I love this little WiFi radio I received just yesterday from C. Crane. Sure, I could just as easily use one of my computers to listen to any of the nearly 50,000 audio streams listed on Reciva.com, but I’d have to install a Real player to get many of them, and given Real’s history of annoying software, that’s something I’m not willig to do. Besides, there’s just something nice about having a separate device. I guess my old brain just thinks it’s radio because it comes from something that looks like one. I like that I can just turn it off and on again, and after the requisite few seconds of “buffering…”, I’m listening to one of my favorite stations. No application to start. No window to move around on my monitor. Just a box with familiar knobs and buttons.

Again, nothing revolutionary about the content, but I’ve already re-connected with Stan Dunn and others who now produce In the Spirit of KJAZ. It’s still the great sound of KJAZ that went off the air 14 years ago. And I can listen to WNYC2, albeit from a tiny speaker so the HD experience is lost. Although I spend most of my time here in an office/studio with a lot of high-end audio gear, I don’t bother to pipe the WiFi Radio’s line output through the fancy speakers. So far, I like the non-imposing little-box sound. Yeah, it makes no sense to me, either. Go figure.

http://p.castfire.com/Xu7m0/video/22252/bbtv_2008-08-22-010603.flv
Videobloggers Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson have been posing as tourists in Beijing for the past ten days, but actually turning their cameras towards the Free-Tibet protests that have been so aggressively squashed by the Chinese government. Xeni Jardin managed to interview Jay and Ryanne on a Skype video call and published it on Boing Boing TV. [full story]

When I started a web-hosting company back in 1995, we used bakery racks to hold Sun servers — mostly ES-450s, as I recall. The first real Internet data centers were then based on the designs of the telco industry, starting at 100 watts/sq ft, working their way up to 300 watts/sq ft for fairly dense server farms. Air conditioning was usually the biggest problem. As server densities increased, many aging data centers were only able to use a portion of their floorspace because they couldn’t supply enough cooling for the newer servers. As expensive as they were, it was very hard to design and build a data center that would be able to handle the increased densities five years down the road. Looking back only 13 years later, we had no idea how steep the scale curve would become.

Now, as Ina Fried reports at cnet, Microsoft (and I assume others) are buying servers not by the box or even by the rack, but pre-assembled and fully networked in shipping containers with densities of thousands of watts/sq foot. They have to. They’re adding 10,000 servers a month. They don’t repair or replace individual servers when they fail. They just monitor the total number of working servers in the container. When some percentage of the servers have failed, they yank the entire container and send it back to the supplier for refurbishing. Or, if the technology has improved, a container can simply be replaced with one that has even more-densely packed servers. (I assume that that each container has its own air conditioning and just requires water in/out.)

With densities like this, the big guys (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) are primarily in the electrical-power business. In some cases, they’re even building (or planning to build) their own generating facilities. It only took a decade to get to this point. Hard to imagine how we’ll be building data centers in another ten years.

Here’s another big one. The FCC gets it. They’ve delivered a thrashing to Comcast. Professor Lessig wrote a five-page response [pdf] to the Commissions three-page summary [pdf] of their 34-page order [pdf]. We won’t know for a few months the extent to which Comcast complies or digs in their heels, but this is not only a round for the good guys, it also puts into federal print a good precendential explanation of the issues. Just having this order on the record will help make the case for net neutrailty as the battle rages on. [source: Lessig]

Having lived through the transition starting with the Carterfone decision, it’s easy to understand how important this is to innovation.

http://blip.tv/play/lG3I3SyBolM
Not just a criticism of McCain’s policies, but an excellent explanation of the importance of net neutrality and other broadband policy issues. This video is in the sae style as Lawrence Lessig’s live slide presentations, which are always entertaining and provocative. Lessig as FCC Chairman in an Obama administration? [source]

A “ducker” is an audio tool (traditionally hardware, but now also in software) that reduces the level of one track when there’s a signal on another track. It’s very common in talk shows, where you want the host of the show to have priority and override the voices of guests. A ducker is extremely useful for cleaning up two-track interview recordings, such as those from Skype.

As of release 1.3.3 (currently in beta), the open-source audio package Audacity has included an “Auto Duck” feature, which could be quite helpful if you record/edit two-track interviews, particularly from phone calls or Skype.

I’m experimenting with Fulfillment by Amazon. So far, so good. Seems to be run with the same quality of infrastructure as Amazon Web Services and the rest of Amazon.com. For a limited time — not sure how long — we’re offering my most-recent book, Loosely Coupled, The Missing Pieces of Web Services, at a 50% discount. You should see the $19.99 price from RDS Press. Let me know whether the fulfillment and delivery meet your expectations.

As Larry Lessig says, this is huge.

…the [Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit] has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

A big step forward for validation of Creative Commons and GPL licenses. Congratulations to all who fought for this for the rest of us.

It’s time to take The Conversations Network mobile. That means two things: (1) a lightweight version of the website design suitable for all mobile browsers, and (2) an iPhone 2.0 dedicated application. The former has been on the to-do list for some time, and the number of requests has been growing steadily. The latter is (for now) just for fun, but I’d love to see what could be done. We need help for both projects.

Question: What’s the latest/best standard for mobile apps? What flavor of XML/HTML, etc? I’m so out of touch on this. The last thing I remember dabbling with was WAP when developing for mobile devices was brand new. Where should I look to ramp-up on developing for mobile browsers?

Opportunity: I don’t have the personal bandwidth to get up-to-speed on iPhone development, but if anyone wants to volunteer to create an iPhone app for The Conversations Network, I’ll gladly handle the back-end development.

AIR: And I’d also love to see an application for The Conversations Network based on Adobe AIR. From the few AIR apps I’ve used to date, I’ve been impressed with the UI as well as the cross-platform installation and update processes.