Apple Subscription Plan

Apparently Apple is shopping a $30 month subscription plan to the media networks for content (1, 2).

I think this is a good idea.

Most of the content on the iTunes Movie store is buy-only which is not an attractive proposition since I suspect that most of it will only get watched once (or twice, maybe). The high cost of buying programs is what puts me off buying anything on the store. For example if I want to catch up on the Family Guy on the iTunes Movie store, I would need to buy all the seasons which would cost me between $10 and $30 a season, a show-stopper for me. For that kind of money I am better off going to Netflix but then I have to wait for 2 days. I know you can rent movies and I do once in a while but the selection is pretty thin.

So if I was able to have access to the content on the iTunes Movie store for $30/month and pay per movie rented, that would be an attractive proposition for me.

Attractive in the way cable wasn’t because I would get 70 channels for a basic cable subscription (67 of which I did not watch), and I would need to get premium subscriptions for better quality content, which is why I killed off my cable 4 years ago.

The interesting thing about this plan though is that it moves close to the a-la-carte programming that cable companies fought tooth and nail against time and time again.

Custom GelaSkins

I recently found out that you can make custom GelaSkins, the process is a little tedious but I got my three customs GelaSkins last week and they look great. The colors are well reproduced, crisp and clean. Be sure to upload high resolution pictures because a laptop lid is quite large, and bear in mind that you will probably have to crop the top and bottom of the image because of differences in the the aspect ratios between the it and the laptop lid.

Why You Can’t See The Great Pacific Garbage Patch On Google Earth

From Google Ocean product manager Steve Miller, via Search Engine Land:

Regarding the availability of satellite imagery of the oceans: Unfortunately we haven’t found great sources of data for most of the open ocean because most imagery providers focus their efforts on the land. Where we do have satellite imagery for the ocean surface, we’ve preserved it in the most recent version of Google Earth and the satellite view in Maps. For example you can still see trawling vessels in southeast Asia. There are a number of potential applications for such imagery, from amateur interest in finding ships to looking at off-shore oil platforms to locating illegal fishing vessels, so it’s certainly worth exploring how we could track down data for the rest of the ocean.

Regarding the gyre: the trash gyre presents its own set of challenges. Even if we had satellite imagery, the gyre likely wouldn’t appear in it. Most of the plastic is particulate and/or a bit under the surface so you can’t see it in the imagery. A number of groups are starting to focus on collecting more data about the gyre via expeditions and sampling – we’d love to see one or more of them produce maps that could be viewed in Google Earth.

There are also links to Wikipedia and a TED conference video by Captain Charles Moore.

Ocean Day

So today is Ocean Day (or was it yesterday, not sure.) I was going to write a post about it detailing some of the issues that plague our oceans, but Roz Savage got there first with a very eloquent post she put together while rowing across the Pacific:

Did you know that 74% of the Earth?s surface is ocean? It?s where all
life on this planet began, and it?s what regulates our biosphere,
including the climate and weather.

The global ocean, our most precious resource, is in serious trouble
right now, so in honor of the first UN-sanctioned World Oceans Day, I
want to ask for your help in protecting it.

The three main ocean problems that need our immediate attention are
overfishing, plastics pollution, and ocean acidification. Today
provides the perfect opportunity to raise awareness for these
challenges, and to explain how we can immediately take action to make
it right.

Overfishing: The UN reports that 75% of seafood species are maxed out
or overexploited. Catches of nearly a third of these species are less
than 10% of what they once were. 90% of the big fish like sharks,
tuna, swordfish are already gone. How can you contribute to a
solution? Start by checking out this video on how to choose sustainable

Seafood. You can also carry a pocket guide with you to restaurants and
the grocery store so you can do a quick check to make sure you make
smart choices. I have a great app on my iPhone ? look for Seafood
Watch Guide from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Plastics pollution: For those of you who followed my row from San
Francisco to Hawaii last year, you already know what an insidious
threat plastics pollution is for the ocean. Plastics are not
biodegradable ? they take hundreds of years to break down into smaller
pieces, which never really go away. Plastics wreak havoc by leaching
toxins into the water and into the marine life that consumes the
pieces ? eventually making its way back up the food chain and onto our
dinner plates. How do we fix this? The best way is to immediately
reduce the amount of plastic you use. Simple ways to do this include
bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, using your own drinking
bottles and mugs rather than disposables, and making more conscious
purchases?support brands that use biodegradable packaging rather than
Styrofoam. And for the plastic that you do consume ? please recycle
it. Right now, less than 5% of the plastic we use is ever recycled.

Ocean acidification. Our actions, primarily our use of fossil fuels?
are rapidly changing the chemistry of the global ocean. How? The ocean
is absorbing 11 billion metric tons of CO2 a year, acidifying the
waters and threatening the foundation of sea life. Experts say that if
we don?t sharply reduce our CO2 emissions right now, within the next
few decades, it will be impossible for coral reefs, the most beautiful
and diverse marine habitats, to grow. Ocean acidification affects
every marine animal with a shell?oysters, lobsters, clams, starfish,
crabs and urchins. If these animals can?t survive, then the entire
ecosystem that relies upon them is impacted. This includes us. What do
we do? For starters, you can join me in my Pull Together effort to
walk more and drive less. Carpool with friends, colleagues or
schoolmates. Plant trees! They absorb harmful CO2 and reduce runoff.
And again, make more conscious purchasing decisions and support
businesses that are switching to renewable sources of energy.

