Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I heard the announcement about Google’s Talk, and I did a quick perusal of the website, and saw that they were only going to release a Windows client, and I decided not to bother with it. First, I was annoyed, as usual, with Windows only clients. And then, based on what I’d read in the mainstream press (I actually only read one article in the LA times last weekend,) I figured that this was going to be too little, too late, even for Google. But then, I then found out from another blog that the protocol Google talk is using is Jabber! For those of you who are not familiar with Jabber, here’s their good basic info page.

This changes everything. Jabber is an already established open protocol, that has been a favorite of geek types for a while. There are multiple clients available for all platforms. There are all sorts of cool ways that developers can extend this.

I am connected with Google Talk (talk.google.com) using my Mac OS X iChat client and my gmail username.

It might take a while for it to take hold, and take over AIM, which, from what I can tell, is the most popular IM system, but it was an incredibly smart move for them to do this - it also allows them to do very interesting things with gmail, and google itself, with the kind of interoperabilities they are building.

Google will take over the world. I just hope they don’t become like Microsoft in the process. They seem to have been making the right steps, keeping things open each step of the way, unlike MS, which is the king of closed, non-interoperable, non-standards compliant development.

Here are a few tidbits I’ve come across in the Intellectual Property arena in the past few days.

Downhill Battle, which is an organization people interested in the whole "copyfight" issue should know about, has a new project, called Participatory Culture. They’ve just released a beta version (sorry, Mac only, for once) of a new platform for internet video, called DTV. This is very cool. It makes finding channels with interesting video easy, as well as making channels easy. It’s definitely a thing to watch. It might indeed make vlogging a lot easier as well. I’m looking forward to the Crooks and Liars channel! I’m going to watch this pretty carefully.

There is a very interesting PDF floating about with a powerpoint presentation by the CEO of the RIAA about the copyright/filesharing, etc. issue as they see it. Uck.They still don’t get it. But I guess they won’t, given their position.

There is a new, interesting project under Creative Commons  license. It’s called Orion’s Arm, which is a huge collaborative science fiction world-building project. It looks pretty amazing - and a great testament to what open source licensing can do for creative work.

I’m trying Ubuntu Linux on an old compaq laptop I have (and brought with me to California.) It’s an old Compaq Armada (m300) that I bought used last year, and weighs about 2 pounds without the accessory bay. It was pretty cheap when I bought it, but it must have cost a fortune when it was new. I’ve installed regular Debian on it, plus a couple of versions of Fedora.

I’ve been hearing all sorts of good things about Ubuntu, and I figured it was time to try it out. Here’s my basic experience and review of it.

The most recent version of Ubuntu is 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). You can get it from their download page. They have regular ISOs, bittorrent files, and jigdo files. They’ve got some good mirrors, because the regular ISO download isn’t too slow.

I am intimately familiar with Debian, and Debian installs, but I’m going to write this as if I wasn’t - I think that would make it the most useful.

The first part of the install process (basic configuration, partitioning and base system install)  is very straightforward - there were few choices to make, the hardware was detected flawlessly, and the install went easily. I kinda went away after the first reboot, and was greeted with the login screen when I came back. No intervention was necessary. Easier install than Windows, I think.

A few things were a bit odd - for example there wasn’t a request for a root password - the default root password seems to be the same as the password for the single user account that was set up during install.

Gnome is the default desktop, and the only one installed by default - I’m a KDE fan. I switched my desktop environment in a way that I’m familiar with (install the kde packages, then change the default desktop manager in /etc/X11.)  Kubuntu, which is the sub-project to bring KDE to Ubuntu, seems really nice - and if I’d read the Kubuntu page first, I would have had an easier time switching to KDE.

The basic add/remove applications interface is nice, and the advanced panel has everything. The configuration editor is not really intuitive, but for those who don’t like the command line, it’s an improvement over basic CLI configuration.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu so far - the ease of install and configuration, matched with Debian’s ease of software update, etc. We’ll see how it works when I try to set up development environments (both Postgres/Perl and Ruby for Ruby on Rails) but I can’t imagine, given the Debian base, that I’ll run into trouble.

Since I’m travelling, I haven’t had much time to think in depth about much of anything. However, in my snippets of time reading my blogroll, there are a few technology snippets that I’ve come across that are interesting.

Beth Kanter has been investigating vlogging - that’s video blogging. It’s pretty interesting - and I imagine that once high bandwidth connections are truly ubiquitous, vlogging might get pretty popular. But the barriers to entry are pretty high. I’ve done a little video editing, etc. myself, and the time and energy it takes to do it well is pretty daunting. I think I’d be lucky to get one or two vlog entries a year actually done. More power to Beth, though! And great to start thinking about this new technology and how nonprofits might use it. I also have been watching her coverage of Blogher - something I just learned about, and sounds really interesting. I wish I’d known about it sooner.

There are rumors that Palm is going to move off of the Palm OS platform, to possibly to Windows Mobile. Case in point - the new Treo 670 has been seen running Windows Mobile. Anyway, this is all rumors and innuendo, but the truth is, if Palm moves to Windows Mobile, I hate to say it, but I dump Palm. Sad but true. I’ll hold on to my Treo 650 until it falls apart, then figure out what to do next.

Unintended consequences: The new energy bill has in it a change in the daylight savings time, which hasn’t changed since 1987. So there are a fair number of devices that have programmed in them the old schedule. I imagine this will be worse for devices not connected to the internet in any way. Could have some interesting side effects.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised in my travels how much I’ve been able to use wifi, most places. Most of the chain motels are sporting Wifi, tons of cafes and the like are, and even rest stops seem to have wifi. I think the days of ubiquitous Wifi are coming. The question is, ubuquitous free? Will that grow, or will it move to become ubiquitous, but you pay for it? Not clear yet.

OK, this is great. At the same time as the patent office is granting business method patents that everyone knows have tons of prior art, they are busy rejecting trademarks, based on who knows what, exactly. Case in point: the organization "Dykes on Bikes" was denied a trademark of their name because the word "dyke" was vulgar. Nevermind that dykes have used that word in a positive self-affirming way for 30 years now, and there is tons of evidence for that. (I mean why call your organization by a name if you didn’t think it self-affirming??)

LawGeek has a nice little rant on the issue - much more in depth than I could provide. Boing Boing also has a post on this.

So when is the USPTO going to get their act together? I’m not holding my breath. I think what I might be waiting for is for the whole system to fall in on itself.