Here’s a shameless plug for Tucows Farm, one of the blogs I get paid to write…
What programming web site will not just inform you, but entertain you as well?
That’s right: Tucows Farm. Because programming is more than just Aspergers and Emacs these days.
The podcast that I mentioned earlier — the one in which I interviews Tucows’ VP of Product Development, Alain Chesnais — now has a transcript, which I’ve posted on Tucows Developer.
The “podcast-and-transcript” approach is the one that I’ll be taking with the podcasts over at Tucows Developer, as it offers the best of both worlds.
You might ask “Why post podcasts, anyway?”. The preliminary observations of the results of podcasts from technical websites seem to be good. At the Evans Data Developer Relations
Conference that Ross and I attended in early February, we saw that a
number of companies found that podcasts were a good way to explain the
broad strokes of a technology or product.
In his presentation, Bill Roth from BEA systems said that podcasting “lets you touch customers
at points where previously no opportunity existed.” Translated from marketer-speak, podcasting
lets you communicate with your users and customers at times you couldn’t before: on their
commute, at the gym, while running errands, and so on.
There’s also the “high-touch” factor of podcasts. It’s one thing to read
an essay or the transcript of a conversation, but another thing entirely
to hear the speakers say things in their own voice. The spoken word has a different “flow” from the written one, and a conversation between two or more people has a certain spark and spontaneity that a group-written article can’t capture.
There’s a world of great podcasts out there, and their number is growing every day. If you’d like a sample, take a look at the IT Conversations website, which features speeches and interviews with some of the brightest and most interesting minds in high tech. For a fun listen, I recommend Wil Wheaton’s “Just a Geek” presentations at the Gnomedex conference — here’s part one and here’s part two.
For the benefit of people who can’t listen to podcasts, who want to scan a podcast quickly for a specific topic or phrase and search engines, we’re also posting transcripts of our podcasts. Luckily, a service like CastingWords.com exists. CastingWords.com is the podcast transcription service whom we used to transcribe the podcast for us. They did a good job and their rates are very reasonable: they charge by podcast length — 42 cents a minute. We’ll be using their services for future podcasts.
Renaissance Faires, which I consdier to be one of the lower rungs of the geek hierarchy are just one of those aspects of geek culture that I just can’t get into (and remember, I can put up with a lot of crap: I sat through Spanglish and a Reform Party student meeting).
Swordplay, jousting, mead, wenches — those are all fine things in my book. It’s when you combine them all in festival form and put a sloppy Knights of the Round Table cosplay veneer that it all goes straight to nerd hell. That’s why I found this entry by Patrick of Bad News Hughes so funny: he went to a Ren Faire simply for the purpose of mocking them. Prithee, Sir Bad News Hughes, I raise a flagon of…oh, never mind.
Albert Lai is the CEO of BubbleShare, a
software company that makes a web application bearing the same name. Albert’s and my path have crossed time and again ever since I graduated from Crazy Go Nuts University and entered the working world. We first met eleven years ago during the interactive CD-ROM boom at Mackerel Interactive Media, when he was still in high school and doing an internship there. We later met at during the P2P boom in 2000/2001 when we lived at the same Fillmore/Fulton townhouse complex in San Francisco and were working at our respective peer-to-peer projects (I was at OpenCola, and I can’t remember where Albert was working). We’ve recently crossed paths again, this time during the Web 2.0/web services boom, and BubbleShare is his project.
BubbleShare is a pretty nice photo-sharing web thingy, with the annoyances of many photo-sharing web thingies excised. You don’t have to register to start posting photos online, nor do you need to download software or pay a monthly fee. Photos on BubbleShare can be annotated with comments and even audio. It makes it easy to send email that says “Hey, look at my photos” to your friends and family, and it’s set up so that even the least technical of them — for most people, it’s “my mom”, but in my case, it’s Dad who’s the most technologically hopeless — can click a link and see your photos.
BubbleShare’s holding a contest and the company for whom I work, Tucows, is lending a hand. Click here for the details, and find out how to win some prizes. One of the prizes is an iPod Nano, and who knows — maybe my iPod Nano-luck will rub off on you.
(Originally posted at Tucows Developer.)
DemoCamp 3.0 — the third in an ongoing series of gatherings of developers demonstrating projects on which they’re working — takes place on Monday, February 20th at the Tucows offices (96 Mowat Avenue, just east of King and Dufferin Streets in Toronto).
The first DemoCamp attracted about two dozen people, and the second drew in around 60. This third one promises to be every bit as good and as of this writing, will feature the following demonstrations:
DemoCamp will run from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., after which we’ll talk a short (a few blocks) walk to the Liberty Street Cafe (25 Liberty Street) for food, drinks and extended discussion.
There si no charge for attending DemoCamp — all we ask is that you sign up at its wiki page. Hope to see you there!
I can’t find the online essay I once read about the nature of the relationship between the incredibly tough-to-please King of All Cosmos and the eager-to-please Prince from the quirky videogame Katamari Damacy, but I did find this Jacob Chabot comic showing the King asking the Prince to roll him up some dinner:
I’m not the only one into the commentary-on-Bulte-by-Photoshop game. My boss, Ross, has taken a crack at it and he’s done a pretty nice job:
Ross won’t mind if you copy this graphic and stick it on your own site.
Ross also notes that he took advantage of advance voting and will gladly tell anyone who asks that Sam did not get his vote.
Michael Geist has informed me that along with Cory Doctorow, we’ve been quoted in this week’s issue of Macleans. We were all interviewed by Colin Campbell last week, and our comments appear in a sidebar article titled Bulte in the Blogs: A Dust-Up Over Campaigns and Copyright. Here’s a scan of the bit where your ‘umble blogger gets mentioned:
He sent me a scan of the article [825K PDF], which I have enclosed for your viewing. The scan’s a bit smudged, but I’m planning to buy a half-dozen copies for my portfolio and will see if I can get a cleaner scan posted here.
Speaking of Cory, if you haven’t read his Toronto Star guest editorial piece on Sam Bulte — Trademark Political Shenanigans — do so now!
My favourite bit is where he talks about DRM — “Digital Rights Management” or “Digital Restrictions Management”, depending on if you’re one of Sam’s God-fearing content corporation buddies or one of those no-good “pro-user zealots” whom Sam condemns. He’s come up a great way of explaining the ridiculousness of region-encoded DVDs (which is why your North American DVDs won’t play in other parts of the world and vice versa):
These are the technological restrictions put on the media that you buy,
such as games, CDs and DVDs, that seek to control how you use works
after you buy them. These DRMs indiscriminately restrict the
enjoyment of your lawful property, allowing rights holders to control
your private use of media in ways not considered under copyright law.
For example, Adobe’s eBook technology blocks your ability to copy and
paste a quotation, even where copyright law would allow it, e.g. in the
course of criticism or in academic research.
DRM technology on
DVDs prevents you from watching discs bought overseas in a Canadian DVD
player, despite the fact that copyright doesn’t give creators the right
to control where their creations are viewed after they’ve been sold.
That’s why you don’t need to leave your Canadian editions of your
favourite books at home when you go on holidays in foreign countries.