It’s really, really paining me to watch the beating that the openmoko project is currently taking. I’ve been majorly into this idea for some time now, about half way through ‘07. FOSS is a brilliant thing, and it’s only a matter of time before the telecommunications industry wakes up to that. After all, Linux sprouted from Unix which sprouted from a telco.

Sadly, it looks like the openmoko team has set the effort back a fair ways. It’s been released before it was ready and Dave Fayram has pointed that out. I thought Dave gave a reasonably fair assesment. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time with the manual, but most users don’t. His review has unfortunately been leapt upon by every Apple fanboy out there and it’sgaining a life of it’s own.

I’m a rank outsider, no involvement in the project whatsoever aside from voraciously reading news about it for the past 12 months. Frankly, it seems that it’s been mismanaged by FIC. There has been a fair amount of disgruntlement coming from the developers working for the company. The fact that they switched from the original GTK platoform to the qtopia stack at the eleventh hour smacked of desperation.

This wouldn’t really bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that openmoko had gained so much media attention. So often you hear outlets talking about the triumverate of iPhone, Android and openmoko. Up until this week I’ve been really proud to see such a rabidly open source project be given that much airtime. It’s frustrating to now find out that they weren’t deserving of it.

I think those of us looking for an open source phone now need to turn towards the slightly-open-source-but-not-really Android, and hope like hell that something great comes out of Nokia’s plans for opening up Symbian.

Fucking World Youth Day.

I decided to go for a ride today to check out the local walking/riding trails around Willoughby leisure centre and see if there was any decent mountain biking to be had. There’s a whole bunch of concreted paths down there that are shared between pedestrians and bikes.

I was riding down one path when I saw a police motorcycle coming the other way. I was confused, until I saw a bunch of people walking behind it, many in World Youth Day Staff outfits taking up the entire path.

I considered moving over to the left and trying to ride around them, but then realised I didn’t want to be “annoying”. I pulled off onto a grassy area by the side of the path to wait it out. As I sat on my bike I got a whole bunch of greasy looks from the police, presumably they were sizing me up wondering if I was going to be a nuisance.

All up, there were two police motorcycles, four more police on foot and about 10 WYD staff members. This was all for about 20 - 30 pilgrims, doing nothing more than walking along a fucking path in the suburbs. As I rode home, I saw another police car and two more bikes directing traffic, I presume they were there for the same group.

For starters, what a goddamned waste of police resources. Secondly, why the hell was I made to feel like a criminal in my own suburb for some freaking god-botherers? Why did none of them even make a token effort to move over and let me past? Why was I glared at for sitting on my bike and watching them pass? The whole “Do not look upon them for they are holier than thou” attitude shits me to no end.

It Hath Begun.

Trent Reznor recently released the latest Nine Inch Nails album in a really, really interesting way. The confluence of marketing-geekery and copyleft-geekery that it represents tickled my fancy.

While his decision to release several SKUs at various price-points is the best new-wave digital distribution technique I’ve seen to date, it’s his choice to license the work under a version of the Creative Commons license that I think is really interesting, and has been overlooked by a lot of the comment I’ve read.

Basically, you can do whatever you please with Ghosts I - IV provided you don’t sell it to anyone, provided you don’t pretend that you or someone other than the original artists created it, and provided that you keep the license intact if you remix it.

So, I could take the FLAC copy I just paid Trent for and stick it on The Pirate Bay perfectly legally.

I see this as a watershed moment for Creative Commons. This is the first mainstream use of the license that I’m aware of. If Trent makes money despite the fact that people can legally give the album to everyone they know, it will say a lot of profound things about the emerging marketplaces for creative works.

First and foremost, it will make the RIAA’s ceaseless lawsuits look a bit silly. They’re telling us that the entire reason the music industry’s profits are declining are because of sharing. And yet here’s an artist that has essentially given his work away for free, and yet by all reports he’s made $750k within a few days. Granted, he had to apply some novel thinking to do it. He had to be a little bit *gasp* creative!

Maybe the mainstream record labels could do the same. I’m not saying they should adopt Trent’s model completely (although they could do worse) but just to inject some bold, fresh, risky thinking into their own models.

I’m still using Ubuntu on my laptop and it just keeps getting better. Clare and I have started up a website project which has meant I’ve been doing more in depth php development work. I really love how easy it is to get a LAMP system up and running for seamless local web development. This makes it really simple to tweak and play with things on the fly. This discovery was really great and I’ve been loving it for the last couple of weeks. However, I’ve just now discovered something that might make all of that obsolete.

