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Hooked on ITConversations
In recent months I have become a heavy ITConversations podcast consumer. The site offers an extraordinary selection of recorded interviews and conference presentations for free download or streaming. These podcasts have pretty much replaced most of my NPR radio consumption. With an iPod Shuffle, podcasting software and a TuneCast II Mobile FM Transmitter I essentially now schedule my own radio program. It somehow reminds me of my first experiences with Tivo back in 2000 which completely changed the way I how consumed television.
Many topics on ITConversations are closely related to my interests. Often, I have read books or articles by the people featured in the postcasts. I find it very insightful to hear an author speak about his or her area of interest and expertise. There are many things you don't learn about an author or topic without hearing him speak.
Until ITConversations, I had to be lucky that an author or technical presenter would either come to town (e.g. book signing event, user group meeting) or speak at a conference I would attend. This obviously limits the number of presentations I could listen to.
What fascinates me about ITConversations is not only the outstanding content, but also the open culture and adherence to quality standards by the site's creator Doug Kaye. The audio production quality of the podcasts is excellent, with the minor exception for some of the phone interviews (for obvious reasons). Doug has recently listed his preferred audio processing tools. Other interesting stuff can be found on the ITConversations wiki as well.
Doug's attention to detail is impressive. For example, the site offers not only MP3 but also AAC downloads. AAC audio files are bookmarkable on iPods. This is an important feature when you are a heavy podcast consumer. Another example is his response to the rise of portable music players without a display, like the iPod Shuffle. Now, new ITConversations podcasts feature Audio IDs that allow listeners to quickly skip through a number of podcasts on ultra-portable players.
Here are some of my favorite ITConversations podcasts. Go ahead and listen to these or others on the site. Be careful, you might get hooked:
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Downloading the CodeCon 2004 Audio Archives
Like last year, the CodeCon conference audio
archives have been made available
via BitTorrent. This MP3 file archive is a chunky 300MB in size.
Since my ISP just upgraded the DSL download speeds in my area, it was fun to
see the download finish in less than 15 minutes.
As you can see from the small screenshot, I'm currently using the TorrentStorm client for Windows. It offers many management and configuration options that the original BitTorrent client doesn't provide. Last month, TorrentStorm 1.2 was released. Try it out if you haven't already. It's a great BitTorrent client.
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Blog Update
After pushing this off for several months, I have finally updated this weblog to support more recent web standards. It now validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict while providing a compliant RSS 0.91 feed. Being in upgrade mood, I also switched to the latest Blosxom release.
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Kicking Tires With SpamProbe
Like many other people I have experienced a massive increase of spam in one of my public email accounts over the last year. For that account my junk mail rate is currently at about 250 messages per day. Until recently Mozilla's bayesian filter was quite helpful weeding out these annoying messages. However, I was never able to get a higher spam detection rate than 90%, even after proper training with thousands of messages. Even though 90% is pretty good, it is still not good enough at these high spam rates. After a long weekend and 1000 spam mails later you will still have 100 spam messages waiting in your inbox. That is not acceptable. On top of that I had quite a significant number of false positives.
Looking for alternatives I came across SpamProbe, an advanced bayesian filter for Unix-based systems that Paul Graham mentioned in one of his recent articles. SpamProbe's author, Brian Burton, claims that his software can offer detection rates of 99% and higher. Having used SpamProbe for over two weeks I'm already very close to that detection rate. On top of that I haven't found one single false positive after the switch. As you can imagine I'm very pleased with this great piece of software.
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64 Wi-Fi hotspots within a five mile radius
Austin is a city that has seen strong Wi-Fi adoption for quite some time. I checked with the new JIWIRE service launched earlier this month. There are 64 official hotspots within a five mile radius around our house. Of course not counting all open access points that one could expect near campus. I'm impressed. This is a hotspot density that is not yet very common across the country.
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Bloglines - A hosted, web-based RSS reader
After having used numerous different stand-alone RSS readers I'm now a happy user of Bloglines. It is a hosted service that provides a simple two-pane interface to personal RSS subscriptions. Since it is browser-based the user is not bound to a specific machine and operating system. This helps with the typical work machine/home machine dilemma. For migrating users Bloglines supports OPML import.
Following an hosted aggregator approach Bloglines is bandwidth friendly towards blog servers. All Bloglines users share the same feed database. As a blogger you will find the following line in your web server logs:
"Bloglines/1.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; x subs)"
Of course,
"x"will be replaced by the number of Bloglines subscribers to your blog.I really like Bloglines' ease of use. Today, the service is free of advertisements. However, not much is known about the future of Bloglines and how it will evolve. Looking at its creator's past big changes could be in Bloglines' future.
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Presentation on RESTful Web Services
Tonight I will speak about RESTful Web Services at the XML Austin Users Group. The topic offers a solid ground for a heated discussion. I'm looking forward to the meeting.
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Led Zeppelin and LOTR
Last week I came across some old Led Zeppelin CDs and felt in the mood to listen to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. As "Ramble On" kept on rambling, I suddenly heard Plant sing about "the darkest depth of Mordor" and "Gollum and the evil one". Wait. I had to rewind and listen to the song again. Indeed, he mentions "Mordor" and "Gollum". What am I listening to, Led Zeppelin? Right.
A quick Web search pointed me to the Zeppelin and Tolkien Relations Page from 1998. Apparently, several Led Zeppelin lyrics were inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien. I'm sure many Zeppelin and Tolkien fans have known about this connection for a long time, but it was a surprise to me. With regard to the recent success of the LOTR movies, it makes Led Zeppelin even cooler than they already are.
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CodeCon 2.0 Conference Report
Robert Kaye brings us detailed coverage from the recent CodeCon 2.0 in San Francicso: day 1, day 2, and day 3.
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BEA's future as seen by Adam Bosworth
Recent presentations by Adam Bosworth, BEA's Chief Architect, have raised my interest in his company's future direction. Looking through these slides it seems that BEA is turning into an XML messaging company. There is almost no mention of Java or J2EE. For whatever it is worth, the word "Java" is only mentioned four times in this presentation, but "XML" can be found more than 20 times. Is innovation in the pure J2EE space over?
After some research I discovered that Adam Bosworth held a keynote presentation at last year's VLDB conference. The title of his submitted paper was "Data Routing Rather than Databases: The Meaning of the Next Wave of the Web Revolution to Data Management". This is a very interesting read and apparently the foundation for his newly articulated future for BEA.
Copyright ©2002-2004 Oliver Schmelzle. All rights reserved.