Just to add to the picture, here is the content of an email I sent to a friend a few days ago:

About the “ocean acidification”, that has been known for a while. This means that any life which relies on calcium for a shell or support will have a hard time growing, this include all sea-shells, oysters, clams, etc… corals as well, though those at more at risk from warming oceans. The list is pretty depressing, since 1900 we have fished about 90% of the large fish stocks from the oceans, most of it in the last 30 years. Bluefin tuna is pretty much gone, there has been a 95% drop in the shark population across the eastern sea board (resulting in an explosion in the jelly fish and sting ray populations), we are officially fishing 38 million sharks (real number is about 70 million) a year from the oceans mostly for their fins (the fin-less sharks are tossed back to drown), and there is a “floating garbage patch” about the size of the USA swirling around in the Northern Pacific dropping crap on any islands in the way polluting beaches and killing coastal animals. Just about any ocean water you care to test to about 300′ will have plastic particles in it which makes its way into the food chain, and that stuff can’t be cleaned out.

If that wasn’t enough, the worse case scenarios suggest that they will be no large fish (over-fishing) and no coral (warming) in the oceans by 2050.

FriendFeed and my Current Reading

I have decided that I am going to post links to all my current reading in my FriendFeed feed, I have been meaning to do that for a while and it is time I did it.

My FriendFeed feed also mirrors my weblog, so all you need to do is subscribe to that and you will get my blog content too.

Point of Sale Issues

Over the past two months I have been helping a friend with a maddening issue on his Windows XP Point of Sale system. What was going on is that that software would randomly lock up just after scanning the bar code of an item. The software would eventually unlock after a couple of minutes, but since customers were waiting the best option was to reboot the system. Not an idea situation.

I know very little about Windows XP but offered to help. I ran Spinrite to check the hard drive (could have been a sticky sector on the drive, it wasn’t,) I ran ‘chkdsk’ (came up clean,) remove various bits of software from the machine (Verizon online backup is impossible to uninstall, in fact it should be categorized as a virus since uninstalling it just causes it to reinstall itself.)

Eventually I gave up and reinstalled everything from scratch. The vendor he got the machine from did not include backup CDs for most of the software so I had to track all that down, including some of the more esoteric drivers for the printer. I reinstalled Windows XP, Microsoft Office, the Point of Sale software, iTunes and Norton Antivirus 2009.

And the machine was still hanging, so we started to take off software one at a time and narrowed it down to Norton Antivirus 2009. The machine has been stable since.

The only thing I still need to put in place is a backup policy.

Marine Monuments in the Pacific

I was very pleasantly surprised that the outgoing Bush administration created three marine monuments in the Pacific (Washington Post article, pictures, Economist article here).

From the Economist:

WHEN marine ecologist Enric Sala first set eyes on Kingman Reef, a remote spot in the Pacific, his heart started to beat like a drum. “I jumped into the water and I was surrounded by reef sharks and red snappers. The snappers started nibbling at my ponytail, they had never seen humans. It was like getting into a time machine and going back 500 years.” He adds, poignantly, “I knew the marine life would be more abundant, but I couldn’t imagine it would be so spectacular”.

Such lost worlds are vanishingly rare. But this week marine biologists received some glad tidings, which may help to preserve a few more such places. George Bush, using executive privilege, ordered the creation of three giant marine reserves in American waters in the Pacific. In total some 500,000 square kilometres, roughly equivalent to the size of Spain, will be better protected in the three zones. Reefs, islands, and the ocean around the Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll and Rose Atoll will be covered.

You can see this great presentation by Enric Sala at Poptech.

Personally I am really glad that this was done. Pardon the pun, it is a drop in the ocean compared to what we should be doing to preserve the oceans, but it is a start. Much, much more needs to be done to manage fish stocks, ecosystems, clean up pollution and enforce conservation areas.

I have written about this before here, and here.

The Economist recently published a very good survey about the state of the Oceans which makes for very sobering reading.

This Looks Like Fun

This looks like fun.

New CTO Position

About 2 months ago I took the position of CTO at MyRoar, an NLP based financial search engine founded by Kate McDonough.

I joined because it was a good fit and there was a lot of overlap with the project I was working on, specifically in the back end needed to drive a search engine. They had the NLP engine and I have everything else around it.

After a slow start I effectively took over development over Thanksgiving weekend, getting a demo site running in about four days and am currently working on refining the demo, getting more data into the index, and working with Kate on raising the funds needed to take this to the next level of development.

The demo is pretty small, on purpose. It is a demo and it was put together in very short order. Since then I have been refining it to grow a little more and to index more data. For me is has been a very interesting learning experience about NLP, and the performance characteristics of NLP which are, shall we say, interesting.

Along the way I also took over the development of the front-end, we also have a mobile front-end. I had to learn enough PHP to muddle my way through in a few days, and it is not perfect but it works well enough as a demo.

Currently I am looking into using Amazon’s EC2 for processing, because NLP always needs more.

Carl Safina – Pop!Tech 2008

I just watched a really excellent presentation that Carl Safina did at Pop!Tech 2008:

Ecologist, author and lifelong fisherman Carl Safina is fighting to wake people up to the fact that fish are going the way of the buffalo. In this eye-opening Pop!Cast, Safina paints a grim portrait of the impact we’re having on the Earth’s oceans and what we need to do to turn the tide.

Well worth watching, and you should check out the Blue Ocean Institute and his personal web site.