Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

The realization has dawned on me slowly.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been acquiring tools for “personal media publishing” — bits of hardware and software that allow me to actually produce and distribute things like music (see my previous posts on some recording I’ve been doing), video, print, etc. I guess I didn’t realize that it was happening, but it’s finally become clear to me: I’m a wanna-be media mogul.

That’s right. I want to be in the media business, creating music, producing video, publishing text and distributing it all at my leisure. To that end, here’s some of what I’ve acquired the ability to do:

> I can shoot pretty decent quality digital video on my JVC Mini-DV camcorder. This can be imported into my Mac, where with iMovie I can edit it, add effects, put in music, and generally produce a nice end product that can then be exported into a variety of formats.

> Not only can I put music into the video I created, but I can *compose* that same music, using a variety of tools not least of which is a package called “Garage Band”. With that product and others, I can compose a pretty nice range of music to accompany video content of all sorts. In the hands of a real composer, even better results can be had. I’ve posted a few of my compositions on the main Web site for Schoolhouse Multimedia (figured out yet why the site is named what it is?). Take a look under the “Music” link.

> With the output of the first two elements, I can author and burn DVDs with titles, menus, music, effects, scene selections, etc.

> I have a printer that will produce output on printable CD’s and DVDs. As a result, I can create low-quantities of highly polished-looking media.

Add to that the various tools that I have for recording, editing, mixing and sequencing music, speech, etc. and overall I have a pretty complete suite of media production facilities right in my home office. (Can you say “PodCast”?)

Trouble is, with all of this ability I’ve yet to really put it all to good use. Part of the trouble is that I’m not a professional in any of the particular areas that I’ve mentioned: video, music, etc. Lord knows I love all that stuff, but the simple fact is that I make my living developing software. I post on the blog partly to satisfy one of my other desires: to write. Again, I’m no professional and heaven knows I don’t make any money at it.

What has continuously impressed me in the last few years is just how much I can do from one desktop computer. 5 years ago, it would have been prohibitively expensive to do what I can do today for under 5 Kilobucks. And we’re not talking about poor-quality stuff. Having no talent whatever, one can now put out some truly polished looking … junk. Crap is still crap. It’s just that you can make some fine looking crap these days, and you can do in record time. Heck, Apple just introduced Final Cut Studio. It’s a combination of Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio Pro. That combination of truly professional tools cost less than $1500.00 and we’re not talking low-end or even middle of the road here. These are tools that Pros are using for things like corporate video, documentaries, and Hollywood productions. Imagine professional video, sound, motion graphics and DVD authoring for that price!

So, in a perfect world I’d find someone who’d pay me to write articles, compose music, shoot, edit and produce video and publish the results on CD, DVD and the Web. And, along the way I’d get to develop interesting software. A pipe dream I know, butI can dream can’t I?

Know anyone who’s willing to take me on?

The title of this blog of course starts with “Technology” and ends with “Telecomm”. To date, I think I’ve managed to put out a few words on those two topics and even the middle one.

Since I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about spending so much space on issues *other* than the original target ones, I figured the following rant would help assuage my need to be true to the name. Note too that I work in the telecommunications industry and this post has particular poignance for me right now.

I’m responsible at the moment for developing a communications interface (I hesitate to call it a protocol, for reasons that will become clear presently) called “(T)ransaction (L)anguage 1″, or most commonly: TL1. I’ll apologize in advance for what I’m about to say, to those who know and love TL1…but I believe that this has to be one of the poorest excuses for a communications interface (human or computer) that has yet been invented.

I’ve implemented a pretty significant number of protocols in my years as a developer. I don’t at all claim that I’m an expert on the subject, but having done them has given me at least my own perspective on what’s good or bad. First, here’s what’s good about TL1:

1. (…)

Ok, let me move on to what’s bad about it… Just kidding. There are at least a few endearing qualities to TL1:

1. It’s text-based, so it’s fairly easy for a human to understand and enter.
2. It has at least a vaguely common form from implementation to implementation.
3. It’s used in telecommunications vendors’ gear across the industry.

Here’s what’s bad about it:

1. There’s no real standard per-se to the structure of a TL1 transaction. There are recommendations as to how one should structure TL1 messages and what the responses should look like. But, they’re seemingly just that: recommendations. More on that in a second.

2. TL1’s been around for a good while, which means that vendors have managed to implement their own variations that often don’t quite mesh with other vendors’ versions. The “standard” has been evolving for a long time, making the whole spectrum of implementations pretty wide… It has the feel of something that’s grown out of years of work by summer interns…

3. Telcordia (formerly BellCore) is tasked with keeping the standards related to the telecomm industry, but they have to be mindful of the fact that folks don’t just throw away old equipment simply because its TL1 isn’t up to snuff. That said, virtually everything that preceded any given incarnation of the spec has been grandfathered-in.

The basic structure of a TL1 message is this (fully-qualified):

VMM:TID:AID:CTAG:GENERAL_BLOCK:DATA;

Where:

VMM represents the specific command being issued. VMM stands for (V)erb (M)odifier (M)odifier and is essentially a dash-separated construct representing a unique command.

TID (target identifier) is an identifier that usually refers to the piece of equipment you are actually communicating with directly.

AID (access identifier) is the name of the logical entity within the device referenced by TID that is the target of this particular command.

CTAG (correlation tag) is a host-assigned identifier that is returned by the target of this message to allow the host to correlate responses to their associated command.

GENERAL_BLOCK is fairly complicated and is frequently ignored. It can be thought of as belonging to the DATA portion of the message if you like.

