As we move towards launching new channels similar to IT Conversations next year, a big piece of the puzzle is our automated show-assembly system. And one component of that system is a client-side application we can the CNUploader. It does a bit of audio processing and uploads the resulting files to our server. It’s written in Python, and is up and running on Windows, but before we can release it to our team (for beta) and eventually to the public, we need a Mac OS X version. All that’s missing is to wire in a different MP2 encoder and a bit of packaging. It should be a walk in the park for an experienced OS X/Python developer. So if you can volunteer a few cycles to lend us a hand, let me know.

Email to:
doug@rds.com

I had fun being with Dan and Mike on the Pilotcast. Recommended only for other pilots, however.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Mike McDougall – Digital Photography (rated 2.2 by our listeners) Digital photography has taken over the overall picture market as well as the revenues of Kodak. In this interview with Larry’s World host Larry Magid, Mike McDougall from Kodak discusses the current trends across this market and some unique elements Kodak is bringing to consumers.
• Michael Disabato – The Evolving Technology Organization (2.7) Most people who use Information Technology do not care how it works. They just want it to do what it is supposed to do. Getting to the point where IT is reliable and invisible requires some cultural and organizational changes. Burton Group Service Director Michael Disabato discusses the Service Delivery approach with a focus on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
• Jim Frank (3.0) On BioTech Nation, Moira Gunn interviews Dr. Jim Frank, Director of Biotechnology and Biodefense Applications at Argonne National Laboratories. He tells us that there’s much, much more to biotech than personalized medicine.
• Pete Friedrich (3.0) Moira Gunn also speaks with professional cartoonists Pete Friedrich, Keith Knight and Lloyd Dangle. They’ve collaborated with some two dozen others to create "Roadstrips…A Graphic Journey Across America."
• Esther Dyson (3.3) The Internet offers a degree of freedom unlike any space in the physical world. When you come across something on the Internet you dislike, you simply move on. In this conversation with Esther Dyson, participants in the Accelerating Change 2005 conference discuss the unique problem of Internet regulation in this climate of freedom.
• Mike Homer and Marc Canter – Reinventing Media (3.3) Several new services offer free storage and bandwidth for creative works submitted by anyone. Among them are Open Media Network, described here by Mike Homer, and Ourmedia.org, described by Marc Canter. Quite different in their architecture, they share the goal of giving the masses a way to publish creative works.
• The Prospects for AI (3.4) Neil Jacobstein, Patrick Lincoln, Peter Norvig, and Bruno Olshausen offer four penetrating examinations of the current and future prospects for the differing technologies of artificial intelligence and the science that underpins them. Increasingly, to the satisfaction of advocates of biologically-inspired design, it seems that the best of the new AI enablers look to neuroscience for the most useful basis for their theoretical models.
• Daniel Wilson (3.6) Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Dr. Daniel Wilson, expert in robotics and data mining. He mixes the popular zeitgeist of robots with the amazing new capabilities they are capable of. It’s all there in his tongue-in-cheek book, "How To Survive a Robot Uprising."
• Thomas Barnett – Blueprint for Action (3.7) Thomas Barnett argues that globalization is a force for good, bringing hope of an end to both war and poverty. Connection to the global economy reformats societies in positive ways and helping the disconnected world to integrate is a key challenge. In this conversation with Phil Windley, Dr. Barnett describes the new world order and America’s place in it.
• James Surowieki – The Wisdom of Crowds (3.8) James Surowiecki offers some insights into both the best decision-making behaviors and the worst decision breaking behaviors of groups both large and small in this entertaining talk from the Emerging Technology Conference 2005. Not only providing insights gained from his recent work The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki also lays out some of the perils of group thinking, and provides food for thought for future discovery.
• Robert Lang – Computational Origami (3.9) Origami is rarely considered to have an impact on technology comparable to computer science or mathematics. Robert J. Lang may surprise you, however, in this talk. He reveals that the application of mathematical techniques to origami has had an impact far beyond paper folding and can even be compared to the way open source software has changed the world.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is one of my own interviews from last year:

• Joel Spolsky – Joel on Software (3.9) I interviewed Joel Spolsky, the author of Joel on Software. He worked on Microsoft’s Excel development team, still a strong influence on his opinions on software development. Topics include: extreme programming of which Joel has often been a critic, formal testing, particularly on large projects, why "customers don’t know what they want" and Microsoft (why some developers may not move to Avalon/XAML/WinFX, and what will happen to Win32).

