Getting ready to go walk in the muck.
Ben, Carina and Shoebox. Summer 2009, near the 4th of July.

The kids and the dog in the muck in Dungeness

Summer of 2009 around the 4th of July.
The kids and I at Hurricane Ridge.

I finally sprang for a flickr account. I want my pictures accessible from the internet, so I've started uploading batches of pictures.

Inevitably you refresh your memories as you upload them, moving from directory to directory and seeing what you uploaded from the camera - that time after the vacation, after Dana's trip to K-Falls, before H&B went to Philly, and so on.

Another Summer moving towards it's end, and I'm back into the Spring pictures now. As I upload the most recent stuff I go through the pictures in time reversed order, so Spring is changing back to Winter to Fall as I sort through my family's images of Christmas, Thanksgiving, last school year and the year before that...

It puts me into a slightly sad state - there are some pictures of Heather at Bumbershoot, she won't be here for it this year. There's Ben just a year ago, at least 3 inches shorter. He's on his last year of elementary, next year it's junior high; say hello to puberty. Maybe not so much sad as nostalgic.

I didn't have a digital camera when my dad was still alive, so this process only goes so far.

Mom has a pile of black and white negatives that Dad took over the years, I want to look into scanners for that. It would be cool to get some of those memories up to flickr!

My flikr API work uses this as a URL.
Currently no useful information is posted here, but you never know.

Folk Life Festival Memorial Day Weekend at the Seattle Center

The Folk Life Festival is this weekend at the Seattle Center. I wandered over Friday from the office during a late lunch and listened to some music (blue grass, Mexican, jug band, and Americana plus a couple I couldn't be sure of) and ate some salmon - very nice. It was not crowded, with beautiful weather.

My kids went the next day, with Ben spending a lot of time in the fountain and some interesting music was heard,  Punk as Folk sounded interesting, the 8 bit sound guy doing video game music sounded like fun, and Ben had some amusing comments on belly dancers. I'm a little sorry I missed it, but only a little, as we went to a friend's wedding and I wouldn't have wanted to miss that either.

Toys

I went Sunday afternoon with my daughter and her dog, taking a new toy I borrowed from a friend: a nice digital stereo field recorder, a Tascam DR-1.

 

The weather was perfect, a hot bright Spring day. The fountain had crowds of kids.

I did take a few photos, but I forgot to download my wife's videos from the wedding on Saturday so I ran out of space quickly. That's OK, I was playing with a new toy!

Audio

At several performances during the day I fired up the  Tascam digital recorder and recorded the audio. Proper level setting is important to good results, but with 24 bit resolution this device is mildly forgiving: if the signal is only mildly or even moderately under-powered you can "amplify" it without undue distortion. Clipping causes severe loss of audio quality, so keep a bit of an eye on that peak LED. If it's lighting, turn the audio down a bit.

For some of the rock-a-billy bands I was bouncing to the beat, and I got right up front and recorded a couple of songs. Here's a bit of "New Way of Rockin" 

Traditional guitarist/vocalist, drummer and upright string bass arrangement. here's another bit from them:

I also got some recording of an interesting horn group - vey large with more instruments than I'm used to seeing, mostly assorted horns. I heard many different styles of music - even a couple of rap performances, which is a new one for me at the Folk Life Festival. I had my 11 year old son and his friend along, and unsurprisingly the expletives were flying like they usually do at rap shows, so we didn't stay very long for the rap music.

Heard a couple of good blue grass bands too.

Unfortunately the mildly crummy tools (see below) keep chopping 30% off my audio files, so the clips are a little shorter than they should be. Since the tool is free I can't complain too much, but that never stops me. Too lazy to go and recreate a longer clip, at least you can get an idea of some of what we heard and how the bands sounded.

Tools

I don't have a good tool on my Cisco lap-top to split the audio up into smaller pieces. I do have that tool on my personal PC, so I took my friend's Tascam DR1 and plugged it into my PC's USB port and downloaded the .wav files. Using my personal software I reviewed the rockabilly recording (I recorded 2 songs back to back) and selected a phrase or verse and split it out, then wrote a mono .wav file with 16 bit resolution out - my bundled audio software required an upgrade I never purchased to output .mp3, this was as much compression as I could easily get using this tool. The result carved a 95 Mbyte .wav file into a couple of .7 to 1.4 Mbyte .wav files. Next I downloaded a shareware .wav to .mp3 converter. Turns out the shareware version converts 70% of the input .wav file. Back to the personal audio software, spit out the same phrase with 30% padding and convert it to mp3 again. Now I've got 105 Kbyte and 58 Kbyte audi files. As I fiddled with schemes to embed these files, it occurred to me I could use C-Vision. I posted the .mp3 audio files to my C-Vision account, and in a few minutes I was able to choose each and use the "Select code" control to get the code to embed the audio controls you see above.

