The first article is Ubuntu is a Poor Standard Bearer for Linux but you need to read the follow up article, How Canonical Can Do Ubuntu Right to get a fair understanding of her position.

Cheers,
-pmh

No need for links, just search on ‘pubsubhubbub’… all hits will be relevant! -LOL
-pmh

So this is the first time since picking up Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital that the Portable Consultant watched what he was really doing as he searched for interesting content on the Net. He now has a greater appreciation for what’s happening here:

Join the dots…
A friend tells me, via email, about a song their kids like and includes a this link to the Hide and Seek video by Imogen Heap.

Yes, I like the song (actually, I’m struck by similarities to Kate Bush) and check Heap’s Wikipedia entry where…

…I find out that, yes, others have made comparisons to Kate Bush’s style and…

…I go(ogle) to Imogen Heap’s web site where I spot a link to…

…her Twitter page where I see she’s got an online concert tonight!, so I…

…loop back an email with that last link to my friend suggesting that they might want to catch the concert too.

But then, since I’m liking the music and I now know she’s got a new album out…

…I check out First Train Home, one of Imogen’s other videos on YouTube and,…

…in the YouTube page’s Video Responses list, I spot an acoustic cover by Anne Legras, who, yes, blows me away so I check out Anne’s YouTube channel, too and…

…loop back again to my friend with a link to another Legras’ YouTube video of L’encre de tes Yeux, a song that almost immediately became one of my favourite songs of all time!

Alright. This, of course, is exactly what everyone under 30 (and many under 40′s) are doing with music. No surprise.

Shining the spotlight…
I have to smile when I hear Roger Faxon, head of EMI, interviewed on a podcast by The Economist. Mr. Faxon takes pains to justify his business’ role in the modern music scene – describing the need for “shining the spotlight” on new performers that deserve to stand out. Explaining why it is necessary for his business to choose the hits Faxon says: “There’s this sort of view of the world that the Internet is this huge democracy and everybody gets to vote. Most people don’t want to vote.”

Nothing new there either, right? There are whole political parties that base their campaigns on that premise. Why shouldn’t those of us who enjoy popular music just follow along as well.

Who makes the choices now?
Still, I can’t help feeling that unless Big Music adapts itself to the world of social networking their business model is doomed. We are now in an environment where a personal search for the music of Imogen Heap (who is, by the way, an indie artist) can uncover a Parisian metro busker with “undiscovered” talent. Now that such undiscovered performers have the capability to make and sell their CD or mp3 directly to me, why in this world wouldn’t I vote for what I want to hear? It’s all about who makes the choices, now.

All the best for your future success, Anne. I’ll be pointing my friends in your direction.

Cheers!

-pmh

What has finally moved the Portable Consultant to post after all this time? Frustration!

So-called “matrix teams” come from different work units, by definition. In my current business environment we come together for a project, apply our subject matter experience, and go on to the next project when done. Each member reports to a different organizational unit, with a ‘dotted line’ to the Project Manager.

Unfortunately, the collaboration systems we use are all too often designed by, and for, those separate work units rather than for the projects.

This results in the following (in no particular order):

• Separate repositories for the business analyst, the infrastructure architect, the project manager, etc.

• Where cross-discipline access has been considered it is likely to be hit-and-miss, depending on who asked for access to the repositories of the other groups and when. This results in name-based rather than role-based access.

• Different naming conventions between repositories.

• Different taxonomies (folder structures) for each work group.

• A general lack of consistency in meta-data (where it exists) and searches (which should be based on that meta-data).

The diagnosis of the To Each His Own approach to collaboration is confirmed by the high number of email attachments that are necessary for the matrix team to keep members informed and documentation current.

In my current situation it wouldn’t even be enough if the project manager were to set up a shared repository – there are two PMs: one for ‘the business’ and one for ‘IT’. Even these PMs don’t share the same repository.

The solution for this To Each His Own approach varies from situation to situation. The first step in all instances, however, must be a realization of how fruitless it is to invest in collaboration without some form of inter-group oversight or cooperation to support the matrix team environment.

Have you encountered this where you work? Did anyone try to address the situation? What approach succeeded? …failed?

Yours sincerely on a typical Monday (but posted on a Tuesday),

Cheers,
-pmh

Let’s be clear: if your property can be altered, recalled, or reclaimed by the seller without your permission and knowledge you never really owned that property. Home foreclosure and car repossession are other examples that come to mind. The CBC article is right to refer to it as the Amazon Kindle Service – a service may be discontinued at any time.

George Orwell would indeed smile to see Amazon fulfilling his vision of the future – along with such better known examples as MS Windows (Genuine Advantage program and the .NET framework assistant) and locked cell phones.

Yes, there are probably legitimate copyright issues here – but this is no way to run an eBusiness. Bad Amazon… bad, bad!

