Jay McGavren's Journal

Beaten to the punch again...

For months now I’ve been dreaming of a communications protocol that would let me access the data I want, when I want, and from the software of my choosing. I’m tired of switching e-mail clients and losing my address book, or switching graphics applications and not having access to my favorite filter.

In fact, I’ve been jotting down a list of the stuff I’d like to be able to do: http://spook.myserver.org/text/jay_mcgavren/software_tasks.txt

Well, the good folks at Palo Alto Research Center seem to be on to something that will let me (let everyone) do all that. Their proof of concept software is called SpeakEasy, and this whitepaper discusses it: http://www2.parc.com/csl/projects/speakeasy/papers/dis02.pdf

To give you an example of its power: SpeakEasy was never designed to handle videoconferencing. But the minute its users shared their cameras and microphones over the network - voila - they were able to videoconference with each other.

SpeakEasy is more hardware-oriented, but I think I’ll be able to apply at least some of its concepts to software and media as well (if PARC doesn’t just do it for me). This is potentially a very big deal.

The Windows ports of a lot of open source software are starting to get really good. I’d passed OSS up before, but now I’m giving it another look. A few packages that seem promising:

Mozilla Firefox - tabbed Web browser. It’s already replaced Internet Explorer as my default. Mozilla Thunderbird - e-mail client. I’m having some trouble with dates on the Outlook import, but once those are rectified I’m going to switch to this. Lynx - text-only Web browser. Useful when you want to read news without a bunch of ad clutter. Image Magick - command line utilities for image manipulation. Improve the contrast, boost the color, crop and resize your images en masse. Audacity - audio editor. Haven’t tried this yet, but it looks to be nearly as good as SoundForge.

It’s getting to where you don’t really need to pirate expensive professional software to get professional results. Closed-source still tends to have a bit more polish and usability at this point, but the gap seems to be closing.

Was anyone else caught off guard last night during the Academy Awards, when not only was there a joke about Billy Crystal downloading movies off the Net, but they actually showed him setting up a video camera in a movie theater?

Right now, somewhere in Hollywood, heads are rolling over this.

In other items I couldn’t have predicted a year ago: my car is here at work with a child seat strapped in the back. :P We took Lenny to the mall this weekend, and I forgot to take the seat out again.

Club Dread opens Friday. It’s from Broken Lizard, the people that did Super Troopers. Go see it!

http://www.clubdread.com/