O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/audvidsyn/

A new mailing list for practical conversations about syndication of audio
and video. A place for publishers and consumers to coordinate. RSS 2.0
enclosures are central. RSS and Atom are directly relevant. Playlists may
be relevant.

The home page of the list is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/audvidsyn/.

My motivation in starting this group is to bring together scattered conversations, because I have been seeing people talking in separate
forums who I felt needed to be introduced. Work on RSS 2.0 enclosures is
the immediate business, but I have a strong sense that the work will
expand across all syndication-related formats and software.

Why

The impetus to create this list came from this conversation on the
videoblogging@yahoogroups list:

There is a Moveable Type plugin called MT-RelEnclosures under
development. This plugin, when it is ready, will automatically add
enclosure elements to a feed. It will do this by scraping the HTML
for links to video and/or audio. Andreas Haugstrup, who is a hacker
interested in videoblogging, started working on the blogger’s end of
things. His goal was to make it possible for the blogger to signal
which linked items to enclose or not. The approach he took was to add
rel=”…” attributes to links.

This opens a can of worms. I was particularly
reminded of Kevin Marks’ and Tantek Celik’s interest in semantic XHTML to express things in HTML that you would normally say in XML.

Over in another community, the podcasters are working on metadata.
One metadata development is work on filenames, to make them more
useful. Another development is issues related to ID3 tags for
podcasts. I took from this that people working on metadata and the
podcasters should be introduced.

Over in another community, the Atom people are discussing whether to
discuss Atom enclosures.

Over in another community, I received an email about using XSPF as a
feed format for audio and/or video.

All together, my feeling is that developers of different parts of this
puzzle are sometimes in situations where they need to coordinate, and
a mailing list with members of the different groups is called for.

Thoughts?

Related link: http://tree.celinuxforum.org/pubwiki/moin.cgi/BootupTimeResources

“The following are individual pages with information about various technologies relevant to improving bootup time for Linux. Some of these describe local patches available on this site. Others point off to projects or patches maintained elsewhere.”

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/automobiles/27TAUB.html?ex=1256529600&en=d3663…

TODAY, you can go out and buy a car that can display television, park itself, display your email, and surf the web. But not in America - our cars have to stay dumb, blunt like safety scissors, lest we hurt ourselves and blame the manufacturer.

In “Doing Digital Media
Right,” Derrick Story laid out his goals for O’Reilly’s
ambitious new Digital Media site.
I’m happy to report that Phase 2, Digital
Audio, is now online, joining Photography. Look for Phase 3, Graphic Design,
to launch in the months ahead.

What can you expect on the Digital Audio site? We’re all ears. Since
the time I ran Music & Computers magazine (1994–1998), I’ve
sought out authors who share my enormous enthusiasm for computer music production.
Many times, that meant working with people who’d never published before
but had solid, exciting ideas and the patience to explain them clearly. I often
ask authors to imagine they had just discovered a terrific new music-production
technique when suddenly I had showed up with a camcorder to watch over their
shoulder. Of course, on the Web, demonstrating those techniques is much easier
than in a magazine.

So if you’re doing cool things with digital audio and want to tell the
world, just
(And don’t forget to sign up for our free Digital
Media Services Directory.) If you’ve been dying to get into digital
audio (or do it better), please use the Talkback link below to suggest topics
you’d like us to cover.

Singing the News

Keep an eye on the RSS news feeds at the top right of the home page. You’ll
find links to new product announcements, trends, other digital audio articles,
and to gadgets people wouldn’t normally think of using for music production
but that offer sneaky shortcuts. We’ll also populate these blogs with hot
tips, editorials, discoveries, and buzz overhead on other forums. We have lots
of ideas for expanding the site as well with useful multimedia features such
as sample libraries and Web-based production tools.

Mission: Invaluable

In short, our mission here at “AudiO’Reilly” is to provide
inspiring, useful, and timely information on digital audio production. We’ll
place strong emphasis on using the software, gear, and techniques we cover.
In addition to extensive tips and tutorials, we’ll feature technology
primers, interviews (again with a how-to emphasis) and artist profiles.
I see the latter as the audio equivalent of the “featured photographer” profiles
on the O’Reilly photo site; they’ll be based on annotated MP3 examples.

We also plan to offer master classes on popular products—like
the crucial “in use” section of a product review, showcasing creative
ways to exploit and hack the products rather than simply regurgitating spec
lists. We’ll top it off with occasional editorials. Digital audio is
fabulous, but it has a long way to go.

Looking forward to the journey,

David

Dying to get into digital audio (or do it better) ? Suggest topics you’d like us to cover.

Related link: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7857

This is the third and final article I wrote for linuxjournal documenting our quest for fast booting of our in-car CarBot computers.

After I finished writing the article, I was contacted by another person who said they got a 5 second boot time using linuxbios and our motherboard. Based our not-too-deep experiments, I believe we could achieve that; it’s a matter of having to do it for every new motherboard that we ship with that makes it a difficult proposition.

Anyway, the series of articles has a lot of good links relating to speeding up the booting process in Linux.

Earlier Articles:
Part I
Part II
Part III

Related link:

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html

RE-UPDATED LINK

I found a couple of links for creating bootable flash drives that I found useful.
How to boot from a USB device … has good instructions, and this worked for me, and took about 20 minutes.

Then I found this utility: HP bootable flash utility
And it worked for me as well, and took about a minute.
(old link: here)

The cool thing is, the HP utility is reported to work with many other flash drives - I have a no-name USB 2.0 thumb drive, made it bootable with the HP utility on a 1.1 USB bus, and then used it to boot a Via EPIA-M2 computer by setting the BIOS to “boot from USB hard drive”.

Although I’m quite comfortable with the command line and a 2 page FAQ, running a GUI and clicking “make bootable” sure speeds things up.

Related link: http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/xml/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnxml/html/sc…

Dare Obasanjo has compiled a short introduction to Schematron (1.5) for the MicroSoft Developer Network. This is the first time (that I am aware of) that MS has had material promoting Schematron. Great! I think it springs from Daniel Cazzulino’s work with Schematron.NET.
Maybe people are finally not seeing Schematron as a threat to their favourite grammar, but a highly pragmatic tool. I wonder whether the rise of unit testing (e.g. Java’s JUnit) also has softened people’s hearts towards open-model constraint checking in general (the former relying on the latter, of course).

Related link: http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/sightings/S01.html

Talking to Groovy’s John Wilson last week, he mentioned that his mini-XML parser had been used to make a toaster that toasts the day’s weather map onto your bread!

I missed this originally: but it perhaps this is the new medium. Quick: someone should patent personalized fast food!

Perhaps (bogglingly experimental Spanish restaurant) El Bulli will toast surrealist poetry on their concoctions?

(Insert joke about spam and toast here)