Wayne D's Blog

(update Sept. 13) There are two additional posts that chronicle me and Twine.com. Find them here and here

I was browsing through my server logs today and noticed a referral from twine.com. When I checked the referring URL I was shocked to find a complete copy of one of my more popular EEEPC articles that one of their users had bookmarked. I checked a few other articles to see what was going on and found that some of them are one line summaries, others are partial reprints while others are complete reprints. All of the reprinted material does include links to the original articles but that certainly doesn't absolve twine.com of their responsibility to get permission from copyright holders. There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern, my 370 word article was reprinted in full while another 170 word article was excerpted to 85 words. There are also quite a few engadget articles reprinted in their entirety. I guess it's time for me to figure out how to send a DMCA take down notice before more people try to trample on my copyright without permission. Maybe I should drop a note to Weblogs Inc. and see what they think of twine.com using their stuff.

I think I'll send them a email first, perhaps it's an honest mistake and their Semantic Web technology. We shall see.

(update Sept. 10) Twine.com responded very quickly and removed the infringing article. They also appeared to have removed the engadget.com stuff too.

When trying to figure out what to write about I realized it's been a while since I told you about my emusic.com picks for the month. This I do without malice even though emusic.com decided that I wasn't getting enough signups for the service to let me continue to be an affiliate. I don't see why one more name in the database matters that much, itseems to me with iTunes and Amazon barking at their heels they want all the publicity they could get. See Geoff Smith is neat, emusic doesn't like me and Emusic really does like me for the backstory.

As might be expected this month's picks are heavily influenced by the artists I saw and liked at Summerfolk and who have checked out by the time I made it to the CD sales tent. First up is Sara Hickman and Motherlode. Twenty tracks of musical goodness. Next up is Kim and Reggie Harris. Get on Board is a celebration of African-American culture with a strong gospel flavour.
My final choice is David Roth's Irreconcilable Similarities. This album is what I would call classical folk music, 16 tracks, 73 minutes, great value for the money.

Now it's time for me to go and remove the emusic.com banner from the footer.

When I hear my U.S. friends complain about the 250 GB cap that Comcast is implementing I have to laugh. Rogers is my ISP and they have implemented a 60 GB after which they charge overage fees. I have never used 60GB a month but when my wife was watching the Olympics streaming on the internet in August I was worried. Turns out I had nothing to fear, my usage for August was only 30GB, That's without any downloading anything through bit torrent. Why doesn't Rogers have a clue? When you mention Rogers in a group of people be prepared for the horror stories. They have to realize they should sell connectivity not bandwidth. The internet is the crack cocoaine of the 21st century and if they want to succeed they need to feed the habit. That means providing their customers connectivity anywhere they can for a flat fee.

I was at Ivor Wynne stadium in Hamilton yesterday and Cogeco has free wifi there for their customers. What does Rogers have for their customers at the Rogers Centre in Toronto? Nada. They seem to be truly surprised when there was the hug e backlash when they introduced the iPhone with an insanely low data cap. Even if the majority of customers would never use that amount of data people don't want to have to worry about it. Now that the 6GB special data package for the iPhone is done, I expect to see the number of new iPhone customers drop. If everytime you pull the phone out of your pocket you are worried how much it's going to cost you why would you bother buying one?

If someone came today and offered me connectivity with a guaranteed minimum rate for $100 a month with half decent roaming wifi connectivity I'd drop Rogers internet and cable in a second, ditch the phone and go VOIP. Bell keeps trying to sell me DSL for a lower price with crazy low bandwidth and transfer levels. Forget it guys, you don't have a clue either. If Rogers want to bury Bell then they need to differentiate their offering from Sympatico not match them GB for GB in their transfer cap level. Rogers needs to look back in history to all those dial up ISP who were left on the technological trash heap and learn a lesson before they get whacked.

Innovate or die boys and girls at Rogers otherwise in 10 years you'll be wondering why the world has passed you by. Sell connectivity not transfer volume. Do you want to be the empty downtown small businesses or the Walmart Superstore?

Now I'm off to watch some streaming video on the web and download a movie from iTunes, if I haven't used too much transfer volume this month.

When I found out I was going to be in San Jose I decided to see if my Twitter friend shoppingnotes wanted to tweetup for lunch. I went to her profile and was shocked to see that her account had been suspended and is being investigated for "strange activity". WTF? ShoppingNotes posted links to her blog articles on Twitter. On her blog she writes about deals, primarily with women in mind. Stella McCartney dresses on EBay, skin care products, designer shoes at half price. In short the sort of things women on a budget who want be fashionable are interested in. Evidently other Twitter users find this valuable as she has more followers than people who are following her.

She tells me Twitter has labelled her as antisocial. Now I know some antisocial people on Twitter and Shoppingnotes is not one of them. If people found her antisocial and her tweets of no value then they wouldn't follow her. I don't need Twitter to tell me who is antisocial, they should concentrate on the extremely offensive or extremely rude people like the person who was attacking Ariel Waldman and let the community decide whether someone is antisocial or irrelevant and not follow them. Come on Twitter, give me back my Shoppingnotes! What can you do to help? If you are a Twitter user go to http://twitter.com/help and tell them you don't need them to tell you who is antisocial, but be nice about it. Pissing them off does no good. (update August 28th) Evidently Twitter reconsidered as ShoppingNotes Twitter account is not suspended anymore, Thanks Twitter!

In the interest of journalistic integrity I must disclose that we did manage to meet for lunch while I was in San Jose, she paid, over my great protests, but that has not influenced me in the least.

By the end of day two I thought my head was going to explode it was so filled with visual computing goodness.

We got to wtiness a BSOD during the second day keynote, I feel sorry for the CEO who got Microsofted, but that's what happens when you rely on Windows.

A few minor points, I spoke to on Japanese researcher who had come for the CUDA training sessions and was disappointed it wasn't more hands on. Education techniques have come a long way from static lectures, maybe Nvidia should talk to a teacher. Training requires an expert, Nvidia should hire a teacher. Another attendee was a bit pissed when he found out that Nvidia was giving away tickets to the Show he had paid $50 to see. It was announced in one of the sessions I attended that Nvidia was going to make all the conference slide packages available on their website. No time frame was announced but at least they are trying. This is their first time running a conference so I'll cut them some slack but I expect better next year. Another thing they might want to try and build in is more networking opportunities, maybe a meet and greet with the conference speakers and the conference attendee's. Nvison was a pretty ambitious project with so many simultaneous tracks, as a conference attendee I was constantly weighing off which of two conflicting sessions to attend. Videoing the sessions and making them available on the Nvidia website would be a great value adder for conference attendees too.

I had another brush with celebrity when I got the chance to have my picture taken with the Mythbusters just before I had to leave for the airport. I expect my kids to be much more impressed by that than the picture with Tricia Helfer. I also got a chance to attend the live Diggnation taping. I never got around to watching Diggnation but I will now. Those guys are funny, but beware they are NSFW.

I'm writing this on my EEEPC using the free wifi at the San Jose airport, now I shound go get security screened. That's it for now.