Archive - May 2010
May 6th
The British Parliamentary Elections and Connecticut’s Response to Citizen’s United
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/06/2010 - 17:05It is election day in the U.K. As I started looking around to see if there are any election results coming in, I found the BBC’s page of Frequent Asked Questions about the British General Election
To the question, “CAN CANDIDATES SPEND AS MUCH AS THEY WANT ON CAMPAIGNING?”, there is this
No, there are strict limits on what is spent once nominations close on 19 April. Each candidate has to account for their election expenses after the poll. Candidates in rural (county council) areas can spend up to £7,150 plus 7p per elector. Those standing in urban (borough council) areas can spend £7,150 plus 5p per voter.
So, I was curious, how does that translate into U.S. Dollars? Here in the United States, an average congressional district had 646,946 people as of the 2000 census. Now, the number of people per district is actually more than the number of electors per district, so this will overstate the amount of money allowed, but if every person was an elector, at the current exchange rate, that would allow a U.S. Congressional candidate to spend about $79,000 for a general election.
Yet there is other money that can be spent. Political parties can spend about $45,000 per district, and third parties can spend up to about $22,000 in independent expenditures.
Of course, this is coming from the country that gave us George Orwell. Here in our country, we’ve taken Orwellian language to determine that money is speech and that corporations are persons, so we’ve got a completely different kettle of fish.
This leads us to Citizen’s United. For my British readers, Citizen’s United is not an amateur football team. It is the name of the Supreme Court decision that the United States would accept the Orwellian definition of corporations as persons.
Here in the states, people have been trying to come up with a response to this bastardization of the language. The Connecticut General Assembly just passed House Bill 5471, “AN ACT CONCERNING INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURES”. It would “provide that independent expenditures made by an entity are properly disclosed and ensure that such expenditures are properly attributed to the entity making the expenditure.”
In other words, if Goldman Sachs, Massey Energy, or British Petroleum want to spend money on campaigns in Connecticut, they will need to have the CEO’s approval. Of course, an advertisement with Lloyd Blankfein, Don Blankenship or Tony Hayward appearing to state that they approve the advertisements might be more valuable to the opposition.
So, as I wait for the returns, it is interesting the think about the differences not only in language but also in politics from our friends in the British Isles.
Orient Lodge Music Review and Sonicbids
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/06/2010 - 09:32Orient Lodge has entered into an agreement with Sonicbids to use Sonicbids’ platform for handling electronic press kits for review. Musicians wishing to present their music to Orient Lodge are urged to use the Orient Lodge Music Review Page on Sonicbids.
May 5th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/05/2010 - 09:28
May 4th
Media Sharing – Pandora, last.fm, uPnP and the N900 and iPhone
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 09:16A month ago, I wrote a blog post about mobile media sharing in response to press releases about NearVerse. I brought up the idea of using uPnP to facilitate some media sharing. Since then, I’ve played with a bunch of different packages and figured it is time for an update.
At the simplest level, the Media Player on the N900 works nicely as a uPnP client. So far, I’ve used it with the N900 media player to play music off of a Windows Media Player on a machine running Windows XP, off of a Linux box running MediaTomb and off of the N900 running Rygel. All of this has been over my home WiFi network. Unfortunately, the network is a little flaky and at times I’ve had problems connecting to the various uPnP servers. If I disconnect my WiFi and reconnect, I can find the uPnP servers and start playing again. Most recently, MediaTomb will play about thirty seconds of music before losing the connection and Rygel, which had been returning information about the music available has stopped doing so. Considerable more testing is need to determine what is going on with this.
I have also install mafw-lastfm. This allows devices using the Media Application Framework to post information about what songs are being played to last.fm. This has worked fairly reliably when playing music that is loaded on the N900. When I use it to post information that has been retrieved via uPnP, it has worked, but not reliably.
A friend of mine recently purchased an iPad and I asked if it had uPnP support. They didn’t know, so I did a little searching. So far, I’ve found a $4.99 app called PlugPlayer. It is a uPnP client for the iPhone and related devices. I haven’t gotten a chance to see if I can stream music from my N900 using Rygel to a iPad using PlugPlayer, but it looks like an interesting opportunity to do a little cross platform media sharing.
Finally to really muddy the uPnP waters, Zach Goldberg’s Zhaan is now available in ‘extras’. Zhaan is a uPnP controller. Not having much for uPnP devices to control, I probably won’t have great opportunities to test it, but I suspect that if I really want to push things, I could borrow my friends iPad, have it play media streamed from my MediaTomb server on Linux and control the whole mess with Zhaan on the N900.
