Tales of the Sausage Factory:
My Annual Shameless Self-Serving Plug for My Employer

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As you all know, I do this blog in my own time as a labor of love and the firm belief that the World Needs My Wisdom. During the day, I work as Senior Vice President of the Media Access Project (MAP). The views expressed here are entirely my own, and I keep a strenous “Chinese Firewall” between my MAP work and my blogging.

But I’m still gonna use my wholly independent space here to make a special end of year appeal for for folks to contribute to MAP. Because while I love my job, I can’t have two labors of love.

To keep from compromising our advocacy, MAP does not rely on industry money. We get funded primarily by grants and by individual contributions (and the occassional attorneys fee from those clients who can afford to make a contribution to our work and advocacy). In 2006, we had major wins in Network Neutrality, Media Ownership, Munibroadband, Spectrum Reform, and a personal shout out for our work on the Adelphia transaction from Commissioner Adelstein. And I will now include a gratuitous link to a recommendation from a friend this past fall.

For 35 years, MAP has been kicking ass and taking names to protect the public’s First Amendment right to speak and hear information from a diversity of sources in the electronic media. We’d like to keep at it for another 35. I know MAP is competing with a hundred other worthy causes, and that it is late in the year to make a pitch for that last contribution in 2006 (MAP is a 501(c)(3), so any donations are deductible). But I’m going to ask anyway. If you can make any kind of donation, we’d all really appreciate it.

Stay tuned . . . .

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
FCC Last Call Part II: Cyren Call Sings Again

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They should have named the damn thing Phoenix Call, given how often this idea keeps getting resurected. OTOH, it better suits the nature of the beast to name it for creatures whose enticing song lured sailors to their deaths than for one of my favorite characters in Harry Potter.

As I wrote before on the Public Knowledge Blog, Cyren Call wants the FCC to give it 30 MHz of spectrum for free from the returned broadcast analog spectrum set aside for auction. Technically, Cyren Call wants that 30 MHz allocated to a “Public Safety Trust” that would then partner with a private sector organization, but it amounts to the same thing. In exchange, Cyren Call promises to build a nifty national broadband network that would be available to public safety entities when they need it. In order to finance the network without raising taxes or imposing costs on the public safety community, Cyren Call would operate the remaining 99.999% of capacity as a commercial venture. What a bargain! Of course, Cyren Call would kep any profit over and above actual expenses, to give it incentive to run the network “efficiently.”

I wish I did so well from doing good.

You would think that when public safety entities would get suspicious of a proposal that sounds horribly like: “DEAR PUBLIC SAFETY ENTITY. I OFFERING TO YOU MANY MEGAHURTS OF SPECTRUM. CONGRESS RECENTLY PASSED A LAW TO MAKE SPECTRUM AVAILABLE TO COMMERCIAL SECTOR, BUT I THINK YOU SHOULD HAVE IT.” But while Cyren Call has encountered the harsh response from the incumbent wireless harpies, over 1300 “HONEST TRUSTWORTHY PUBLIC SAFETY ENTITY” commentors supported the Cyren Call proposal. Unsurprisingly, most supporting comments from public safety folks emphasized that the part of the proposal they really, really liked was the part about getting even more spectrum.

But Kevin Martin, who seems to be having a “celebrate the incumbent telco harpy” meeting this month, has thrown in an interesting apple of discord. The FCC proposes to create a system similar to Cyren Call, but on the 24 MHz already assigned to public safety rather than grabbing yet more spectrum (you can read the full Order here. In other words, the FCC seems to be saying to the public safety community “O.K., so do you all think this proposal is so wonderful when it doesn’t bring you another 30 MHz of prime spectrum?” Of course, it helps that this plan parallels a plan proposed by Verizon Wireless back in September, which is remarkably simlar to the Cyren Call plan but in the spectrum already allocated to public safety and inserting the words “Verizon Wireless” in every place you had the words “Cyren Call.”

More below . . . .

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Inventing the Future:
What's the Matter?

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My daughter has been studying “matter” in science. This is the unit that discusses physical changes between phases (arrangements of molecules,) versus chemical changes between compounds (arrangements of atoms). It also discusses electrons, protons, and neutrons.

She wasn’t getting it. It was all just so many meaningless words, and symbolic coding isn’t her forte. Not everyone learns the same way, and everyone can benefit from working with the same material presented in different ways. In dealing with this, it is necessary to use not just different words, but different input entirely, which are processed by different parts of the brain. My daughter thinks very geometrically, so we were able to construct a series of visual scenes portraying the material. Napoleon said, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and Mindard’s famous map of Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia shows that a diagram can sometimes be worth a thousand pictures.

In the phase-change scene, we draw a bucket of water in the middle, a tea-pot on one side, and tray of ice cubes on the other. We drew labeled arrows from solid to liquid and liquid to gas, and back again. (“Melting,” “Evaporation,” “Condensation,” and “Freezing.”)

