I have been studying technology for longer than many have. I have been personally affected by the consequences of changes in technology. I have spent the past four years, and will be spending the next two working towards educating myself so I can influence technology that affects me the most in a positive way. I witnessed iPod mania among my peers from its birth, and have seen the effects this has had on common perception about the worth of music, and purchasing vs. pirating.

From my perspective, the “SOPA” situation is as follows:

• Technology is moving forward, and will always be moving forward.
• The high-grossing media distribution industry is built around distribution of physical medium, which is no longer relevant due to automated/far-reaching electronic medium distribution systems like iTunes, or a musician’s/record label’s own online retail store.
• Therefore, the high-grossing music distribution industry is no longer relevant.

This may be difficult for one to hear, especially if she/he has made a living/put children through college/gotten filthy rich using some of the profits of this industry. Yes, this is a tough place to be. It is a sad state of affairs when technology makes jobs obsolete, and the solution is not always clear. What is clear to me, however, is that what SOPA proposes is not the solution to this problem. Therefore, I can only assume that it is because of the money/power that this industry has in politics that SOPA is moving forward.

In terms of the problem the bill states it is solving, combating online piracy, I have a suggestion that I think is better than what SOPA proposes. Censoring the internet, deleting DNS records, etc. seems like an incredibly roundabout solution to a straightforward problem. I picture this solution as merely trimming the problem from the surface, instead of taking it out from its roots. Not only is the SOPA solution shortsighted, but by definition it has the potential to stunt general innovation. What I think would solve this issue is an incredibly simple and unobtrusive form of DRM.

The DRM system I imagine can work similar to what I hear Amazon’s kindle books work like, minus the digital distribution of the media. This system could be managed by the government, implemented by the government, etc., and would consist of an open API to track consumers’ digital media purposes. Instead of the government mandating that all websites abide by arbitrary requests, they could mandate that any sites distributing digital media interface with this API. This would be a straightforward way to ensure that consumers are only downloading media that they have the rights to, and would provide a clear criteria for an “infringing site”.

Consumers could also be provided with some control over their catalog of purchases, and could “loan” ownership of their items over to someone else.

Clearly I am glossing over some details here, but I think even at an abstract level, this concept seems more reasonable than allowing the government to choose which sites are “infringing”.

Briefly, for anyone who has not studied models of computation, the basic idea is that there are different types of theoretical computers (i.e. models of computation) and there are different sets of problems that each of them can solve. For example, a computerized soda vending machine can solve a much smaller set of problems than the computer you are using right now. Analogously, the computer you are using right now cannot solve certain problems, and thus (theoretically), it is only a matter of time before we have solved all that we can, and until then we are simply “filling in the gaps”, as Amy puts it.

This has never bothered me. I have known that we are just “filling in the gaps” for some time, but it was only until I discussed the idea with Amy that I gained some practical insight into what it meant for me. If you’re still reading, bear with me while I depart for a bit.

I have been interested in audio and music technology for as long as I can remember. My goal is to try to make a living while filling in the gaps in technology that I want to see filled, which will in turn allow artists like myself to be more productive, and open new opportunities to create beautiful things. Of course, I’d like to have fun doing it as well, but that is for another discussion .

For the past few years, I have been learning about new technologies and about opportunities for collaborative audio/music applications on this great new platform we call the web. Considering the web in the grand scheme of computing with respect to the philosophical issue described above, of course no one knows where it will end up, but I find myself wondering if there will be very many problems left to solve in the near future. I have only lived in the bay area for a little over a month now, and have already met a handful of people who are working on a “collaborative shopping cart”, or a “collaborative text editor”, or a “collaborative audio organizational tool ”. When most apps are made into their “collaborative” counterparts, and there is a multitude of distributed computing frameworks in existence, what will be left for the web?

Accompanied by my staying up-to-date with the evolution of the web, I have taken up an interest in open web standards and the process/people involved in taking on this challenge. I have come to learn that there is a well-known tension in the Computer Science industry between the standards themselves and how they are actually implemented by vendors. The most recent “gossip” on this subject is the Google Dart controversy.

Again for the non-computer-scientist, the idea here is that if you have a lot of money for development, you can take the time to create a level of abstraction over the standard ways of doing things if you think the standards suck. This allows your teams to build things easier/more reliably, and at the end your code gets translated into the standards-compliant code which you never have to look at.

Fortunately, many people with these sorts of resources (and many without) are working to improve the standards and make them much more useful in the real world. Unfortunately, since this process is unavoidably so slow, the stereotypical developer ends up fawning over any small enhancement to these specifications that may make their lives easier. I know because I do this too, it can be fun , but I think that most of the time it is short-sighted, tunnel-vision fawning, which is an issue.

