I _Really_ Don't Know

Not by me! How arrogant would that be? By George Orwell - posted by Guy Kawasaki

What an amazing essay by such a great author.

So, last week I was over in Athens, GA at code4libcon 2007. I was expecting a good week full of ideas, beer and really great chats with really smart people, but it was much better than I expected.

Things started really well with Karen Schneider's keynote. Karen is an impassioned speaker and is well-known throughout the community. Much of what she said made a lot of sense to me.

A little while ago at work I said that I thought we could build a union catlogue in twenty minutes, in the same style as the ruby-on-rails videos where they take over the world build a simple blog in 20 minutes - there's a few of them around and 20 minutes seems to be the magic number.

Anyways, to cut a long story short I got 'called' on it and told that I had to put my money where my mouth was and, despite having not done it yet, we announced the upcoming title in a public webinar. No pressure...

I'm sitting in a very nice conference venue in Athens, GA. It's the first conference I've been to that has desks for everyone to work on and plenty of power sockets. Imagine what you see at the G8 Summit, or other political meetings.

Keynote today is Karen Schneider, Florida State University, blogging as The Free Range Librarian.

The FT is running a nice little poll on the question of DRM in music. Unsurprisngly the results are overwhelmingly in favour of dropping DRM. The comments, though, contain some real gems in this debate.

I wrote last week about the increasing visibility of multi-touch UIs, most recently with Apple's iPhone. This week I've found some more to share...

Ksan Lab have a nice demo of Virtual Painter up on YouTube giving a nice view of the natural style of interaction allowed by these devices. The gestures used here are different to those seen in some of the other demos. It (or the demonstrator) seems to favor single-finger use.

When I said the other day in comment on Steve Jobs Thought On Music that DRM doesn't work I really meant it doesn't work.

The "Processing Key" of the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) protection system used on both of the new HD formats has been captured while in memory in clear text.

I had a batch of ISBNs to convert from ISBN13 back to ISBN10. I've got some C# to do it, and some Java, but figured this Excel spreadsheet converter would be useful for folks.

ISBN10-13 Converter

I wrote the other week about Starfire and wondered "why?", but to add a little to other side of the Sun innovation debate... Here's Fortress, a language specifically designed for High Performance Computing.