Using Software

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 }

With almost 10,000 photos on Flickr, 'Digital Photography From the Ground Up' was an easy book for me to pick review. Considering I started off as a reluctant amateur and have become a reluctant semi-professional digital photographer, I'm a hack. It all started with my first camera, a Canon PowerShot A40. If you asked me about focal length multiplication factor/crop factor, minimum focusing distance, f-stop or even hyperfocus, I would have just stared at you.

I won't anymore. Granted, some of the techniques I figured out on my own - but I didn't know exactly how things like the hyperfocus technique worked or how to refer to them when speaking with others; I just knew that they did. And most of the stuff I actually had not even bothered with, even when I was shopping for my last camera. The camera ended up being my present Canon PowerShot SX100IS 8MP Digital Camera with 10X Optical Image Stabilized Zoom.

It seems just about everyone on the Internet has a digital camera, and many of us are just fumbling through the pictures one at a time. Sometimes we get it right. Most of the time we get it wrong, and most of us don't even bother with the ones we get wrong.

Enter Digital Photography From the Ground Up. { Read more }

These days, time is a precious commodity and I quite simply don't have as much time to spend dealing with social networking... networks. Facebook is one thing which is an enormous time sink and becomes more so because most people get a new toy and, like most people when using something that dumbs down the Internet enough for them to use, go a bit nuts.

It's ok. I understand. I don't necessarily like it, but I understand. And as someone who does understand, it is my responsibility to enlighten. After all, I've been around long enough to remember when the phrase 'asbestos underwear' was new. I remember when email addresses were strings of numbers and dots. For that matter, I remember when pornography was hard to come by (no pun intended).

Here's a short list of what not to do with Facebook if you don't run into the dark side of this techno-dinosaur - and what would be considered inappropriate etiquette by anyone who doesn't view the Internet as a toy built for someone else's recreation... at that someone else's expense of time and energy. { Read more }

• Poking someone who is already your friend is annoying. 'Poking' seems to have been designed to allow people who are not your friend to see your profile. If you want to say something, then bloody well say it or be advised that I have another idea of where you can stick your digit. And it typically doesn't smell nice, unless you're into that sort of thing... at which point I'll have to pick a new place for your finger. Like in your eye.

I use the Seamonkey integrated web browser - I've done so for years - but as I plunge more and more into using Google Earth, I've been noticing something that would annoy the heck out of anyone running Google Earth and Seamonkey at the same time:

As soon as you try to access something on the web through Google Earth, it tries to uninstall Seamonkey. This would be filed under 'making me unhappy'. Thus, I searched around and came up with this page in the Google Earth forums that, in turn, got me to the real Seamonkey/Google Earth answer:

I have the same issue. After some investigation, I found this is becuase GE (or possibly MSHTML.DLL ?) attempts to run SEAMON~1.EXE, with no path, so goes looking for it in C:\WINDOWS, and finds SeamonkeyUninstall.exe, which in 8.3 name format is of course SEAMON~1.EXE, so it runs it.

Why it is doing this, when previous versions did not, is not yet clear, but at least this is something to go on.

Workaround to prevent seamonkey being closed every time you click on a link is to rename seamonkey to something that does not match SEAMON~1.EXE, eg put a "1" in front of it or something - "1 seamonkeyuninstall.exe" works nicely.

This does not make links works, but at least it stops all your seamonkey windows being closed.

Props to smeenz for helping me sort that bug out. { Read more }

My abstract for the Prato 2008: ICTs for Social Inclusion: What is the Reality? has been accepted - so I'm trying to get everything together to head to Prato, Italy for October 27th through 31st. I'm hoping I can spend a little extra time exploring Europe, but that has a lot to do with finances and scheduling - both of which are on an upswing but are a bit unpredictable at this point.

My paper, Inclusion in Synthetic Worlds, will deal with inclusion issues in (you guessed it) synthetic/virtual worlds that affect participation and determine how the worlds themselves are used. The abstract, which was accepted: { Read more }

I was fortunate enough to be requested to review a copy of Philipp K. Janert's Gnuplot in Action before its release - the draft itself is still a work in progress, so this cannot be a full review. Because of this, it will not be scored on the KnowProSE.com scale. Also, humble apologies for the tardiness on this one. I wish I had been slacking off. Instead was really busy with travel and other things, otherwise this would have been up last week.

Graphical analysis of data is increasingly important these days because even looking at the data in a different way can lead to interesting insights. Gnuplot is an impressive application - I have had occasion to use it in the past when doing some R&D, and I admittedly wasted at least half a day fiddling with Gnuplot itself. Why? I don't use it every day - and it is safe to assume that a lot of people who would find it useful may be in the same boat. Therefore, the premise of the book seems sound.

The best way to 'explain' the usefulness of Gnuplot would be from Gnuplot examples themselves. For those of you who don't know what Gnuplot is, here's an introduction quoted from the Gnuplot home page (check out the link in the quotation): { Read more }

• Drupal: Content Management System.
• Google Analytics blog
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Inside Adsense
• Official Google Blog
• Yahoo Search Blog

You can now download Lotus Symphony at no cost from IBM.

It isn't open source, but it does work on both Linux and Microsoft Windows. I'm sticking with Open Office.org, but it is good to have another option available to both platforms.

Could IBM be encouraged to make it Open Source? Maybe, but they haven't offered it as such so it doesn't look like that will be happening soon. When everyone was using Lotus 1-2-3 back in the 1980s, I was using Lotus Symphony... and back then I was using the GEM Desktop. I'll have to check it out and see what has changed in the last...

20 years.

Man, I'm getting old.