Technophile Monkey

If you’re looking for an opportunity to solve a unique UI design problem and would like to see your name in a Free Software product, here’s a chance

Look at this mix of metaphors:

Scared yet? It’s a screenshot from one of the projects I’m involved in that is currently entering beta, which means that people are actually using that interface. Such cruelty.

The project’s called leihs and is an inventory management system with a focus on a borrowing and rental. It exists so that the university can manage its several thousand pieces of equipment that students can borrow for free.

We have a unique problem here: We need to make four dimensions of information visible in the interface. How many pieces of an item are available? When are they available? When aren’t they available? And which inventory pool are we taking how many of them from? The system also knows how to split orders between various inventory pools, since the university has many independent inventory managers and sub-inventories.

We’re currently trying to make this accessible through a mix of metaphors. Our frontend is part e-mail client (look at the top and bottom panes), part online store (look at the item categories and shopping cart) and part hotel/flight booking system. Then there’s a graph that displays item availability over time, a tough one all on its own, but more annoying still when you have to integrate that information with all the other stuff you’re displaying.

So what do you think? If you’d like to contribute, send me an e-mail or sign up for the development mailing list. The backend and all the hidden bits in leihs are beautiful already, it would be great if the frontend were as well

Lincomp now stocks the T400 in its ultimate version (4 GB RAM, 250 GB HD, 2.53 GHz Core2Duo, DVD-RW) with preinstalled Ubuntu 8.10 for reasonable CHF 1870.00.

The T400 is a new entry in the T-series, which already hosts the popular T43 and T61. If you need a workhorse that’s built like a tank, the T400 is a good choice.

Bei Lincomp gibt es jetzt das T400 mit Vollausstattung (4 GB RAM, 250 GB HD, 2.53 GHz Core2Duo T9400, DVD-RW) und vorinstalliertem Ubuntu 8.10 für ansehnliche CHF 1′870.00.

Das T400 gehört zur neuen T-Serie und ist der Nachfolger des beliebten T43 bzw. T61. Wer ein Arbeitstier braucht, solide wie ein Panzer, ist mit dem T400 gut beraten.

At least if you are Monty Python. After offering all their material for free on YouTube, sales of Monty Python films and series at Amazon have exploded.

Yes, the Pythons are an established brand and so you naysayers will complain that this wouldn’t be possible for people like you and me. But it is! Look at Yahtzee’s success, his movies going from a YouTube hobby to writing episodes under contract for The Escapist. Look at Cyriak’s surreal animations (some of them quite Terry Gilliamesque). Cyriak is one of the UK’s most successful people on YouTube. He’s also done some of the idents for sumo.tv and at least one music video.

This is more and more proof that the classic notion of copyright is outdated and needs replacement. Not just because handling the right to copy someone’s work has been a weird thing to do ever since the book press was replaced by cheap laser printers and PDFs. Go, YouTube stars!

YouTube’s not the only distribution channel we need, however, that would centralize control. As soon as we find material that is under some permissive (for copying) license, we can set up our own channels that are independent of corporate control. Using distribution methods that warez junkies have known for decades, we should help those artists that give us permission to help, that put their work under Creative Commons, the Art Libre license or similar. An example is this funny and slightly pythonesque short film by Ana Husman. Her servers are crushed by requests, so I’ll try to fetch the movies somehow and stick them on The Pirate Bay/ISOhunt and eMule. Update: I’ve torrented and converted all her movies I could find, including Lunch. They’re up on The Pirate Bay. Thanks to Tomislav Medak for the link to the original files!

Her films are completely awesome, so this is step one for me, become part of the distribution chain and offer my bandwidth so she doesn’t have to. If Ana’s stuff ever appears in a store, on Amazon or in a cinema, wonderful! That’s the moment where offering stuff for free will make her money.

We’ve dreamed for years about this day, and I totally missed it when it came to pass. Today a fairer way of dealing with creative content is possible, thanks to permissive licenses and distribution technology that was formerly exclusive to warez. In the 90s, we’ve dreamed about putting the powers of couriers and release groups to work for a media distribution system, always concluding with “but the big media companies won’t let us”. If you go back to discussions on Slashdot between 96 and 98, you should catch some of that. We didn’t get our own release groups for art (maybe we should!) but we did end up with BitTorrent. With permissive licenses, there is no one stopping you from distributing something you like — the dream comes true.

And who knows, perhaps offering something for free will make you money.

Update: With Ana Husman’s server down, I’ve been trying to find her CC licensed movies elsewhere. It’s tough! Especially festival organizers have an opportunity to learn something here, and to educate visitors. They could link directly from festival programs to downloads of CC licensed stuff, but so far I haven’t seen a single one that does so. Perhaps the organizers aren’t even aware of the CC status of what they’re showing? Anyway, I’ll keep on searching and hoping.

I’ve created a misheard lyrics video for Nightwish’s song Amaranth quite some time ago. It achieved about half a million views on YouTube, but now WMG (which I assume is Warner Music Group) has taken it down. I was told that some people actually sang my misheard lyrics instead of the original ones at concerts, so I’m flattered. But now the video has disappared!

Google/YouTube offers a fantastic service for such situations: AudioSwap. You can swap your movies’ audio tracks for ones that Google has officially licensed from the content owners. This creates a great opportunity for alternative video authors (including misheard lyrics authors) to put their content on YouTube, with fully licensed audio tracks.

I hope that WMG finds their sense of humor soon and licenses Nightwish’s Amaranth to Google, so that my video (and everyone else’s!) becomes available again. Misheard lyrics videos are a fun hobby, but Warner Music Group is being a spoilsport here.

The original video was at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWd6j5rphtg

Update: I’ve now circumvented the problem by placing a muted version of my video side by side with the official Nuclear Blast YouTube video of the track So you can more or less watch it again at this mashup page.

The IFPI says that the music industry is now reinventing itself and adapting the ways it’s selling its products to the needs of today’s increasingly digital customers, instead of suing them to death:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/IFPI-Die-Neuerfindung-der-Musikindustrie–/meldung/121821

In an interview in 1996, twelve years ago, me and a few others told journalists that the music industry has to reinvent itself and adapt the ways it’s selling its products to the needs of tomorrow’s increasingly digital customers, instead of suing them to death.

We were of course ignored, just like our peers in other countries. Who wants to bet that the music industry would have had a much easier time these last 12 years if they had listened and woken up to reality a bit earlier?