Ever wondered who those volunteer members of Team ITC are, what they look like, and where they live? Now you can see some of them and their locations at Frappr.

And now, I’ve created a *new* Frappr map for all of you: the listeners to IT Conversations and The Conversations Network. The map is currently empty, so if you hurry, you could be the first one to post there.

Ah, the battle over the history of podcasting has reared its ugly head once again. Gotta check my calendar. Is it a full moon already?

I’ve had a lot of email in the past 24 hours from people who want me to weigh in on the revisionist history issue. Personally, like most people, I really don’t care who invented it. But maybe that’s just because I didn’t invent anything. 🙂 Oh, wait! I was the first person to coin the phrase “podcatcher.” Is that worth something? Should I have my own page in Wikipedia?

I can provide a few factual dates to which I can attest first hand:

• First IT Conversations program:6/3/03, an interview with Phil Windley
• First IT Conversations podcast: 9/24/03, about a year before most of the podcasts you hear about. I was inspired by Dave Winer’s RSS feed of Chris Lydon’s MP3 interviews. I hand-copied Dave’s XML to create my own feed with enclosures.

But let’s not forget some of the other true pioneers, some of whose names are rarely mentioned in this discussion. A partial list might include:

• Jish Mukerji (first audioblogged August 2001)
• Harold Gilchrist (an audioblogging evangelist who first audioblogged January 2002)
• Adam Curry (audioblog post ~October 2002)
• Noah Glass (introduced AudBlog in February 2003)
• Eric Rice (Audioblog)
• Rob and Dana Greenlee (WebTalk Guys, going waaay back)
• and lots of people who published spoken-word audio on the ‘Net as far back as the early ’90s

Thanks to Harold who documented some of these people and dates earlier this year.

IT Conversations has been named one of the three Best of the Web podcasts by BusinessWeek Online.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Peter O’Kelly – Microsoft as a Superplatform Contender (2.5) "Microsoft in the enterprise" has been considered an oxymoron for many enterprise IT strategists. Despite these barriers, Microsoft has gone ahead and finalized key initiatives such as new model-driven tools, Indigo, Avalon, and Windows Longhorn. Peter O’Kelly assesses Microsoft’s strategy to become an enterprise superplatform contender by leveraging the potential of the .NET platform initiative.
• Dick Hardt – Identity 2.0 (3.3) Dick Hardt delivers a witty and focused look at the next stage in the evolution of digital identity. In particular, he offers an insight into which parts of the identity ecosystem will be the likely drivers to take us from the directory centric world of what he terms Identity 1.0 to the user centric world of Identity 2.0.
• Blogging for Business (3.3) Some controversy surrounds the concept of blogging for business; many businesses are either unaware of blogging as a business tool or think there is no value in the time and effort spent in blogging. At the 2005 BlogHer conference, Lisa Meyers Brown of the American Cancer Society, Susan Getgood of Getgood Strategic Marketing, Mary Smaragdis of Sun Microsystems, and Christine Halvorson of S tonyfield Farms discuss the value of blogging to companies of all types and their experience with blogging at these widely diverse companies.
• Norman Packard – Synthetic Biology (3.3) The debate about the definition of life is one that compels philosophers and technologists alike. Norman Packard of ProtoLife blurs the edges of the discussion by creating synthetic biology – cells made from scratch.
• Vinod Khosla – In Conversation with John Battelle (3.4) Web 2.0 enriches online user experience by facilitating collaboration, participation, and communication. This is exciting investors once more and new Web 2.0 startups are finding it easy to get funding from venture capitalists. Although Vinod Khosla is a venture capitalist himself, he warns startups to learn the lessons of the failures of Web 1.0 companies and to use the money they raise judiciously and to remain creative rather than become comfortable with a business plan.
• Matt Gardner (3.4) On BioTech Nation, Moira interviews Matt Gardner, president of BayBIO, Northern California’s Life Science Association, on their new report: Which biotech companies are doing what? He explains which biotech companies are addressing which challenges, and how close are they to delivering.
• Andrew Weil (3.6) Moira also speaks with Dr. Andrew Weil, the author of "Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being." You know him best from his numerous bestsellers on healthy living and his public television specials. They talk about the science of Healthy Aging.
• Bob Hanner – Seeing What’s There (3.7) We are bio-illiterate, which means that non-specialists have generally a very poor understanding about other species. Most of us cannot even identify the insects we find in our gardens and therefore we are not terribly interested in those species we cannot name. Bob Hanner is trying to change this situation by creating a handheld scanner that would read the "barcode of life" and enable anyone to identify any living thing in real time.
• Darrell Hammond – KaBOOM! (3.7) Play is a crucial factor in the overall well-being of children. Yet, play has often been pushed to the back-burner in many communities. The founder of KaBOOM! envisions a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America. Since 1995, KaBOOM! has used its innovative community-build model to bring together business and community interests to construct more than 850 new playgrounds and skateparks and renovate 1,300 others nationwide.
• David Fogel – Accelerating Problem Solving (4.0) In many discussions of artificial intelligence it’s clear that the emphasis is on artificial. What passes for intelligence in machines is more often than not simply very good programming. David Fogel proposes his own definition of machine intelligence and shows how, by combining this with the way humans learn, researchers can produce startlingly effective results in problem solving.
• Robert Lefkowitz – The Semasiology of Open Source (Part 2) (4.2) Semasiology is the study of the development of the meaning of words over a period of time. Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz explores the relationship between open source and the actual source code, and reflects upon both the way forward and the road behind, drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Charlemagne, King Louis XIV and Donald Knuth.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is a program from last year:

