Daily Archives: June 21, 2007

internet, multimedia, web authoring

Bringing paper and ebook together

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There’s a buzz building about a session at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (which looks great, I wish I could have attended) from Manolis Kelaidis on his “blueBook”. Kelaidis is a designer at the Royal College of Art in London. His idea is to bring electronics to the book, rather than making books virtual. Here is the brief, from his presentation:

  • Design a book consisting of sheets of paper with printed buttons (hyperlinks), which when touched allow the user to access and control digital information.
  • Information accessed in this way could then be stored either locally (within the book) or remotely (PC, handheld devices, Web, other books).
  • The book should have the look-and-feel of a regular book, with flipping pages and conventional binding, while technology should be non-intrusive, portable and robust.
  • Manufacturing should be based on traditional bookbinding techniques minimizing complexity and costs.

Using conductive ink and embedded electronics, such a book can include multimedia (play music or video) and live links to web content or interactive discussions, perhaps in conjunction with a wireless-connected PC. Printed words become hyperlinks. The presentation is amazing and thought-provoking. See also Tim O’Reilly’s post on the subject and its comments.

Update: Presentation seems to have been removed; if it reappears I imagine it will do so here.

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software, software development

SQLite, test-driven development, and the inscrutable SQL standard

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I interviewed Dr D Richard Hipp, the main author of SQLite, for the Guardian Newspaper.

Among the things I found interesting is that he attributes the high reliability of his database engine to the extensive test suite included in the code. I’m not sure whether he practices test-driven development as such, but it is a great case study for the advantages of integrating tests with your code. One of the points he made was that the test suite enables him to replace entire subsystems and be confident that nothing gets broken. By contrast, I have heard of cases where key sections of code in large, old applications is marked “do not touch” because nobody dares to risk the consequences.

I also asked him about the importance of standards in software development. He gave me an answer that somewhat surprised me:

When I coded up SQLite I did not refer to any official SQL standard. I used the PostgreSQL documentation. That was my reference. If you’ve ever picked up a copy of one of the official SQL standards you will find it largely inscrutable. They are next to impossible to make sense of. Even for particular details of syntax you can study it, and they are so vague that you can’t really understand what they mean. So a strategy we’ve used when there’s some question about how something should work is we write a little test script and run it on lots of popular SQL database engines, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and try and find a consensus. Then we code to make SQLite work the same as everybody else does. Clearly that’s not the right way to do a standard, but in practice the implementations vary so widely that it’s the only practical thing to do.

Many companies boast about how they respect and observe software standards; sometimes the reality is more pragmatic than you might have thought.

general

CD swapping with HitFlip

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I took a look at the CD swapping site hitflip.co.uk, after seeing it recommended in The Independent newspaper.

Here’s the deal:

Disposing of CDs

You list all your unwanted CDs (DVDs, games, etc). Each one is assigned a value in “flips”, the currency of hitflip. Currently a flip is worth £2.30; CDs tend to be assigned from 2 flips up. If someone wants a CD, they request it, and you send it off to them. You get the value in flips credited to your account. You can’t cash in your flips; you have to use them to acquire other items.

Acquiring CDs

You browse the library for an item you want. When you find one, you request it. If it is immediately available, it is posted to you. You pay the value in flips, plus a cash fee to hitflip, currently £0.79 for a low value item, increasing for more valuable items.

My Hitflip review

I don’t much like it. Main problem: there’s not much immediately available that you are likely to want. The obvious risk is that you merrily post off all your best items, then find there is nothing you want that is actually available. You get stuck with a pile of useless flips.

The problem is that you are not really swapping. Instead, you are selling for virtual money. That’s more flexible than real swapping, but lacks the advantage of a real swap, where you do not approve the trade unless you get something you want in return.

There seem to be several flaws in the hitflip system:

  • You can’t set your own price in flips, you have to accept what the system assigns.
  • There’s no way I can see to describe your item, its condition, special features etc. Everything is just meant to be in good condition.
  • You can run a wish list, but you can’t add items of your own description, only select from the hitflip library which is not remotely comprehensive.
  • Privacy: it appears that you can get anyone’s address by offering an item on their wishlist. I realise that you need someone’s address in order to send them something (duh!). But I’d have thought there should be an approval step. X is offering the item, do you want to accept? If X is new, or has a bad community rating, you might want to decline.
  • Bugs: The system originated in Germany, and I found German language messages popping up now and again.
  • User interface: browsing the library is laborious and the UI overall is not great.

It’s not all bad. It all hinges on finding items you want. If you succeed, you get them in return for your unwanted items at the cost of the fee.

Overall though, I find it hard to recommend.

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general

The declining price of recorded music

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I recently purchased a second-hand copy of Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin’s tour de force from 1975.

These sell for anything from £1.50 – £8.00 or so on eBay. Mine was the old unremastered release which usually sells at the upper end of the range, as there are fewer of them circulating and some people prefer the sound.

I was interested to find the original sales receipt inside. The double CD was purchased from HMV in Portsmouth in 1993. The price: £22.99.

Prices have risen by about 40% in that time. So £22.99 in 1993 equates to about £32.00 today.

Amazon UK has this CD (remastered) new for £7.97 – 25% of the 1993 price at HMV.

OK, so bricks and mortar shops are more expensive than online, and CDs are often reissued at budget price. So try a new double CD: Bruce Springsteen’s Live in Dublin is £11.98 at Amazon UK, or complete with a DVD at £17.99, still way below the 1993 price.

It is not just the decline in CD sales that is hurting the music industry, but the fact that they are selling for much less money.