Whining About Tools

I blogged recently about a hike up Mt. Zion, using pictures to spice it up. It's instructive to compare that experience with my trip to Folk Life 2009, the audio equivalent. Instead of photos I'm bring back audio, but the intent is the same: to try to give you a better taste of the event/experience. C-Vision helps, but the tools to deal with resolution variables and "clipping" - choosing a subset of the total data - are much beter and more widely available for pictures. Taking the picture of the Tascam DR1 and putting it in this blog required maybe 3 minutes of fiddling. Getting 13 seconds of audio took over an hour of transferring, fiddling, installing, backtracking, and publishing. The second time was faster, but it's still probably an order of magnitude slower than working with photos.

Lack of integrated tools and lack of reasonable free tools makes working with audio quite a bit more work. Lack of tools for mash-ups also doesn't help.

I took my Garmin eTrex Legend Cx with me, here's out path:

 

You can see we spent a long time on the West side of the fountain, and a fair amount around the Fountain Stage - that's where I recorded the rockabilly. Looks like it's time to dust off my .GPX python scripts and see about building a geo-mashup. Lacking good geo-mashup tools, I guess I just have to do it manually.

I remember reading that the W3C consortium defined the HTML standards over a decade ago. They "owned" the standard - heck they included Tim Berners-Lee, who co-invented the modern Web and it's HTML over HTTP protocol. They announced that they were done making changes to HTML, and from now on the interesting work would be based on XHTML, a fully XML compliant version of HTML.

Turns out they didn't really own as much as I or they thought. While they advanced their new, technically better spec over the years, the fact is that millions of PCs running Internet Explorer and an assorted cast of competitors - the installed base - were still running HTML. Web developers who wanted eyeballs ignored the W3C for the most part and coded to the installed base. Just recently the W3C threw in the towel - the whole XHTML thing and it's years of effort never really took off, so it'll freeze by the end of the year and nobody much will use it. Now the W3C is getting behind the whole HTML 5 thing. It'll be interesting to see how that goes, I'm looking forward to native sound and video support in browsers, seems like it should have been here long ago; check out Erwan Andre's blog for some details, looks like he'll be blogging about it for a bit.

So the spec authors don't really have as much clout as I thought. Who does? I saw an interesting article on CNN about a group trying to "kill" IE 6. IE 6 is ancient and doesn't support many of the newer more interesting technologies used on modern web sites. For HTML coders, having to support IE 6 is a pain. So a coalition is forming to try to "encourage" if not force IE 6 users to upgrade. Nothing is ever that simple, so some users can't or won't upgrade, but it will be interesting to see how much control of things the web coders can exert.

I was experimenting with an in-house Cisco tool, discovering that it does not provide acces to videos/media/photos over the internet, only when connected in via VPN or internally on Cisco's network. Too bad.

So now I'm taking a look at flikr video embedding:

Works well enough. My free Flikr account only lets me download 2 videos a month, though. For roughly $25/year I can get unlimited.

Twitter had a major multi-hour outage recently, it was all over the news and blogs. Now it turns out that apparently one person's accounts on twitter, facebook and other social media sites was targeted in a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Reports are that Cyxymu (named after a town in Georgia) has been targeted, and the implication is that Russian nationalists opposed to Georgia are behind it.

This incident is a case study in "the law of unintended consequences." I've already been to Cyxymu's facebook site to check out what the fuss is about, and I'm sure ten thousand and more others have as well. Within a few days it'll probably be millions. And we're all sympathetic to Cyxymu and inclined to be more favorable to his take on the situation between Georgia and Russia, and more hostile to Russia as a result. The DDOS attack has cost the Russians sympathy and respect, and raised their enemy's profile so far that they effectively gave him the equivalent of millions of dollars in promotional marketing - heck, you can't even pay for publicity this good.

That really seems to be pretty much the exact opposite of what the attackers had in mind, so it's good to see the faceless criminals mess this one up and only hurt the cause they are championing. Sometimes the good guys win, and sometimes who the good guys and the bad guys are becomes obvious through the despicable actions of the bad guys.

Misleading title, kind of: Pirate Maps!

 EE Times has an article about V.i. Labs and their "stealth algorithms" combating piracy. The software will "phone home" to report usage data, and can include the location of use on Google maps in many cases. So you see, people using software illegally - pirated software - are pirates, and thus the Google map report of where the software is being used is a pirate map. I can't help it, pirate imagery amuses me. Arr!