The other little bit of media fun on the N900 for me has been Pianobar. Pianobar is a command line program for the N900. However, there are two nice GUI interfaces, pyPianobar and qtPianobar. I’ve run things from the command line and using the two GUI interfaces, and I like the pyPianobar application best. Of course you can also play Pandora from a web browser, but when I’ve done that in the past, it seems to take up so much CPU time that that I haven’t been able to answer phone calls when they come in while I’m listening to Pandora in a browser. Yet with the Python interface to Pianobar, I’ve not had that problem. One issue is that pianobar does not appear to use the Media Application Framework. What this means is that the last.fm application does not work with pianobar.
So far, all of this has been playing with audio. The next thing I want to explore is video. The recent discussions about Google making the VP8 video codec available as open source look particularly promising. Will it be possible to run VP8 encoded videos on the N900? Related to this is the interesting work in getting the Theora video codec to run on the DSP of the N900. Now, if only we can get an open source VP8 codec running on the DSP of the N900, and get Netflix to make its videos available using HTML5 and VP8, but all of those things are still down the road.
So, what am I missing? Are there some interesting media applications on the N900 I should explore?
May 3rd
High Speed Social Fiber
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 05/03/2010 - 12:06It was late when I got home. I had a bunch of pictures to upload for my blog post and a couple hundred new unread emails. When I did get a chance to check some of my other social media, I saw this message on Twitter
jcnork - @ahynes1 can u go? -New Haven Mayor Destefano joins business & community leaders in promoting #GoogleHaven 100 Campaign http://bit.ly/crRR6o
Twitter can be terse and cryptic if you don’t have the context, but in this case, I know what my friend Jack was talking about. He, and a bunch of other friends have been working on a project to get Google to select New Haven as a location to roll out their gigabit Internet. I knew it would be a busy day, but that it would also be an event that I would want to be at.
The press conference was taking place at Fair Haven Furniture, 72 Blatchley Avenue. Fairhaven, with its lovely views of the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Q bridge crossing the mouth of the Quinnipiac river, and the looming oil tanks of the Port of New Haven, has never been high on my list of New Haven tourist attractions. As I passed companies like Independent Pipe and Supply, Lynn Ladder and Scaffolding, and New Haven Awning, I wondered what sort of place Fair Haven Furniture would be like. Would it be a struggling furniture manufacturer, trying to hold on to the glories of yesterday when there were many more manufacturing companies in New Haven? Would it be one of those ‘to the trade’ type stores selling credenzas and other office furniture? Maybe it would be a new citizen to our country, trying to make a go of it here in America selling painted cribs imported from China at a really low price.
Since the mayor was there, as well as several news outlets, it was hard to find a good parking place, so I parked in front of a closed gate next to an abandoned building and hoped I wouldn’t get towed. I walked around the corner and found the door leading to Fair Haven Furniture. I was totally unprepared for what I found inside. (If I had of had time to look at the website ahead of time, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised). Fair Haven Furniture is a hidden gem. Since I was there for the press conference, I only had time to look at part of one of the three floors the company has.
The press conference itself wasn’t anything all that special. Mayor DeStefano talked a little bit about the history of New Haven with its port and railroads which fueled the growth of the city. He noted that high speed internet is our generation’s version of ports and railroads and he hoped that Google would choose New Haven as a test bed and that the infrastructure would help lift New Haven out of recession. He noted the importance of the initiative being led by people from the community and embraced by businesses, instead of being a project led primarily by the city.
Andre Yap, Founder and CEO of Ripple 100 also spoke about his hopes that Google would choose New Haven and bring considerable collateral growth. Kerry Triffin, owner of Fair Haven Furniture expressed similar thoughts and spoke with many of the guests who were discovering his business for the first time.
Giulia Gambale Gouge brought cupcakes from Claire’s Corner Copia. The GoogleHaven cupcakes were from suggestions that had been made online for cupcake frostings. Giulia had been working with Claire to help her make better use of social media, and the cupcakes illustrated the value that companies can gain by entering into conversations with their customers on social media.
While I’ve been concerned about what happens to all the energy around GoogleHaven if Google doesn’t select New Haven, I was pleased to see some concrete benefits to New Haven from the Google Haven effort. Businesses and other organizations are working together to increase public involvement in all aspects of New Haven’s social fiber. If that social fiber can ride on top of a high speed fiber network from Google, so much the better.
The Google Haven effort began by citizens stepping forward to help make New Haven better. The city joined the effort and gave it a great boost. Now, we are starting to see some of the benefits of this effort, and are eagerly hoping that Google will join with the effort to give it an even greater boost.