-pmh

Update:

1. This MSNBC article on the Amazon 1984 scandal has a more humorous (sarcastic?) tone.
2. This Fictionmatters article provides balanced and deeper coverage of the underlying issues. (…but I still say “Bad, Amazon… bad, bad!”)
3. Microsoft has apparently updated its .NET Framework Assistant to allow you to uninstall it from Firefox without the need to edit the Windows registry, locate remove system files, etc.

Update 2, The Apology:

Here’s word on Amazon’s apology but note that “…the apology failed to state that Amazon would not do the same thing again in similar circumstances…”

My own use of the online games is minimal because I was always concerned about the permission statements that you get when you sign up for them.

That’s not how I personally use Facebook anyway, but the recent ‘conversion’ of a cute aquarium game (send pretty fishes to your friends’ aquariums) to a dating service with constant emails (“Honestly, Dear… all those speed date emails are spam. All I ever did was send her a fish!”)… well, that was downright naughty. Bad Facebook, bad, bad!

I was struck by one item in the news report that would be funny if it weren’t true:

“- Facebook keeps the profiles of deceased users for “memorial purposes” but does not make this clear. Recommendation: Information about use for memorial purposes should be in Facebook’s privacy policy.”

…Thank you, Facebook, but when the time comes The Portable Consultant would rather have family and friends handle any and all memorials. All social networking sites should delete accounts after an agreed period without any logins, at the very least. (This is a much larger issue, of course.)

Facebook needs to get its act together, but users/consumers also need to understand how important personal info is …and take care not to sign it away without due diligence.

Cheers,
-pmh

Secondly, the heart of the issue as clearly stated by Joseph Bonneau “It’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on”, should be framed and hung on the walls of web designers and managers, not only at social networking sites but also those in the public service, in the private sector, and even corporate intranets.

Cheers,
-pmh

Yes We Scan - Carl Malamud

The other day The Portable Consultant caught this interview with Carl Malamud on an IT Conversations podcast. Having enjoyed his 1992 book Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, I was interested to hear that he is still pursuing his attempts to free public information from the reluctant hands of bureaucrats. In Exploring the Internet, he discussed his attempts to get the International Standards Organization to distribute international standards over the nascent Internet. Now he’s running for the position of Public Printer of the United States, a public office for which only one other person has bothered to run since it’s inception under President Lincoln.

Yesterday I attempted to print some Canadian tax changes, from a recent budget, that might affect my taxes next year. They are found on an ordinary web page almost entirely made up of text.

Adobe’s Acrobat 9 Pro Extended failed to print the page in my Firefox browser and issued the following error:

%%[Page: 14]%%%%[ Error: LucidaSans,Bold cannot be embedded because of licensing restrictions. ]%%
%%[ Font vendor (B&H) does not permit this font to be embedded in PDF. ]%%
...
[Warning] The font LucidaSans-Demi could not be embedded because of licensing restrictions.
Text may display incorrectly on platforms that do not have this font installed.
...
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Now, I like to keep such documents in PDF rather than cutting and pasting into text files so I turned next to the freeware printing utility CutePDF and found it had no problem. It printed the web page as a PDF file just as I had asked Adobe to do… only CutePDF had no compunctions about embedded fonts being licensed to my machine. CutePDF uses the open source Ghostscript PostScript to PDF converter.

This is why open systems will win out every time against the forces of DRM. When DRM tries to stop us from legally accessing and ‘owing’ a copy of public documents it fails to meet the criteria of a reasonable and fair constraint on the use of intellectual property, in this case a font.

Carl Malamud understands the necessity for free and unrestricted access to public information – documents and databases. He understands the underlying technologies. This is why Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Tim Bray and others who share these views are supporting his candidacy for the position of Public Printer of the United States via the Yes We Scan campaign.

For what its worth, I do too.

In fact, there are some governments on this side of the border who should also be paying attention to his candidacy and his platform for the fair dissemination of public documents and data.

Adobe… shame on you!

Cheers,
-pmh

There are countless ways to do this, and countless web sites to show you how, but what’s striking is the vast array of open source options. Not only Linux OS spin-offs like MythTV and Mythbuntu, but what appear to be very smooth products like Elisa and Neuros LINK from Fluendo and Neuros respectively.

These companies are not only using Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), but many of them are actively inciting FLOSS developers to join their open source development communities to contribute to and hack their products. Neuros, for example, sends interested developers to its developer wiki directly from the same web page that directs customers to online support forums.

After years of denial from commercial software vendors, the FLOSS paradigm of development and support is proving increasingly useful for commercial consumer products.

These media related software & hardware products, and not the home Linux PC, appear to be the arena where the consumer is meeting open source systems for the first time… whether they know it or not.

Cheers,
-pmh