Instead of getting excited and anticipating the support of HTML5 native date fields in iOS, I think if developers instead directed their excitement and anticipation on what we can do to fundamentally move the web platform forward, the evolution of the web may happen at a faster rate. Alex Russell said it best in <= 140 characters:

“The world needs fewer complacent followers of web standards dogma and more directed inquiry into why they all suck so hard.”
- @slightlylate

Why are there multiple standards for changing the way things look on the web? Why do I have to know what “HTTP request”, “Facebook API”, “Cross-site request”, and “JSON” all mean just to get a user’s name when she/he on my site, when he/she has undoubtedly already entered their name 1000 times all over the web? Why can’t my mother translate her extensive graphic design skill to creating web sites easily?

These are the kinds of questions I think Developers should be asking if we are really interested in advancing this platform and potentially computing in general. More people in the trenches could be discussing technology at a higher level and deciding how *they* want it to progress.

After all, it may be only a matter of time until the web doesn’t need anymore development

Technology has the incredible potential to make us more human, but I feel this will only be the result for people who utilize it in a human way. If you do not take time for self awareness and instead succumb to the temptation of this rapid flow of information and instant gratification, it seems to me that you are less human due to technology.

http://on.ted.com/8rKx

The Extreme Blue program is IBM’s way of capturing interns before they are attracted to startups and showing them that working for IBM could be just as cool as a dot-com. Their basic process is to bring together a bunch of what they call “top talent” and allow them to innovate on an end-to-end solution over the summer.

The innovation part, for me at least, came in the lack of technical requirements. I was allowed to utilize whatever technologies I saw fit, and so I did. The mentors also understood very much that this was our chance to develop an innovative solution, and they provided an excellent venue to do just that. We were given guidance if we started to drift off track, but otherwise they were mainly available for questions and constructive criticisms.

One of my favorite things about the mentors during Extreme Blue was that they maintained an attitude of “anything is possible”. Whenever the intern team would make a suggestion, the mentors would help us realize how it could be implemented. They would never doubt that something could be done, it was just a matter of what we had time for, and where our priorities lied.

Additionally, a more well known aspect of Extreme Blue is the opportunities to present to and speak with well-known executives within IBM. We got the chance to pitch our project to many executives from the Austin campus as well as from other US locations, including CEO Sam Palmisano.

I would recommend Extreme Blue to anyone who has the opportunity to take part. It has certainly changed my view of IBM for the better, and gave me the opportunity to learn how to succeed at IBM, principles that I’m sure will translate elsewhere in my life.

Here is a more detailed description of the technical details of my work for Extreme Blue.

Last.fm listening history since Oct 2006.
View as: pdf png

It encompasses all of my listening history since October 2006, when I first started using Last.fm. If you are actually going to look at it, you may want to start from the right (most recent).

Generated courtesy of lastgraph (lastgraph.aeracode.org).

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Nettie Nichols: Hi Colin. I apologize for the wait time. My name is Nettie, how are you today?

Colin: I’m alright

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Colin: I set my account to “Do not renew” in the iPower BillingCentral control panel, but a payment was processed on April 4th, and there are multiple payments still pending. I would like a full refund for the 8.99 charged on April 4th, and I would like to close my account.

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Colin: I thought you may ask this, so I found the email from the last representative that asked the same thing

Colin: First of all, thank you for the prompt service in providing the information that I need. I am transferring to “DreamHost”. Their plan is $9/mo. Since you would like to know, I will explain to you why I am making this decision.

1. Unnecessary domain charges at iPowerweb
There is an $8 fee on each domain to keep the WHOIS information private. This is offered for free at Dreamhost.

2. One database I am only allowed one database at iPowerweb. At Dreamhost, I get unlimited.

3. Shell Access is offered at Dreamhost. This is crucial to run certain web frameworks that I would like to use in the future, and have up until now been using my local server for.

4. Dreamhost supports any software, basically. Including Ruby on Rails, and git. These tools would make my life much easier in many circumstances.

5. Unlimited disk space at Dreamhost

6. Unlimited bandwidth at Dreamhost

7. Unlimited subdomains at Dreamhost

8. Downtime
A few times this year, it seemed that iPowerweb was down for a limited time.

9. Speed
I have no proof, but it seems to me that you are overloading your servers or something, as frequently a request to iPowerweb takes exceptionally long to yield a response. Not only that, but once I am on my WordPress installation, the server takes so long to process backend tasks. How much computational power does WordPress really use?

Now you say that you can work something out to better suit my needs, but can you really provide all of this? I seriously doubt it. After reading this, can you really blame me for switching?

Hope that feedback was helpful.

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Colin: No problem.

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Colin: I see.

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Colin: Thank you!

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Colin: That will be all. Thanks.

After using the drive in the above configuration for a few months, there are some problems I’ve noticed with it.

Upon normal operation, the sequence of events is as follows:
First, I plug in my eSATA card with no devices attached. Wait for the little icon to appear in the menu bar. I then attach the drive, and the lights on the eSATA card are solid, letting me know that it is waking up the drive. This usually takes a little while, as each of the 4 HDs have to spin up individually. When this is complete, the status lights on the eSATA card begin to flicker and the drive is mounted. When I am finished using the drive, eject from Finder and wait for it to eject before unplugging from eSATA card. Then select the expansion card icon in the menu bar and select “Turn off card”, which then allows me to eject the eSATA card. If I just pull the card out without first shutting it off I get a kernel panic.

