TomS Words of Wisdom

Interesting bit of news.

Slashdot | Women Now Outnumber Men Online

Got home about 10:00 pm and found that the internet
access is down. More later when its fixed.

I made it down to SoCal with out incident. I got from the ExtraCar lot through check-in and security in about 45 minutes. The flight from Sea-Tac to Burbank was full but uneventful.

I spent most of my first day down here shopping for gifts and fixing my parents computers. It took several hours but I finally gave up and had to recover (reinstall) windows and all the drivers (but not the programs) on my mother's laptop. I also installed firefox on her laptop and on my folks main desktop computer.

After going out to dinner with my parents and my grandmother this evening, I spent a couple of hours introducing my Dad to podcasts. The biggest difficulty he seemed to run into was the inconsistency in UI of the various directories and in the podcasters' site lay out. We downloaded several sample podcasts and burned them on to CD-Rs for him to listen to on his way back to San Jose next week.

Tomorrow we (my folks and I ) drive from Glendale out to my brother's place in Norco. There we'll have a big family dinner and open presents. Should be a good party and a fun time with my niece, nephews and their cousins.

Thanks for the feedback. Though nobody has yet answered the questions I
posed.

> 1. How many podcatchers would this likely break? i.e. They would not
> ignore the new tags if they didn't support them?
> 2. Who else should I pitch this idea to and where else should this
> idea get discussed?

At this point the "mirror" tags are just an idea. If I still think it's
worth some time and effort after Christmas, I'll flesh out a full spec,
including a valid and commented XML Schema file. [I find schema files
easier to read and there are tools to convert them to DTDs.]

I had somewhat different purposes in mind for each of the three tags.

The main purpose for the "mirror:location" tag is to enable a simple
fall over and/or bandwidth improvement mechanism. This tag is simply a
discovery method that gives the podcatcher and/or user choices in where
to download from in much the same way that Source Forge uses mirrors.
The primary source, i.e. the one given in the enclosure tag itself, may
not be the most efficient for every user. Addressing this problem has
been the traditional function of mirrors since the early days of the
Internet. It's not meant to replace round-robin load balancing.

The "mirror:format" tag is intended to cut down on the number of
separate feeds that need to be maintained and processed. It came out of
some inefficiencies that the FeedMesh guys were complaining about
regarding the same content showing up in multiple feeds with different
UIDs. So the intent is to more closely connect the the content to the
UID. And yes to make use of "mirror:format" tags, the podcatchers have
to allow the user to prioritize format preferences.

Personally I want my podcatcher to download multiple formats and put
them in different places: low-res audio on my 256mb iRiver; high-res
audio on my desktop; low res-video on my video iPod; and HD video on my
DVR. Then when I've consumed the content in one of those locations, my
podcatcher should delete or archive the content from all those
locations. I think that having multiple formats associated with a
single UID in a single feed makes this easier.

Finally the intent of the "mirror:addMirror" tag if to allow mirroring
of content to be collaborative. For example, if I wanted to promote a
new video co-dec, I could offer to trans code a popular video cast and
provide a mirror in the new format without hijacking the main feed.
Another example might be a service that protects against the
slashdot/DSC effect by mirroring the media file as soon as it is
published expecting little or no traffic unless the primary source
becomes unavailable or too slow.

I've done almost no work with XML-RPC I and am still trying to get my
head around exactly how to spec the "mirror:addMirror" tag. Suggestions
welcome.

TTFN
Tom Sayles

> Please forgive the cross-posting and please don't flame me if this subject got hashed out months ago.
>
> I've been kicking around ideas for how to solve some of the bandwidth issues. What I've come up with is proposing yet another name space extension to RSS. Specifically to add /mirror:format, mirror:location/ and /mirror:addMirror/ tags as sub-elements of the enclosure tag. More info and a quick/dirty example are in my blog post at:
>
> http://www.soot-n-smoke.com/tsayles/2005/12/idea-mirror-tags-for-rss-enclosures.html
>
> So I have a couple of questions:
>
> 1. How many podcatchers would this likely break? i.e. They would not
> ignore the new tags if they didn't support them?
> 2. Who else should I pitch this idea to and where else should this
> idea get discussed?
>
> TTFN
> Tom Sayles
>
>

This idea proposes a new set of sub elements of the RSS Enclosure Tag to identify alternate locations and formats for an enclosed item. Since the RSS specification is basicly frozen the way to implement this would be through a new name space that defines these tags. I'm not an expert on writing XML specifications, so any suggestions or assistance would be appreciated.
esnecialy
The new tags are all sub elements of the RSS Enclosure tag and would include:

• mirror:format
• mirror:location
• mirror:addMirror

What I'm advocating would look something like the this.

If you have any comments please post or e-mail them.

I've made some really good progress with my Linux box in recent days.

I tripled the amount of RAM from 128MB to 384MB and it has made a big difference. I've got the Apache2 web server up and running with php5 and Pear. (This is probably the programming environment I want to be working with in my next job.) I've even gotten IPV6 and network printing up and running.

I'm still working on replicating my user data (My Documents, My Pictures, etc.) so that I have redundant auto-updating copies on both computers. I'm about 30% of the way there, as I can access the files from my Windows machine and work with them on my Linux box.

Snow
Originally uploaded by TSayles.

Had a couple of inches of snow last night in Woodinville. Had more up in Snoqualmie where I work, but didn't have my camera.

We've had the snow level creeping down the mountain sides for a couple of weeks now.

Guess it must be winter.