Older blog entries for highgeek (starting at number 14)

Sorry for the fact that I haven't written an entry for a while. I should get my studio in North Beach on Tuesday, so that should give me some more room and a place to hack at other then the office.

I got an ORINOCO WaveLAN card and an Apple Airport that I hope to plug into DSL for connectivity at home. It should be pretty bitchin.

I have been working on a cool XML project that hopefully should be live sometime next week, I will keep you posted.

Adjusting to the new environment and being away from the woman I love has been tough to say the least, but I am slowly starting to see the light and how much fun work is going to be.

LinuxWorld really sucked and I am happy to say that I only had to be there for 2 days.

I have been playing with a new personal project which is an AudioFS for FreeBSD written by Theo van Klaveren. He told me that he should have another version out soon that he has been working on that is suppose to be more stable which I am really looking forward to. When working on MP3: The definitive Guide we had a list of several Audio FS types for different OSes such as BeOS. I am happy to see we got one underway for my favorite OS, FreeBSD.

Well, I finally made it up to San Francisco. I am currently in an Executive Apartment kinda place that is fully furnished while spending most of my free time looking for a more perminent place to stay in this city.

I still call back and forth with my unlimited mobile-to-mobile cell phone to talk to my girlfriend and such. I was talking with the PacBell PCS folks here on California street and they claim that there is no way they can simply stack on another phone number to my nokia 6190 GSM phone, which although technically is possible, is really annoying.

If I could simply keep my 858 area code number and service and tack on a 415 area code number for the San Francisco folks I would have it made, but for whatever reason they are not willing to take this on. It is really annoying when something technologically is really simple and possible, but for business or accounting reasons (or maybe simply because of cluelless sales folks) this is not possible. So, anyone who has experience with this and is reading this feel free to send me an e-mail.

Work has been an entire new thing as well, I have been spending most of my time getting a demo box ready for the O'Reilly Conference next week, but I haven't really gotten into coding yet. I still need to get myself in a reasonable matter on all the mailing lists again. I still haven't gotten my entire mail sorted out yet.

Things have been heck-tick trying to get ready for my trip up north. Cleaning up the apartment, paying off all the bills, etc. etc.

I am one of the original people who started and moderated the San Diego Gothic/Industrial Community site, but although I still want to contribute and be involved it looks like there are others who are interested in taking it over. I really wish I just had more time to contribute. I definately could use the help to get it going to the full extend I would like to see it go, I am just not too sure to what extend that would really be. Usually people claim that they want to contribute, but usually they have other interests into getting involved and in the end end up contributing nothing. I hope I can at least keep the site running and provide as much technical support as I can. I really enjoyed the San Diego scene.

Fourth of July was a blast (other then the fact that I some how got my DSL to blow up after I unplug its power cord). I spend some time with my good friends Adam and Lidija, Rachel, Riik , Dennis and later on with my old buddy Tommy Tarka. I also got to pull out my CD DJ gear which is always a pleasure and a blast. I played a wide mix from Haujobb, Forma Tadre to X-Cabs, Imminent Starvation, Synapscape to X-Marks the Pedwalk and Banca De Gaia.

Only if I had more money and time to play with musical equipment. it is soo entertaining. It's gotta get to a point to where you can control your MIDI instruments with perl. :-)

Anyways, I am getting nervous for my trip. I am not sure if I will have enough time to really get everything done that I would like to before I leave. At least I had a chance to see most of my MP3.com buddies this Fourth of July.

This is my first diary from my trip to San Fransisco. I must say that I had a wonderful time.

I really like the city. I have decided that I am going to take an opportunity in San Fransisco to work on some great projects and products. I am finalizing all of this now, so I do not want to talk about it too much until everything is settled. Starting my own business will have to wait for a while, because I felt that I could not pass this opportunity up.

On a different note my two new monitors arrived yesterday with my new laptop. It is going to be fun installing FreeBSD and such onto this beast and get it configured correctly with the new monitors. I will most likely be going to San Fransisco starting July 10th, so I have a lot of things to do in San Diego before taking this trek up north.

I haven't been too on top of the news these last weeks, but hopefully I will still be able to point to some good articles in the next couple of days.

