SubscribeNow Reading Reloaded changes
Starting August 15th, Amazon’s web service API started requiring all requests to be signed—that is, they must include a cryptographically generated key.
This is important, because while the service as always required an ID to run, it was never a secret. In fact, the former developer’s access ID has been embedded in the Now Reading Reloaded script since the very beginning.
The change, however, requires the addition of another key, this one like a password, and it’s not supposed to be given out. Since Now Reading Reloaded is open source, that means anyone who wanted to could use my key.
As a result, I’ve modified the plugin to use two more fields in the options screen, one for the Access ID and one for the Secret Key: both of these are required to add books from Amazon, and you will have to get both yourself.
Actually, it’s easy to do: go to the AWS site and register. Then plug the two keys they give you into the appropriate spaces in the Now Reading options screen. Resume reading.
Now Reading news
I have providing some light maintenance development for Rob’s Now Reading plugin; since Wordpress 2.7 wholly changed its interface, the plugin need some tweaking to make it work.
Up to this point, I’ve been hosting it locally, mostly picking at it whenever time allows.
I just updated it the other day to add a new feature (editable ASIN) and hopefully fix a recurring bug (CDATA error when searching).
In any case, I hope to make a push in the near future to clean it up and submit it the official Wordpress plugin site so that its user can benefit from auto-update, etc. etc. My own much-atrophied skills as a PHP developer aside (I deal mostly with Java at work), I think that it will ultimately benefit everybody, assuming I can make it so that the updates don’t override custom templates (perhaps giving preference to Now Reading template files in the theme folder?).
Stay tuned. The plugin is now here.
Comments on this post are closed. For support, please use the forum feature of the official plugin repository.
The Ethics of Software Patents
rev. 15 April 2009; get the PDF
The laws that protect the creation of content are manifold and complicated—even byzantine. America has copyright protection, which applies to concrete expressions of information, trademark protection, which protects distinctive symbols or verbiage associated with a legal entity, and patent protection, which protects “(1) processes, (2) machines, (3) manufactures or (4) compositions of matter” and is perhaps the least understood of all the various kinds of intellectual property protection (Guntersdorfer, 2003).
The explosion of the Internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has thrown into stark relief both the legal problems associated with protecting content in a digital age as well as the ethical issues inherent in the existing process for acquiring official intellectual property protection and the rights afforded involved parties in a redress of grievances. Copyright law specifically has come into public consciousness primarily due to the popularity of filesharing: for all intents and purposes, the advent of modern filesharing was the 1999 arrival of Napster, a program which allowed anyone to exchange digital copies of music online, for free. Legal problems eventually forced Napster to shut down (Ante, Brull, Herman , & France, 2000), but its legacy leaves not only alternative modes of filesharing, but a whole host of new web-based content creation engines that toe the lines of fair use.
Tracking LZMA efficiency
I’m a big fan of 7-Zip. It isn’t the best-looking application ever written, but that could be because its creator, Igor Pavlov, is concerned much more with its compression methods than its interface. 7-Zip has its own container format, but more important is the LZMA compression algorithm that Igor wrote and put into the public domain.
I decided to do some quick and dirty benchmarks to track the progress of LZMA/7-Zip over time. I went back as far as Igor supplied binaries, including one from the very old 3.x series. Rather than test every single release between then and now, I used only “stable” releases, with the exception of version 4.65, which is the latest version of any sort, as well as 4.66, which uses an alpha version of Igor’s new LZMA2 codec (and, as you’ll see, provides definite performance improvement).
I used Igor’s Timer utility to time the process (global time was reported). The corpus in this case was the Linux kernel source, v2.6.28. I conducted these tests on a RAM disk to eliminate hard disk latency issues (especially for decompressions, which improved by about 25% from my initial HDD-based tests). My rig is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 [2.4Ghz], with 4GB of RAM (one dedicated to the RAM disk), running Vista SP1 x64.
The command line setup was an approximation of the 7-Zip GUI’s “ultra” settings: -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on, letting the archiver auto-choose the number of threads to spawn. Read the full article »
GNOME Audio Player Shootout Revisited
It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop.
As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed exactly the same). I decided to revisit some of those players and see how they’ve progressed. Some of them listed last time haven’t seen any appreciable development, and have been left off.
I realize that I am totally ignoring the daemon-based players (read: Music Player Daemon, XMMS2); this is by design, since those players open up a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say that if you’ve decided on and XMMS2 or MPD-based player and successfully configured it, you probably don’t need any advice on choosing software.
The following programs will be covered in this review (development versions):
- BMPx (0.40.14)
- Rhythmbox (0.11.6)
- Exaile (2.99.1-svn)
- Banshee (1.4.1)
- Quod Libet (2.0)
- Decibel (1.00)
- Songbird (1.0)
- Listen (0.6~svn1044)
All of the testing was done on a fresh install (and update) of Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox, using a small representative sample of my music collection (some modern, some classical, in Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC).
In defense of open models
Andrew Keen has no idea how open models work.
In his latest article, he pontificates that the recent economic downturn is a death knell for community-supported or community-built programs/sites/&c.
So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.
There are really two broad fallacies that need addressing here. The first is Keen’s use of the word “open source,” which here is a misnomer. He never mentions Linux, Apache, or other open source programs which always have and will continue to have a dedicated base of programmers, most of whom work on it in their spare time, without any remuneration except personal pride and the esteem of their peers. It need hardly be noted that an economic downtown is likely to increase interest in open-source software, as it likely reduces operating costs for businesses.
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