Software Engineering

For those of you who aren't too familiar with MPEG Surround, you can read about it here - in a nutshell, it's the latest open standard for audio compression.

Developers of software that use the MPEG Surround will have to pay licensing fees as outlined here - it's done per unit outside of PC software which probably means that mobile phones and MPEG players, such as the ever popular iPod, will pay the per unit fees.

PC Software is divided into 'consumer' and 'professional' licensing, and fees vary based on whether a PC application is 'consumer' or 'professional'; distinguishing between the two should be interesting...

Because of these fees, it is severely unlikely that any software using the MPEG Surround standard will be available at no cost; open source/Free Software may still be possible but will likely also be unavailable at no cost unless either someone sponsors the software or end-users (you) pay for it.

Is the licensing worth paying for? Via Licensing seems to think so - and it is their business:

Access is the goal. Sophisticated technology is the result of cooperative development and collaborative standarization efforts.

This is especially true in the area of multimedia distribution and broadcasting, in which multiple industries participate in the creation, distribution, and consumption of content.

Via Licensing is in business to provide streamlined access to patents that are necessary to implement foundational technologies on which products are built. Via Licensing develops and administers patent licensing programs, or "patent pools," on behalf of innovative technology companies and for the convenience of licensees. { Read more }

In Google’s kinship with the mind, a group at Berkley is quoted:

“Our ap­proach in­di­cates how one can ob­tain nov­el mod­els of hu­man mem­o­ry by stu­dying the prop­er­ties of suc­cess­ful in­forma­t­ion-retrieval sys­tems, such as In­ter­net search en­gines,” the group wrote in the stu­dy, pub­lished in this mon­th’s is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence. The study al­so sug­gests brain sci­ence might help de­sign bet­ter search en­gines and data-retrieval sys­tems, they added. “These prob­lems are ac­tively be­ing ex­plored in com­put­er sci­ence,” they wrote, but “one might be equally likely to find good so­lu­tions by stu­dying the mind.”

I agree with studying our tools to understand better who we are, and I agree with studying ourselves to make better tools. However, I do not understand how the statement that 'the tools we made work very much in the same manner we think' is anything of worth - we made it, and we cannot make something of the mind that isn't like us in some way. { Read more }

Reading MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed , there was a lot of 'duh' when it came to MySpace. In many ways, MySpace seems to be the opiate of those who couldn't find any more Microsoft Frontpage - which is not a bad thing, but it is necessarily ugly and has given other technologies a chance to mature into more user friendly ghosts of what they need to be. I'm referring to content management systems.

Plus, everyone got their 15 Megabits of fame from MySpace. Twitter I won't comment on because I haven't used it and have felt no urge to. It is named too much like what I think of a small muscle spasm. I can't take it seriously, and if I did I would go to see a doctor.

SecondLife. Yeah, SecondLife. Here's what Lance Ulanoff had to say:

...Second Life could just as easily be the first to go. No one believes its reported participation numbers anymore, even though big companies, such as Circuit City and IBM, have built virtual stores (and Playboy is jumping in with both, er, feet this month). Some individuals are even claiming to make real-world money in there, but are they really? Frankly, I think Second Life is the equivalent of a virtual con. There's no doubt that it's enjoyed startling growth in the last year and a half, but that was driven, for the most part, by the laudatory press and media coverage it received. Companies herded like sheep to the platform, because they believed the hype. So did users. But reality is finally starting to trump perception. Companies' virtual stores sit empty, and there's no way they can measure if they're building any additional brand recognition simply by being there.

Of course, they're not... { Read more }

Chat logging can be a handy thing for meetings and so forth within SecondLife. The problem, of course, is that not everyone wants to have their chat logged - and by Section 4 of the Community Standards of SecondLife:

Disclosure
Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Lives. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident --including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident's privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.

The key word is consent. So I looked all over for a chat logger which met the community standards (not to mention just plain good taste). I did find one SL Chat Logger, but again - it didn't ask for consent.

This is beta code - and it is at version 0.1 (the plan is to release updates via comments on this page, at least for a while). If you find bugs, feel free to fix them and let me know, or plain let me know. To report a bug, please copy and paste some text of the bug and note how it can be recreated in IMs to Nobody Fugazi in world, or comments here.

The code, upon being touched by the owner, starts logging chat. The first time a person within chat range says something, it asks their permission to log their chat. If they decline, the script ignores anything they say from then on (until the script is reset, when they will be asked again). If they accept, their chat is logged.

Touching the logger again will cause logging to stop and the text, formatted in HTML, to be sent to chat - where, using History, you may copy and paste to your heart's content. { Read more }

From the Atlassian Blog:

...San Francisco, CA (Business Wire) January 9, 2007 - Linden Lab®, creator of the highly successful Second Life® virtual world, has selected Atlassian JIRA for bug and issue tracking for their open source development community. JIRA, the world's most popular Java-based issue tracker, is used by over four thousand organisations in more than 60 countries, including many open source projects...

