Jon Bauer’s Blog

Microsoft this week got hit with a 1.6B fine for infringing on MP3 technology.

To me, it’s becoming clear that the current round of Anti-DRM talk is a little bit misguided. I keep hearing “Let’s get rid of DRM and just use MP3 instead”. I personally don’t understand how this helps, if you still have to pay a license to use MP3 in your product.

To be fair, it’s not usually the customer that pays the MP3 tax, it’s usually the company that produces a product that can play .mp3. But I bet they pass that cost on to us somehow. Most taxes and tarrifs are passed on to the consumer with higher prices. (Anyone remember the Audio Tape Piracy Tax?) And if large companies like Microsoft have to be scared away from using it, and other companies (who have already paid to use it), have to switch, then what’s the point?

MP3 is the current choice because it’s what everyone’s used to. It’s taken this long for the public to accept .mp3 as an everyday word, and thus a brand. But it’s simply not the right choice.

When I rip my CDs, (and I do buy CDs still) I rip them in .ogg format. OGG is a Free, and Open format, that sounds as good or better than .mp3. The problem is that OGG is not supported by default in any media player I own, except my Linux laptop. My wonderful girlfriend bought me a Video IPod for our anniversary, and while I use it for testing new episodes of 247HH , I can’t actually put any of my ripped music on it, so it sits on my desk, lonely. You can install an OGG plugin for Quicktime if you want iTunes to support it, but I don’t think that support allows you to transfer them to your IPod (dumb). Yahoo Music Jukebox does a great job at supporting lots of open formats, but it doesn’t run on my OS of choice. Serato has recently added .ogg support, which means it’s actually easier for me to play my music on a turntable than in my portable media player.

Ok, so why do I rip in OGG? Because it’s Free, and it will win, eventually. If OGG doesn’t win, then another Free format will.

It’s the same reason I started focusing on PHP3 when everyone was using ASP. PHP was Free, and I knew it would win, and it did…..eventually. PHP was not a brand name back then, but when offered the choice, the tastemakers of the webmaster world drove adoption, and eventually the public followed. It meant cheaper hosting fees than Windows hosting packages, and once people got over the stigma of doing something that wasn’t “the norm”, they wondered why they ever paid that much to begin with.

MP3 is a kind of DRM.

It’s not Free, it’s just the best brand right now. It’s a patent trap, and a way to lock you in to paying more for your music.

If you want to stop DRM, focus on a Free format, and spend that extra money you save on more music.

Building Flickr Applications with PHP

From a review’s point of view, I liked that this book was short , but from an avid book buyer’s perspective, I wondered if it’s thinness would make this book worth it’s price. I am happy to say that this book is worth every penny, especially if you are a PHP programmer (even a novice one), and you want to learn more about Flickr and how you can integrate Flickr services into your online project.

I am probably the perfect reader for this book, as I had never signed up for a Flickr account, and although I view lots of images there, I’d never set up a Flickr feed or seen what all was possible behind the scenes.

This book starts out with an overview of what Flickr offers it’s users, and the basics of how to start an account and how to fill it up with photos. While this stuff may be obvious to the seasoned Flickr user, this was all new to me, and a welcome introduction to getting up and going in no time. Chapter Two walks you through most of the features available. Organizr, Sets, and Permissions, are all pretty self explainitory, and the book doesn’t waste too much time explaining what you can figure out yourself. Now that I know how to get data into Flickr, the rest of the book examines how to get it back out, using the Flickr API and the Phlickr PHP package.

Chapter Four covers the basics of PHP, which I’m not sure is really neccesary, except in a Beginning PHP book, but it’s good if Flickr happens to be your gateway into the wonderful world of PHP.

Chapter Five gets down to business by demonstrating how to pull a photo and it’s meta data from Flickr via Phlickr. Most blog owners could put the book down there and have everything they need to add Flickr photos to their site or view photos from other PHP based applications, but the rest of the book actually goes into much further detail about Phlickr’s API, and what you can do with it.

Sorting and Searching by tags, Creating a Photo Set, Managing a Portfolio, are all very cool tricks that the book explains very clearly and Phlickr makes very easy. It’s certainly enough power to create your own Flickr admin application, and all without breaking a sweat.

Chapters Seven through Nine give detailed information about what’s possible by extending Flickr Feeds. Auto generating emails with Photo updates and comments is one trick in here, but once your familiar with what Flickr offers, it’s easy to extend these concepts for your own unique uses. Before closing, the book also shows how to re-syndicate Flickr web services, making your customized feeds available to others.

Don’t let this book’s thin appearance on the outside fool you, it’s thick and juicy on the inside, and does a good job of not wasting paper or space on the bookshelf. The only downside to this book would be that it focuses on only the one Phlickr package, but most books would only give an overview, and knowing one package well beats learning the same one trick in several libraries.

This book really opened me up to Flickr and made me realize what I was missing all along. It’s a beautiful application that really can not be judged until you’ve used it yourself. It’s backend is brilliantly developed and seemlessly usable is many ways. It was a joy to discover such a great app via a book, and now armed with several creative ideas on how to use it’s API, I will be using my Flickr account much more in the near future.

Congrats to the entire Symfony dev team for releasing Symfony-1.0!

The Symfony Book is out as well, both online and print format.

Review coming shortly. (after I finish reading it)