We also drew the classic old 1950’s nuclear energy picture, with angry-faced (negative) electrons in an elliptical orbit around smiling (positive) protons and neutral neutrons.

It worked.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
FCC Last Call — Part I: Cable

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The FCC sure had a busy day a its last open meeting on December 20, 2006. In addition to the oral argument for the indecency cases in the 2nd Cir., the FCC also had its last open meeting of 2006. While it is impossible to provide a thorough analysis until the FCC releases the full text of the orders it adopted, below find some brief impressions based on the what we know so far about the FCC’s cable franchising order, cable rates report. Later, a post on the surprise Return of the Incredibly Awful Cyren Call Proposal.

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Inventing the Future:
The Shared Experience

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<%image(20061217-Shared_TV.png|588|407|Shared Experience prototype: two people and TV feed.)%>

This is a picture of a three way iChat. My friend Preston Austin travels quite a bit with his business. Here we see Preston in the bottom display, cleaning bicycle parts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His wife is folding laundry in Madison, Wisconsin. A third computer has a TV tuner attached, providing a live feed from “Sex in the City.” Preston and his wife have watched movies “together” this way several times. He reports that the experience allowed for more rich interaction than just long video calls and certainly better than separately watching TV.

Preston has been emphasizing to me the value of the shared experience almost since the moment I met him. When he first told me about shared virtual movie theaters, I didn’t really get it. But now I see my kids gathered around the TV or the computer running a DVD, and talking to each other about what they’re seeing. Or they’re on the phone discussing the same TV show that they and their friends are separately and simultaneously watching.

I think the principle here is that every(*) experience can be enriched by sharing it. Regardless of where the solitary activity is in the range from passive to active, the activity becomes more active when shared. This has value for education, training, and entertainment.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
The Legend of OpenLaszlo Legals

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I work for Laszlo Systems, Inc.., on OpenLaszlo, “the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications.” For the last year I’ve been working on the Legals project, which is a re-implementation of the entire platform — compiler, doctools, runtime-specific kernels, common core runtime libraries, you name it, while keeping APIs intact– in order to support compilation of source applications in our LZX language to arbitrary runtimes, starting with Flash and DHTML, but with SVG and Java on the horizon. This undertaking has been compared to the magician’s trick of pulling the tablecloth out from under the place settings — while dinner is being served.

Over the last calendar year, within the small but growing world of web application developers, the Legals project has gained increasing attention. Technorati shows that bloggers in China, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere are paying close attention to our every move.

Amusingly enough, these very sharp developers have grasped the essential idea of the project, but have been bewildered by the project name, “Legals”. Even within the company Laszlo Systems, those not invloved on the project have been intruigued by the moniker. Well, yesterday we essentially began our Beta program, and the Legals codename is being retired in favor of the much more normative (and bland) “OpenLaszlo 4 Beta Release 1.”

Below the fold you’ll find a little story I wrote for internal consuption at Laszlo about how the code name “Legals” came to be. If you like geek arcana, I think you’ll like this. Some tidbits for context: Everbody mentioned is a hardcore developer, except for Amy, the erstwhile program manager, and me, the technical writer. David is the CTO and founder of the company, our big cheese. Max is also a founder of the company. Oliver is the original designer of the LZX language. (The OpenLaszlo website can tell you more about all these people.) I’ll only add that I’ve been in this business since 1980, and the people mentioned below the fold are the smartest developers I’ve ever worked with. Finally, to set context, I might admit that a year ago our company’s financial situation was, shall we say, not especially propitious. Since then we’ve put millions in the bank and things are really looking up. But a year ago, things were more scary.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Virtual healing

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Here’s a feel-good story with a technophillic, Croquet-like feel to it: a network of children’s hospitals across North America get together to form a digital virtual universe for their patients and families. It was founded by Steven Spielberg and Norman Schwarzkopf.

In the demonstration presented at the conference, E.T. and the four-star bear, the on-screen characters of Mr. Spielberg and Gen. Schwarzkopf, were met by a child from Mount Sinai who presided as their tour guide through STARBRIGHT World. Together they joined friends from other hospitals where they explored the three virtual environments in STARBRIGHT World: Tropical World, Cave World and Sky World. In Sky World the group fell through a funnel cloud that transported them into a unique space where they can build sand castles, playhouses and forts, or anything imaginable – alone or with help of a few friends.

More on the story at Muniwireless.

Inventing the Future:
Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 9: How Do You Make Money?

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Last time: “Killer Apps,” in which I claimed that it was possible to engineer an application that had good characteristics for success within its chosen market, rather than just having to count on “built it and they will come.”
Now: What are the ways that revenue can be produced from a Killer App on an open-source platform?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.]

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