• Jim Rygiel – Lord of the Rings Special Effects (3.7) His work on King Kong opens soon, and last December, Moira Gunn spoke with Jim Rygiel, the special effects supervisor for "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy. They looked at the technology of Hobbits, and talked about how the technology of digital effects has changed over its six years of production.

Do you know how to write an OS X installer for a program written in Python? The Conversations Network is developing a cool audio normalizer and uploader utility. The Windows version is working and we’ve got the typical Setup.exe installation working. Now we need someone to implement the code for OS X including putting together a DMG-type installer (I think).

If you can volunteer your time for this noble cause, let me know. doug@itconversations.com.

Update: Per map’s comment, we probably need a few things related to an install program:

• acknowledgment of our open-source license or a LICENSE file
• a README file
• a place to store configuration information (In the current PC version, we use an external human-readable config file in the same directory as the application.)

The first two could just be files in the DMG that aren’t copied to the Applications folder, but what’s the right answer for configuration data?

As many of you know, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Sony’s MiniDisc recorders for many years. The new models, MZ-M10 and MZ-M100, have solved a few problems and increased the love.

What I love (*=new in these models):

• Much cheaper media than CF
• Good AGC
• High-quality compressed audio (ADTRAC)
• Long record times (8 or 34 hours depending on mode)
• Uncompressed WAV recording option (94 minutes)*
• USB transfer to PC*
• Long recording battery life (12.5 hours)*

What I hate(d) (*=solved in these models)

• Lousy UI
• Transfer of WAV files to Mac*
• Transfer of compressed files to Mac

Overall, these are among my favorite solutions for recording live events. Connect to the sound board, make sure AGC (automatic gain control) is enabled, push Record and walk away. Come back at the end of the day (up 10 12.5 hours later) and retrieve the recorder. These new models have a longer-life NiMH battery, and you can attach a single AA cell to get the all-day battery life. Previously, you had to transfer the audio in real time through analog- or digital-audio interfaces, but Sony now includes USB transfers to PC. You can transfer uncompressed files to Mac, but not the compressed ADTRAC files that I typically use. That’s okay for me, since I’m still using Windows for audio.

The street price of the MX-M10 is only$299, while the -M100 is $100 more. I have the latter, and the only differences I know of are the improved display on the -M100 and the remote control. If I were to buy another one, it would be the less-expensive MX-M10.

Since we’re in the business of publishing conferences, lecture, etc., on line, it’s pretty obvious that we need to find a way to create downloadble files that include slides synchronized to audio. We’re pretty good with audio and video, but we don’t know much about the various formats and tools for producing these synchronized programs. Can you help us out?

Starting with an audio recording and a separate PowerPoint or Keynote file:

• What are the best release formats for a synchronized file? QuickTime? Shockwave?
• What are the best tools for creating a synchronized file?
• What are the easiest-to-use tools for novices?
• What are the cheapest tools?