10 Sep 2002
Today is my birthday. Nope, I’m not kidding, it really is. I turn 26, which feels, old. But it’s been a pretty good year.
One year ago today I was awoken by the phone. It was my father-in-law, and my wife answered the phone. Intrested in what he was calling about at 11:30 in the morning (neither my wife or I had started our jobs so we were sound asleep) I listened in to the conversation. After much confusion (“What do you mean, ‘What’s going on.’ Haven’t you been watching it?” “Watching what?”) I ended up setting up this scarry media overstimulator (that link is the top google hit for my name, btw).
The warroom idea was great until the BBC and Canadian new feeds were cut off. Then it got boring. American news sucks. I want DirecTV to have a “world news junkies” package that has BBC, Al Jezzera (which is reportedly adding a english feed soon), a few channels showing all the nightly news programs from all over the world with english subtitles. I want it all…
In the following days mirrored the gpg source code and anything else I could think might soon become contraband on my hard drive. Things fortunately didn’t get that bad.
As part of reflecting on what I could do to make the world a safer place for the values that I believed in, and what my country was built on, I joined in the development of Mojo Nation, which became Mnet. I feel I’ve added a lot to the project with the GUI, and now trying to make the code more accessable to all who would like to add to it. Now if we can get micropayments back in.
One of the things I would like to do better is money. Money has not been good to me this year, most likely because I haven’t been good to it. I’m not talking making megabucks, but not going slowly towards bankruptcy would be nice.
25 was a good year. 26 will be even better.
04 Sep 2002
So I’m in NY. A few days here and I’ve promised myself that I will not leave my house for more that 24 hours unless I get a contract signed in blood that states there will be a less than 250ms, greater than 128Kb/s connection to the net at my destination.
This library has 4 terminals, 3 with no chairs all in front of the main desk. I guess the are trying to stop pr0n viewers from using the computer. There are other computers that use Cybersitter. Wonder if they allow outgoing ssh connections. I was hoping to get some work done here, but I don’t think it can be done.
27 Aug 2002
Mnet is moving along, and it should be because I’m pushing hard. The new downloading code, dubbed BlockWrangler is working (look in cvs’s HEAD). I’m trying to get the DownloadMonitor code working with it so the GUI gives more feedback.
My blog really needs a Wiki markup filter, so that I can use the much easier to type Wiki markup language in my blog.
27 Aug 2002
Dave Winer is helping Tara Grubb with her new website. Looks great, but where are the signups to help :).
27 Aug 2002
In a mystical land called Hack The Planet
Aaron Swartz said:
It seems there have been little developments in voluntary payments. I think it would be nice to have such a thing to combine with the exciting P2P work that’s going on, as well as combat some entertainment-industry FUD.
To which I replied:
Hell, yes. In this time of the media co. running around screaming “they’re stealing, they’re stealing” we don’t yet have a way to show them that we aren’t stealing, they just don’t know how to run a business in a modern era. Tipster is what’s needed. For one, the name is great, a few people could figure out what it is right away. What’s needed is the “PGP” or “Deep Crack” approach. We know it can be done in theory, but no one that I’ve seen has gotten theory in code. Without that working example the world will just ignore us. The main app is a media player, possibly just focusing on music Version 1.0
- MusicBrainz (for the metadata)
- MuiscLink (aka FairTunes) like service
The main idea is to track what the user has listened to and every month prompt the user to pay $20 in which x% goes to the artist they listened to x% of the month, etc. Version 2.0
- MusicBrainz
- Artist pages that are Tipster aware
- OpenDBS or other low overhead payment system
Cut that middle man out of the picture. MP3/ogg files tell us where to send the $$$. You could do quite a few things to make this app more attractive than winamp/kazaa:
- Allow creation of peer recomendation groups
- integration with a p2p network
- CD cover art
- Self organizing library using MusicBrainz metadata
- Bitzi file rating system
- use mp3guessenc to weed out and replace Xing encoded mp3’s
I’m hoping to move in this direction myself.