I started reading the Official Ubuntu Book and it casually mentioned the Connect to Server feature. Basically you drop out the Places menu, hit Connect to Server and give it the ssh details of your remote development environment. It then opens up the remote filesystem as if it were a standard window. I’m now accessing my server on the other side of the world as if it were sitting on my local system. Admittedly it’s a little slower than working with files locally, but it’s a damned sight better than buggering about working through ftp on a Windows system. Additionally, ssh is nice and secure whereas ftp is most certainly not.

Until now I’ve been working on my site locally with the idea of gzipping up all my files and my SQL database and uploading it to the server as a job lot once I’ve done. Now that I’m armed with this knowledge, I’ll likely just start working directly on the server. It’ll mean less uploading hassles ultimately. The only danger is that I may be tempted to use more absolute paths in my code, which is just poor form. Oh well, I’m a bad man. I might just stick the whole site behind an .htaccess file to avoid the great unwashed getting a look at it while I’m done and buggering up my brand integrity. (Shit, can you tell I just did a marketing subject? It’s getting into my brain.)

Lately I’ve been somewhat doubting my choice of degree and career. The basic thrust of my thinking has been “Given unlimited resources and time I’d spend my days tinkering with electronics, obscure software and the odd mechanical device. That said, what the hell am I doing in a business degree?” And it’s kind of been bothering me. When I forgo doing my lecture readings in favour of mucking about with a homebrew Wii sensor bar, shouldn’t I take notice of that?

What I’ve come to realise in the last couple of days, however, is that while I like doing those things, I’m not going to get paid millions of dollars to do them. Sure, I could pursue an electrical engineering degree, but there’s a couple of problems with that:

1) There’s a lot of mathematics involved. This is something I could probably overcome, however it would be hard, and would probably limit me.

2) I’d be limited to a technical role for a long time, if not forever, while working for someone else. Engineers can make great money, however they can’t make CEO money. It’s also a lot harder for a pure engineer to be self employed. They either start an engineering firm, for which you need to be a great manager and not a great engineer, or they invent something brilliant that the whole world can’t live without, then license it to a corporation and make a trillion dollars. That’s kind of a risky life strategy.

So where that leaves me is: “There are other career paths that might interest me more, but business and marketing do still interest me, and they don’t limit my future earning potential.” Which basically translates to: “I’m a complete mercenary who is sacrificing life happiness for money” or “C.R.E.A.M. suckah”. Now I’m not entirely unhappy with that. I have no compunction in saying that money is a major motivator in everything I do. Money buys things, and I really like things. Nevertheless, it still niggled at me a bit. There was still margin for error there. Was I really making the right call?

Today it all crystallised for me. What’s the core reason I love tinkering? I like doing things that people haven’t thought of before. I recognise areas for possible improvement that other people don’t see, and I visualise ways to fill them. I think I’m pretty good at that. For example, right now I’m part way through creating a visual basic solution that will let me quickly visualise a bunch of specific data at work.

Where I’m going with this is, what’s the core goal of a marketer? To take in a bunch of factors (customer feedback, market conditions, technological landscape etc) and divine from that a product offering that no-one else has thought of but fills a need.

So; a satisfying reaffirmation of my existing life path, or a fabulous exercise in rationalisation and justification? I’m pretty certain it’s the former, and I’m happy with where it’s left me.

That said, I still need to stop tinkering and get down to some damned study. Exams are in a week and a bit. Argh!

I was shown a leaflet from The Greens today by Krystal and it got my blood boiling about our partisan political system… again. The below is a cut and paste job from a private forum.

http://www.nsw.greens.org.au/materials/reports/Dev%20Map.pdf

I agree with some of their points, however, all their ideas are about how to spend money and none of them are about how to make it.

This is what shits me about partisan politics. Both sides are caricatures of themselves. The Left wants to save the environment, let in all the refugees and increase welfare spending. The Right wants to privatise everything in sight and encourage the economy via free enterprise.

There needs to be a freaking balance. However, that’s never going to happen with the way our political system currently is. Most people don’t vote on issues, they vote for the party they’ve always voted for because their mums and dads always voted for them. Then out of the people that do vote on issues, most of them get their information on said issues from Today Tonight and A Current Affair.

It’s for this reason that the political parties paint their policies and standpoints in big, primary colours that are easy to digest within a 15 second soundbite. “We’re the Greens, we like the environment!” “We’re the Nationals, we like guns and farmers!” Because that’s the only way they’re going to fit into the tiny portion of mindshare that Australians have allocated for politics.

The Democrats were the only hope we had for a decent centrist party but they’re well and truly dead now. I am feeling decidedly unrepresented in the current political climate.

Also, just to clarify, this treatise is in no way against you, Krystal. You’re one of the good guys since you actually think about these things.