...JIRA is an extremely flexible tool for managing tasks and issues associated with any project. While most JIRA customers use the application for bug tracking, many, including Linden Lab, use JIRA to manage other business-related tasks. For over a year, Linden Lab has leveraged JIRA internally as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool between employees. As Linden Lab CEO, Philip Rosedale, reported in a case study published last year, "Now, on your first day of work at Linden Lab you're given your login, your JIRA login, and your first task, which is to log into JIRA." (full case study available here)...

So, JIRA will be what we will be using to manage the SecondLife viewer project. Will it also manage forks? Probably not.

Still, it is interesting that JIRA was selected. It is almost open source (see here, bottom of page) - but I don't know which open source license is being used for some people but hasn't 'leaked'. That licensing structure is worth considering; I didn't think it possible to have an open source license applied selectively. I've always seen the proprietary license used selectively. Eyebrow raised, considering...

Whatever the licensing, it does appear that JIRA will be up to the task. { Read more }

Aladdin 4D Nears Open Source Goal shows that Open Aladdin4d is close to being open source:

Kermit Woodall writes "Only $3300 Remaining!! We're talking source code, trademarks and everything! Nova Design, Inc. has put the entire rights and source code to one of their top software titles, Aladdin 4D, on an exclusive offer to the Open Aladdin 4D group (www.openaladdin4d.com) who are raising the money for it. At this time we have raised enough money that only $3400 more is needed before Aladdin 4D is ours and Open Sourced!

What is Aladdin 4D? It's a powerful, but extremely easy-to-use, 3D modeling, rendering and animation package that includes the 3D tools that you'd expect as well as many unique features like relative time-based animation, an amazingly powerful particle system, and one of the fastest rendering systems on the desktop...

And from Aladdin 4D : Nova Design is selling Aladdin 4D into Open Source!:

Nova Design is selling Aladdin 4D into Open Source! We're talking source code, trademarks and everything! Nova Design, Inc. has put the entire rights and source code to one of their top software titles, Aladdin 4D, on an exclusive offer to the Open Aladdin 4D group (www.openaladdin4d.com) who are raising the money for it...

...The initial money raised through donations will be collected by the Open Aladdin 4D group, headed up by Nate Downes, and will be used to purchase Aladdin 4D from Nova Design. Nova has set the amount at only $37,579.83 which, as they've stated, is going to be used by them to pay off old bills. Compared to amounts raised for other Open Source projects, this is minor. Also, any money raised beyond this goal will be used for site costs, and rewards and bounty programs to encourage porting and further development of Aladdin 4D. We have plans for Aladdin's future, never fear!... { Read more }

I was asking about Microsoft Office 2007 backward compatibility today, only because OpenOffice doesn't support Microsoft Office Open XML - yet. It ends up that Novell is capitalizing on their recent deal with Microsoft:

WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Novell today announced that the Novell® edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites...

And from 'Novell OpenOffice to Support Microsoft Office Open XML':

..."OpenOffice.org is very important to Novell," added Friedman, "and as our customers deploy Linux desktops across their organizations, they're telling us that sharing documents between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office is a must-have." Microsoft's business division vice president Chris Caposella this morning acknowledged Novell's contribution to (Office) Open XML. { Read more }

I stole the title from Billy Marshall's article, Second Life for Server Virtualization because it is true on so many different levels. So are a lot of other things he said in the article, which - if I knew what SecondLife's architecture and code looked like - I could comment on in the context of SecondLife.

But, you see, Billy has a point lost very often on people which I think I can sum up in one line:

Quit calling it innovation if it's not; quit writing that you are innovating and innovate already.

Or as a crinkley green midget with big ears once said: 'There is no try.' Apparent translation problems caused another movie to have a quote, 'there is no spoon'. It's much the same thing. By not confining your thought into a receptacle, the thought doesn't have to be forced to the shape of the receptacle - in other words, one can shape the receptacle.

Point to ponder for anyone, really, but mainly developers:

...So why are you using all of the stale stuff provided in a general purpose operating system instead of branching out to create the perfect avatar? It’s akin to getting the girl of your dreams to say “yes” for an outing, and then wearing clothes from your dad’s ‘70s wardrobe, splashing on his Old Spice aftershave, driving his 1974 Buick Electra 225, and using all of his corny lines as your rap. Why would you do that? You wouldn’t do that, yet you accept the technical equivalent of this dismal scenario with the way you are building your virtual appliance – your avatar...

I suppose part of the problem is funding. People don't like to fund things that don't fit neatly into receptacles. Even open source falls under the sheer weight of dependency on receptacles.

There's much that could be done. Some of it might seem crazy and zaney, but it's the crazy people who bend spoons. { Read more }