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It’s been a few years since my last vacation overseas. Since then I acquired several e-dependencies on services such as Pandora (see my older post on feature extraction) and Hulu, a service I learned about from my colleague Adam Sheppard (you may have read about Adam on Live Labs’ web site). I discovered that these services don’t work from outside the US:

This is surprising because in both instances the providers know my permanent location from the ZIP code provided when I set up the accounts.

Luckily Pandora and Hulu are not my only options. I am also a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber, and unlike with the previous accounts that is a paid subscription. Their service did not complain about my accessing it from outside the US. While this finding hasn’t sunk in completely it resonates with what I’m reading in Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop it) about reducing generativity.

I’ve been a slashdot reader since the end of 1997, when I discovered it over the dial-up connection I had at the University of Illinois. While back then I visited /. almost daily, nowadays my visits are much less frequent. During this time the slashdot community expanded and changed (if nothing else we’re all 10 years older). Consequently I no longer have a good grip on how objective and well-researched the typical slashdot post is.

This changed last night, when the slashdot story Microsoft Developing News Sorting Based On Political Bias covered one of the projects I’m involved with (i.e., Blews). The coverage provided some interesting insight about /.

First, in spite of the “news for nerds” tag line, slashdot stories are not necessarily new. Over a week before the /. coverage Matt Hurst blogged about the mainstream media picking up Blews in their TechFest coverage; I also had a similar post. So if you’re looking for fresh nerdy news you’d be better off going elsewhere.

Second, the /. comments cover a wide spectrum: some are objective. Others are amusing. Others make me wonder whether a sequel to Mel Gibson’s 1997 Conspiracy Theory is in the works. Yet they are far from being evenly distributed–on the contrary. So if you’re after a reasonable S/N you’d also be better off seeking that elsewhere. (BTW if Blews resonates with you consider attending ICSWM 2008; several folks from the Blews team as well as myself will be there.)

So with old news and poor S/N what are those coming to /. after?

Last weekend I caught a Taiko performance in Seattle’s Japanese Garden. I have never seen Taiko live; the mix of percussion and choreography was quite impressive. Here’s one of the snapshots I caught. If you’d like to see the dynamics of a similar performance this YouTube video should give you an approximate idea.

A few weeks ago I attended Lang.NET Symposium. Charles Torre asked me to participate in a conversation with Miguel de Icaza, who was among the attendees. (While nowadays most people associate Miguel with Mono, our paths crossed–virtually–many years ago, when Tudor Hulubei and Andrei Pitis were working on GIT.) Charles Torre was our host, and we talked about open source, Mono, Moonlight, and various other bits. Our session is now available as a Channel 9 video. (Note: cross-posted from my work blog.)

Disc-less… and the competition is coming over your high-speed Internet connection. Netflix lives up to its name; Jaman, Apple TV and VUDU are also doing it. With Jaman, Apple and VUDU entering the world of HD, the incentive of buying plastic seems low.

That aside, I find it puzzling that shipping 12-cm disks via gas-guzzling trucks is still more economical than pushing bits through the wire. Sure, there’s also the carbon footprint, but that’s not factored in the price. At the beginning of the year I heard on a show on the BBC World Service that “being green” is going to be fashionable in 2008. The show also warned that typically this would be just a fashion statement because under the current rules of the game it’s extremely hard to do it while staying competitive. So far they seem right on both counts.

I decided to give WordPress a try and migrated my entire site from Drupal. Among other visible (and not so visible) changes now I can use Live Writer for WYSIWYG blog-editing. I’m sure I broke a few things in the process so do let me know if you have problems with the content/links.