I have experienced two problems with this configuration, both of which I’ve figured out how to get around.

The first occurs much more frequently, and is more likely to be a problem with the eSATA card/drivers. If my computer has been put to sleep, and then woken up, there is a very good chance that the drive wont work. I plug in the eSATA card, then plug in the drive as described above. The lights on the eSATA card come on, and the drive is woken up, but then does not mount and does not show up in disk utility. A restart fixes this issue.

The second problem has only occurred once, and I finally figured out how to get around it. This issue, I believe, is an issue with the LaCie device itself. On all modern LaCie disks, there is a power switch with settings “On, Auto, Off”. “On” turns the drive on, and “Auto” turns the drive off until it is plugged into a machine. The problem that I was having is, the drive was staying on, even when it was in “Auto” mode. If I flicked the switch to “Off”, then back to “Auto”, the drive would come on, even if it was not plugged in to a computer. When plugging it into the eSATA card, the activity lights would not come on at all, and the disks would not spin up (although all four lights in the back were solid blue). After hours of frustration and restarting, I finally just unplugged the power to the LaCie device, plugged it back in, and that seemed to do the trick. Changing it from “Off” to “Auto” now did not turn on the drive, and it turned on when I plugged it in to the computer as expected.

I imagine any system like this is going to have its quirks. Overall I’m satisfied, especially because when I get the drive mounted it is wicked fast.

“For their own purposes the physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.”

My laptop is 2.33 GHz = 2,330,000,000 Hz, not too far off from his prediction.

“It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.

All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there still come more machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.”

I love this section of the article, and agree entirely with him.  Why aren’t you allowed to use a simple calculator on a standardized examination? The purpose of our technology is to assist us with simple tasks, so that we can further ourselves with more complicated ones.  We can only build upon a solid foundation, and what better way to ensure that it is solid by designing a flawless machine to take care of the foundation for us?

I am less interested in the specific details of his proposed technologies, like his “hypertext” machine (the reason the article was assigned in Interface Design class in the first place), than I am in the broader concepts that he touches upon, and the timelessness of this article in general.

It seems to me that most humans think that this is it.  Our evolution has brought us here, and this is the stopping point because we have evolved from monkeys and we are so advanced.  Our technology is so advanced because I can carry around a device that tells me where I am on the earth, and I can video chat with my grandchild across the world.  This article proves the opposite.

In 1945, the majority of the population undoubtedly felt the same way as most people do now, except they felt that they were “technologically advanced” because they could send some text across a wire in 6 hours.

What I feel is important to understand, is that we are only as advanced as the amount of time we have existed for.  Of course, our technological advancements do not grow linearly with our physical evolution, but our time as Homo Sapiens is just another moment in the evolution of organic life on this planet.  Much like how people think we so much more “technologically advanced” than we were in 1945, it is a popular belief that we are the most advanced species that will ever exist on this planet.  Assuming that we don’t destroy the planet first, I’m sure that Homo Sapiens will evolve into something more advanced, just as our fairly primitive technology will greatly advance in the future.

This is not a new concept, I was probably first introduced to it from reading Ishmael, and I’m sure Bush understood this well.  He was apparently the first presidential science advisor, and for good reason.  His insight into the future of technology is so thourough that this article can literally be applicable in any time period.

The LaCie 4big Quadra RAID enclosure is pretty tight. I am sick of buying external hard drives every time they fail, and having a million enclosures left over, so I splurged. I have 4 – 1TB disks in a RAID5 configuration. That gives me 3TB to play with. It is very fast, and works well so far. I cannot support the multiple claims I’ve heard about it being too loud. I’ve heard the fans come on, and they aren’t that loud. Yes, if I was recording some voice over work right in front of the device it would certainly be heard on the microphone, but it is nothing to complain about. I will get a long eSATA cable and hide it behind my desk or something.  The only downside to this device is that you void the warranty if you use a replacement drive that you do not purchase from LaCie.  There is a 3-year warranty on the thing, so I guess I’ll play nice for 3 years.  I’ll buy one of these “LaCie approved” spare drives, and hopefully not more than one will fail on me in the 3-year span, because they are about $40 overpriced.  All-in-all a great device.

Trying to get it to work with eSATA on my Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard is a different issue. There are various options for ExpressCard/34 eSATA cards out there. I purchased one from OWC which did not work. The OWC ExpressCard/34 eSATA II mounted the drive, then immediately froze Snow Leopard when I tried to move a file around, or copy files to the drive. Sometimes OS X just hung, unresponsive, and other times I got a kernel panic.

The Apiotek Extreme ExpressCard/34 eSATA II on the other hand works beautifully. At first it didn’t work at all, but I had to download drivers from the Apiotek support page which worked like a charm.

All in all I’m happy with my large Time Machine/everything else drive.  I’ll keep one of my 500GB LaCie’s around for some stuff as well, but all my other drives have been sold or the enclosures are sitting in a box in my room.

Here is a follow up where I discuss problems that I’ve been having with this configuration.