at IBM's site provides a nice breakdown on the different methods being used.

The article is a bit dated, but still relevant. I picked it up on OSNews.com recently.

Jan Kneschke, author of Lighttpd, is in need of a new box for hosting the sites comprising Lighttpd.net.

I want to ask if someone can offer a box to run lighttpd.net. The traffic for now is really low, last month it was 70Gbyte. The webserver has 3-4 req/s (see http://jan.kneschke.de/rrd/). If you can offer a box to host lighttpd it has to have about a 1Gbyte of RAM, a CPU (the box has no load, now it is a 2GHz Celeron) and some disk space. Looks like RAM is the only problem for now.

If you have the resources, this is a worthy project to help.

Today, the great guys at Shopify.com released their Bring-your-own-domain features.

Now the Speedymac store can be found at store.speedymac.com, take a look.

The schema that a couple of my projects rely on were developed by a partner company, for use in their product.

Having worked with them for a couple years, and been frustrated by the refusal to address performance issues, which greatly inhibited scaling and UI design, I spent the afternoon de-normalizing the schema to improve performance.

Surprise, surprise. The performance increased by about 70% and the my code was reduced by an equal amount.

Being a pragmatic self-taught engineer has its upsides. You tend to view the common wisdom that permeates the technical world with skepticism.

The other side of the coin is, when you find something that make sense, your gut tells you to go with it long before it becomes common wisdom.

In this case the Ruby on Rails philosophy, name things what they are in your schema.

Too many schemas have convoluted naming formats. Usually requiring intimate knowledge of the code and functionality to fully get it.

In this case, the partner company named their tables in a manner that over time blinded them to the actual usage of the data.

They kept talking about implementing metadata tables to improve performance.

I explained that a metadata table already existed, they just stored too much in that table that existed elsewhere, and didn’t properly use relationship to make queries fast enough.

For example:

Content -> Messages -> Users

Users as sender belonged to Messages

Users as receivers has-and-belonged-to Messages through a join table

The point they missed was that Content was a Message, and Messages contained metadata about the Content.

The performance issue was solved by removing all non-relevant data from Messages. Moving the Sender and Receiver relationships directly to Messages, without any join tables.

It meant that every Receiver would have their own Message entry, which is logical. While still storing only one copy of the actual Content.

No more SQL gymnastics to determine which Receiver owns what, or when a certain Receiver viewed their version of the Messages, or performing searches based on Content, Messages and Receivers.

Could track-backs or pings from RSS by used on e-mail servers to combat spam and spoofing?

The outgoing mail server to stores a hash or simply the message-id of each message originating locally.

The receiving server, or any along the way, would track-back/ping the originating server (based on MX records) with some unique ID header tag, to see if the message truly originate there.

A simple web service would respond with appropriately information for success and failure.

Sure, there are a range of issues, but perhaps this type of technique could go a long way towards combating spam, and more importantly spoofing.

I’ve built a prototype, using Ruby and CommunigatePro, but need to deploy it in our data center to run real world tests.

Just a thought.

As a fun project, I am setting up a online store using Shopify.com

Over the coming weeks I will be adding more products (several hundred), customizing the design and adding more information.

If you ever need any goodies for your Apple laptop (or any laptop), please take a look and drop me a line.

The prices are pretty much standard retail, but you will be supporting an individual instead of a big company.

Speedymac LLC is my company, consists of just myself, and I work hard to make sure my customers are happy.

The store is at speedymac.myshopify.com.

Have great weekend!

PS – No sales tax since we are 100% virtual.

Along with my web development and design work, I am starting a new service – innovation consulting.

One talent I have always been proud of, is my ability to identify opportunities for innovating within business processes.

Until now, this talent has always been applied within companies I worked for, friends whom call me for advice on their businesses, and projects I intended to exploit myself.

As most entrepreneurs know, there are never enough hours in the day, or days in the week to capitalize on every great idea you have.

Saving them in a scrapbook it pointless, unless you know someday someone will benefit from the idea.

When companies like 37 Signals advertise their workshops, included in the description is usually a phrase like this, “this workshop is for managers, programmers, designers and even idea people”.

Thats me, an idea person. I have a talent for seeing across technological and company boundaries. FInding elegant pragmatic ways of overcome the challenges or unlock hidden opportunities.

• Why hasn’t spam been killed, using callbacks?
• Why hasn’t RSS replaced POP3 and SMTP in e-mail systems?
• When will companies stop trying to build accountability in every system?
• When will web applications set the time zone automatically based on IP address geolocation?
• Why isn’t the movie industry embracing technology an downloading porn to my mobile phone? (Solved)

These are fun and interesting problems to tackle. They intrigue me and get my brain buzzing.

I have provided countless innovations to companies I have worked for and with. The highlights include:

• Daily and Hourly inventory process in the fast food business
• Branding and production processes for printing products
• Same-day desktop publishing productions process
• PDF work-flows for digital printing
• Queued e-mail management for SMB Helpdesk/CRM
• Template-driven reminder service for the dental industry
• Report delivery system for Real Estate Appraisers
• Spam quarantine management systems

If you are looking for help on a existing project, need a new idea, or need a reality check for that crazy idea, give me a shout.

Met today with the Bob Brauer and Bryan Holjes of StrikeIron, Inc., a web services marketplace that simplifies the selling and buying of Web services.

Very nice guys that know exactly what they are doing in the web services market.

They have over a hundred commercial web services available for integration into existing applications.

More interestingly, you can sell your web service through their market place.

Started the process a couple weeks ago of building a professional business plan for one of the companies I am a partner in.

We are working with Grace Ueng of Savvy Marketing Group. In a few weeks the initial version will be delivered to us for review.

So far the experience has been top notch. Grace is sharp and obviously playing at the top of her game.

I highly recommend her services.

The motion picture industry is in talks with some major retailers about installing DVD burning kiosks in stores. It’s an interesting idea, but one that almost entirely misses the point.

(Via Ars Technica.)

This is a decade late. The days of carbon-based movie distribution is drawing to a close.

Movie distribution companies should have done this a decade ago. When Blockbuster was all the rage.

Today, consumers want to download, share and mash-up content. Not trudge down to some kiosk, that may or may not be working when they get there, and purchase a DVD.

Netflix, Bit-torrent and iTunes have proven that consumers don’t want some stodgy low-tech solution.

If I really want a DVD, I will stop by the discount bins at Taret or EB Games and pickup that oh-so-precious intellectual property, the movie companies are fighting to protect, for $4-10 each.

If the movie companies want to be innovative, try same-day pay per view of premieres. I would pay to see the latest blockbuster world premiere, broadcast live in HD, on opening night. They could through in an option up-sell of a live Q&A session with the stars or director immediately following the event to rake in more bucks.

Hell, why doesn’t the music industry do this with concerts? $300 for tickets to see Madonna – I think not. But $50 for an evening of HD coverage of her concert with perfect surround sound, in the comfort of my home – absolutely.

Rightcart.com is interesting. These guys seem to be headed down the same road I am currently on.

I am working on Sidesale.com (not live yet), which is similar. A distributed or aggregated e-commerce system.

The funny thing is they are patenting their idea it seems, at least according to their web site.

The idea of implementing mini versions of old systems, such as shopping carts, instant message systems, mail lists managers, etc. is fairly obvious. So, I wonder how the patents will stand up to scrutiny?

I am happy to see the competition, since this validates the idea.

Not that Amazon and others haven’t already tread heavily on this ground before.