I spend most of my day today working on the computer and watching the MP3 Summit webcast. It has been interesting to see soo many people being at a conference like this without anyone knowing (even after 3+ years) on how the music industry is going to move online. Intellectual Property and how to maintain the property owners rights while providing the consumers with a pleasurable experience is still the sought after solution.

Today Cnet published this article that talks about the MP3.com "open" APIs and comments from the tech community saying that a system is not "open" unless it can be usable by everyone, but that is really what they are meant to be open APIs or Protocols per se. It seems to me the only way this is going to work is to really open up these APIs/Protocols and post the specs in RFC style format (maybe even submit them to the IETF). But if you open up the entire API/Protocol on how to talk to my.mp3.com or any other MSP service, and have it be a standard, it needs to be readily available and usable by everyone while still have the ability to protect IP owners. This would probably mean some kind of public/private key or username/password scheme to protect who has the ability to access what data if this would be service you would have to pay for. This would probably have a similar issue in the RSS/RDF world of distributing articles between content providers and general/subject related portal sites.

So in common terms, again, the API is "open", but not open enough! Or it should become at least either open source or an open specification that can then be implemented by anyone who chooses to do so.

MP3.com seems to show somewhat mixed feelings about the entire open source community. While allowing developers (such as myself) to release perl code to CPAN or providing a Linux version of BeamIt with GPL'd source and a closed library. I really wish it would have the ability too come out more and make the "open" be really Open.

One of the reasons I decided to leave MP3.com was because the company was slowly getting too big for its own good, especially after an IPO where it needs to start worrying about the shareholders rather then its services and consumers. When a company grows at such an insane rate it is really hard to bring the new people up to speed fast enough, while still keeping the same synergy. Our popularity also made it hard to keep up with demand, we were getting soo many new artists joining that it was hard to give that personal care that they all so desperately wanted. People end up falling through the cracks and it can take a very long time (especially in net-time) to get them going again. It doesn't happen on purpose, it simply is caused by growing pains and by demands for attention by different people pulling you all in a gazillion directions rather then focusing on your core goals. Since you are limited on time, you focus on the majority.

Although, I really enjoyed working there and thought it was a killer work environment, it became quite obvious that the company had shifted its focus after IPO. Its main concern became the investors and shareholders before anything or anyone else. It became quite hard to move around terrabytes of music while not disturbing visitors to the site and artists uploading and making sure you did not accidentally leave a file uploaded by an artist in a black hole. It happens; not on purpose, but you can not deny it. It really comes with moving too fast. I am sure a lot of other fast growing businesses have similar experiences.

While still debating the idea of moving to San Fransisco for some of the opportunities that I am interested in, I do have doubts if I really want to leave the San Diego area. In the San Diego Union-Tribune there was an article giving some input to why I am struggling with this. We really will have to see how good the offers will be before I can say that moving up north would be of interest.

Another site of interest that I am not sure people have seen is the Techdeals section of Findlaw.com. It has all sorts of agreements and legal documents about company deals, IP and employment. Check it out.

After reading the responses to Napster/Gnutella: the real story, I remembered the Steve Albini article and decided to re-share that with you all. Today is a bar-b-que day at La Jolla shores with an old friend. It will be great to see what he has been up to these last couple of years.

After a pointer about an L.A. Times article, I notice different numbers in regards to the settlements. 1/3 cent per stream of a song and 1 1/2 cents per addition to my.mp3.com per song doesn't sound too bad. If they had to pay the 1 1/2 cents per stream as the NY Times article seemed to claim it would have been a lot worse.

Anyways, I have been spending some time getting my servers sorted out and watched the netherlands play soccer against denmark which was entertaining. Time to get some sleep before saturday morning hits.

Fleischers' old home Hits Magazine has an interesting rumor on their site. "MP3 NEEDS TO JIBE WITH JIVE: The MP3.com deal with BMG, negotiated last week, does not include Britney Spears, NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys or any other Jive act, which means the Music Service Provider will have to negotiate a separate agreement with the label.". They also have more info on the other rumor although it has been said that MP3.com is not for sale.

I am also working on plans to be in San Fransisco part of next week. USENIX 2000 and the MP3 Summit are both in San Diego then, so it will be a busy but productive week. :)