SON ofabitch! Ignore that previous post about the HDTV tuner…if you want to see what actually makes me drool, versus just something nerdy, check out Radio Babylon. For less than $200, that’s a bad-ass embedded development system, and with Andy’s Radio Babylon code, you can turn it on near a friendly wireless network that contains iTunes shares and plug your headphones in. It picks a random iTunes share, picks a random tune and starts playing. Repeat until bored or the batteries are dead.

Amazing. I’ve been looking at gumstix for awhile, but this pushed me way over the edge. This shoots straight to the top of my birthday list of toys.

OK, admittedly, I don’t have a HDTV, I seldom watch any TV, and I don’t even have a Tivo to catch what I would watch (though I’m rebuilding my Linux DVR as we speak, after an hardware failure. So I’ll catch up on Battlestar Galactica eventually). But this USB HDTV Tuner has the geek chops, if nothing else. Use your laptop to watch HDTV! The bundled software lets you record, and even “backup your favorite episodes to DVD”. Exxcellent….

Mark Wallace (of Walkerings) has a great article on MMORPG trust and the various player-to-player/player-to-company interactions that can occur in that sphere. It focuses on notable 2005 goings-on in two of my favorites: Second Life and EVE Online. Well worth reading, if you’re into MMORPGs, even if you don’t play those two in particular. The ramifications are relevant for the entire MMORPG space.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve changed the web application framework underneath this website to Django; an awesome, Python-based, easy-to-use toolkit for dynamic websites. There are several pretty high-profile sites using Django (it was originally developed for The Lawrence Journal-World [newspaper in Lawrence, KS]), and the latest big site has been announced. The US Congress Votes Database tracks voting for every member of Congress, allows you to subscribe to a member’s voting record as an RSS feed, and contains records of every vote since 1991. Pretty cool, and a testament to the power of this framework.

(Heh…got your attention there, didn’t I? *grin*) Well, it’s probably not what you think. This is just a quick note that I have been meaning to post for awhile to my “local” readers. Which is basically Lee and (maybe) Andy (no link…no trace. He’s a wraith).

Anyway, point being that I downloaded the Broadcast Flag and Analog Hole hearings from last November, and have them available as a V-CD (OK, so I lied about the DVD) if anyone is looking to watch them. Almost as exciting as C-SPAN, I suppose…but this is important stuff. You ARE paying attention to the Digital Transition Content Security Act (aka: Analog Hole Legislation), aren’t you? HR 4569, to be exact. And if you need a link to it’s status…well, here ya go.

And with pubdate to boot. w00t! Did I mention Django is cool?

FlightAware is a free IFR flight tracker…dang, this is cool. Includes live flight tracking of any flight, instant info for an airport, aggregate data for analysis (flights/day by time, etc.), and nifty animated flight video. I’m not a plane nerd or anything, but this IS pretty cool. (Thanks, reddit!)

Well, so far the migration appears pretty successful. Nothing appears to be lost. The template generating my RSS feed needs some editing; it only has title info right now, and no datetime data. That’s pretty trivial. Definitely some CSS tweaking, but that was expected.

And I get a real web framework again! Nothing against blosxom in general; it ably powered my weblog for a while. Much longer than intended, in fact. And I could have added things like comments to blosxom, of course…but it was always a solution limited to my weblog, vs. my entire site. Rebuilding my reading list, for example, it really beyond the scope of blosxom (though possible, I’m sure, with much tweaking).

Using Django, OTOH, gives me a full-blown application framework. Clean integration with databases, all the python libraries available, flexible templating language, caching capability, framework plugins…the list goes on. This thing is great!

In addition, Django has an underappreciated (by me, anyway) bonus; the admin interface. Through The Web, easy to use and customize, full control of the data in the app. And built in…when I build a data class, the admin stuff basically comes for free (along with the DDL for the db table, for that matter…truly a DRY infrastructure). I didn’t really grok how much I’d like it until I tried it (as I am now, writing this blogpost in it).

I’ve already slapped the above-mentioned reading list back in, turned on commenting, and I’m preparing some more additions. Django is fun!

OK…I think this is ready. Heck with it…if it breaks, it breaks. New backend (django)! Now with comments (again)! All hail python!

To bed. Seems to be working, hopefully no horrible errors. Those I will fix tomorrow. *grin*

I got an interesting email from Lawrence Lessig yesterday, reviewing
some of the new projects Creative Commons has coming
up next year. (Nothing notable going on…I tossed CC some $$ this
year, and I encourage you to do the same. So I get all the emails.)

One project in particular stood out…it’s fascinating. A project
called Returning Author’s Rights (go about a third of the way down
the page there). From the description: Under US copyright law, a
creator has the right to “terminate” any transfer of rights he or she
made 35 years after the transfer. But to do so requires an insanely
complex series of steps which most creators simply don’t have the time
or knowledge to engage in. Thus, the law gives authors this right, but
the law is so insanely complicated that creators would have a
difficult time trying to exercise it. We can help with this. Over the
past year, we’ve been mapping out a computer program – a kind of
wizard for termination of transfer applications – that creators could
use to know whether they have rights that they might reclaim and to
help the authors reclaim those rights.

Uh, wow. I can see why they call it a “stealth project” elsewhere in
the description. I can’t wait to find and read more specific info on
this, but it is HUGE. There are many creators out there who have
signed over content that is no longer making the transferee any money,
but which the transferee holds onto as a matter of course. Music
examples alone abound. The possibility that authors could reclaim some
of these rights is awesome…I can’t wait to read more about the
project and the process. Who knew? Thanks again, Professor Lessig and
CC! You are doing important stuff.