Scott Rettberg

The View from Above

A satellite view of my neighborhood on Google Maps, which now has satellite imagery.

Dave Winer recently announced that Userland will soon be releasing the kernel on which Frontier (the system used for the blogs here at Stockton) and Radio are based for open source development. That's good news. Though details on the licensing haven't been released, even if an open source developing community doesn't develop around it, should Userland go under, their software won't die with the company.

This weekend Nick and I used SubEthaEdit to work on installment 4 of Implementation. SubEthaEdit is a great piece of freeware for Mac OSX, allowing multiple people to work on one document at one time, either on your local network via Rendezvous or over the Internet. A tool like this would make the kind of “jam session” writing that Dirk, William and I liked to do when we could get together in person while working on The Unknown a lot easier from remote locations.

The name of the software, which seemed strange to me, is from Douglas Adams. Cool:

The Guide was compiled by researchers roaming round the galaxy, beaming their copy in, which was then instantly available to anybody to read. Over, believe it or not, something called the SubEthaNet. [...] I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end. But I did have the inkling of an idea that a collaborative guide, one that was written and kept up to date by the people who used it, in real time, might be a neat idea.

– Douglas Adams

This afternoon while chatting with Jill, I decided to test the limits of my wireless connection. It went further than I thought. Unbeknownst to me, Jill was taking snapshots as I strolled.

I have a decent connection all the way to the bay. I was able to show Jill some pixelated ducks.

Not quite to the beach though. As I walked down the street, Jill watched my image break up

into something resembling a futurist painting.

If I have time this weekend, I might try and see if I can install photoblox, one of several very cool little Laszlo widgets that Marc Canter is using on his blog.

We’re reading Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen in my Internet Writing & Society class, and discussing AI. While googling around trying to see if there was a working version of Depression 2.0 out there, I ran across Jabberwacky, a Web chatterbot that took 3rd place in the 2003 Loebner Prize.
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Yesterday I attended Jan Rune Holmevik’s dissertation defense at the University of Bergen. While I haven’t yet had a chance to read it in its entirety, from attending his defense, I can report that his dissertation, TraceBack: MOO, Open Source, and the Humanities, includes a great historical overview of the open source movement, as well as a history of LinguaMOO and the development of Encore. His dissertation in Humanistic Informatics also included a program, the Encore MOO system that he and Cynthia Haynes developed. In conjunction with his successful defense, he also released Encore 4.0, which is is distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Gratulerer Jan Rune!

This post was originally published on Grand Text Auto.

Wow what a great toy for a book, cd, or dvd fetishist. Brian sent along a link to the Intelliscanner Collector, a personal barcode reader for the mac with integrated software that automatically downloads cover art and title info. $180 though. I'm not buying it. I'm trying to shed things, Simplify, Simplify. But maybe I'll buy one when they come down to $50 or so on eBay.

I recently downloaded the demo of ToySight, software that uses the mac’s iSight camera to integrate object and motion control into a variety of videogames and “toys.” The demo includes “Freefall,” a game in which you stand in front of the camera with arms extended as your avatar falls through the clouds, trying to collect balloons and land on target, and “Laser Harp,” a toy harp in which you pluck strings that appear in front of your image. It might just be the gee-whiz factor, but I see a lot of potential for this kind of cam-based interaction (admittedly not enough to buy the package, but I looking forward to playing more of the games with my friend’s daughter when she gets it). I wonder what kind of electronic literature we might dream up for this form of interaction? Maybe something like Noah et al’s Talking Cure could soon be coming to a laptop near you.

This post was originally published on Grand Text Auto.

Nick, in response to the recent Copyright and the Network Computer: A Stakeholder's Congress conference, asks the DRM-obsessed of the world to Stop Handcuffing My Mind. Nick has a good point — most digital rights managements schemes are “code” for “we're working with congress to make your computer less useful than it is today. Darn it!” Which reminds me of a recent comment on GTA, by an unemployed recording industry middle-manager (I assume). Nick describes a world in which the general purpose computer might become the restricted-use computer, via legislation (set your time machines several weeks into the future).

I finally made the leap to OSX a few months back, and I'm finding that iTunes is one of the first computer programs I've run across in a long time that has actually changed one of my regular life behaviors — the way that I listen to and think about music. I've been ripping all my old CDs to the hard drive. Having the bulk of my music collection available and visible at all times is completely different from having the CDs stashed away in a drawer, five of them playing at any given time. I suppose that most of the time that I played music on my little home stereo, I was listening to the the five CDs in the changer, usually the ones I'd purchased most recently, alternated with a few standbys. But now it's all always onhand, and searchable. iTunes let you search and sort by a bunch of different criteria — Artist, Title, Album, Date, Genre, your rating, etc., and allows you to generate smart playlists that automatically update — so for instance I have smart playlists for artists (Beatles, Bjork, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Johnny Cash), for genres, both those predefined by iTunes (Blues, Jazz, Latin) and those that I define (Funky, Songwriters, even those of a particular record label — Bloodshot). In some ways iTunes has given me access to my musical memory — the music of my teenage years mixed with my Blues period mixed with the bit of Latin and insurgent country and Built to Spill from my last Chicago period). A new hard-drive, a wireless connection, and suddently I'm always on my laptop and hardly ever sitting in front of the desktop. And I'm listening to music I forgot I even owned.

Last week Apple released the Windows version of iTunes. The iTunes, iTunes music store and iPod software/hardware cluster may turn out to be the smartest thing the company has done in its history.

In addition to the iTunes software itself, there are a bunch of little freeware and shareware programs for OSX to modify and enhance the iTunes experience. Clutter is one of my favorite of these. Clutter searches the amazon.com database for cover art of music in your library, allowing you to download the art into Clutter and iTunes, and in a neat gesture of retro-remediation, lets you stack the covers on your desktop and play them as you would CDs by clicking on any of the covers cluttered on your desktop. Kung-Tunes is a little widget that generates a webpage showing the current and last five songs played on iTunes and ftps it up to your server. I've had it running for the last few days, and threw a link to the playlist up on the left there. I'm not sure if anyone reading this blog would be interested in what I happen to be listening to at any given time — but why not? Similarly, iChatStatus is a little program that displays the current iTunes song on your iChat buddy list. iLyric is a cool idea — a script that searches for the lyrics of the song currently playing in iTunes — though the results I've come up with are often inaccurate or unsatisfactory.

Back home in Chicago a few weeks ago, I played Girlfriends with my niece Kayley. Maybe Disney isn’t all bad. Kayley’s four and half years old. The experience of playing this game, designed for girls six years old and up (sure she’s an overacheiver) was interesting for several reasons — not just because my goddaughter is always a pleasure, a giggling joke-telling, nonstop kinetic force of nature. It got me thinking about literacy, and about how computers are influencing the way that the current generation of post-toddlers are learning to read and write. Kayley, for instance, can’t yet read. They’ll cover that next year, probably. But she can install a Windows program (in this case the Girlfriends CD-ROM), can distinguish the Next button from the Previous button, and can agree to an End-User License. With no coaching at all, she was able to install the program, and to complain about the fact that she’d already installed it, but that the Windows box was buggy, and that the password interface was a big pain.
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