DATA is the actual payload of a given message.

Sounds good, right? Wrong. Things being what they are, a message like this is entirely possible:

VMM:CTAG;

As you can see, there are a few missing elements. Most critically, the TID and AID fields seem to be missing. It’s actually OK that there’s no GENERAL or DATA sections. But what makes TL1 so infuriating is that the above message has actually been implemented in some gear.

Another annoying feature of the language has to do with the DATA portion of a TL1 message. There can be fundamentally two types of data. The first is what is known as “position dependent”. The second is (shockingly)…”position INdependent”! The position-dependent data are just that: The data each represents is indicated by WHERE in the message each parameter appears, so the order is critical. Position-independent values are represented by a KEY=VALUE-type structure. This allows the values of various parameters to be located anywhere within the DATA portion of the message. One only has to locate a particular key in order to determine its value. Data parameters (it’s recommended) are to be separated by commas. Alas, that often ain’t the case.

I’ve seen the DATA portion of some TL1 messages structured similarly to:

Parameter,Parameter:Parameter:Parameter

…or some similarly ugly form.

So, from the perspective of a host software developer, the fact that each vendor can more or less structure their TL1 any way they like makes life pretty difficult. You have to have a fair amount of specialized code in place in order to accomodate the bizarre variations that occur, or you must invent some kind of “Rosetta Stone” mechanism that allows you to map your data to the proper form required by a given piece of TL1 equipment. And, that still implies that you manage your TL1 on a per-equipment basis rather than being able to rely on a standarized form at least.

Responses are yet another matter. The form of a TL1 response message in no way relates to the structure of a TL1 command. You’d think that responses would be formed in the same general way. Nope. Not by a mile. Where a TL1 command has colons that generally delineate fields of the message, TL1 responses are a mash-up of time stamp, textual response codes, CTAGs, and free-form data. There are essentially no hard field delimiters, so one has to have some significant text-processing capabilities to deal with the range of possible response formats. One never knows, for instance, if a response will be formatted for consumption by a human or simply for a computer. You may see a response that contains carriage-returns and line-feeds so that it’s more readable…or you may not.

My gripe in this situation (among so many others) relates to the other side of the equation. As an equipment vendor, it ought to be pretty simple. I should just be able to define my own dialect of TL1 commands and responses, and issue a spec that tells anyone using my stuff just how to talk to me. But I can’t. Why? Because my equipment has to be cameleon-like. I need to be able to emulate the behavior of other types of equipment, since the hosts using ours may not be able to be modified to accomodate. Thus, if I have to behave like equipment ‘X’, then I need to know a priori how to manage messages that will arrive. It’s no walk in the park to figure out how to deal with a whole suite of implementations in a generic fashion.

There is a Web site, hosted by Micromuse that has a pretty good description of TL1. To read it, you’d guess that TL1 was the greatest invention in American Telecomm in the last century. But, the industry demands TL1 support and who are we as suppliers to object? Why can’t folks start moving towards emerging standards like Web services, browser-based interfaces, Yiddish, etc.? Because history prevails and there’s an awful lot of gear out there that spews this cruft, that’s why.

There. Geeky enough for you? I hope so, since it’s been a part of my recent work life and frankly, it offends my technical sensibilities. I had to unload. You paid the price.

We now return you to your usual feather-weight postings…

My wife insists that I have the gene. I’m beginning to believe her and I’m convinced it must have come from my grandfather. In fact, I’m sure of it.

In his will, my grandfather left me all of his computer, electronics, and Amateur Radio equipment. At the time, it really wasn’t clear to me what that meant, even having spent a considerable part of my life in his house, garage, workshop, etc. As my wife, mother, Aunt and I were sorting through things it became all too clear that he had the ability to defy the laws of the known universe: He was actually able to put multiple items into the same physical space. I swear it’s true. My wife swears it’s true. My mother swears it’s true. And my aunt swears the same thing. That much swearing must make it so.

That was in 2001.

Fast-forward to 2005. My wife and I are working towards moving to another house. As anyone who’s lived anywhere knows, when you begin that process you pretty much always begin to clean out stuff that you don’t really use or need. You assess whether various items actually have sentimental value and if you decide not, out go those goodies. We’re doing that right now and having just hauled what feels like 64,000 garbage bags to the curb for trash pickup, I can confirm that I have managed to inherit that same super-physical ability from my maternal grandfather…

I don’t know how it’s possible, in 1100 square feet, to have crammed as much stuff as I have. But indeed I’ve done it. The way that I know that I’ve acquired this dubious talent is that each time I remove an item from some location in order to throw it away, another item appears in its place. (what’s the inverse of a sucking sound?) And it hasn’t just happened once or twice in a few different places. It seems to be happening throughout the house, from the garage, to the basement, clear to the attic. I’m amazed, and the effect hasn’t abated. It’s overwhelming and so I’ve looked in the yellow pages for some kind of “junk exorcist” or something similar. They just don’t exist. My wife and I have read all the books on the proper methods for getting ready for a move, trying desperately to find a solution. I can tell you that they simply didn’t have me or my grandfather in mind when they wrote those tomes.

So, I’m an aberration. The question is: Just exactly how much real-world space will I need to contain all the items that currently fit into the multi-object space that I’ve created?

We rented a storage space. I’ll let you know.

I read Dave Slusher’s post “Theatre of the Mind“. Turns out that I listen to a ton of old radio broadcast stuff that I’ve purchased on tape and CD, and more recently downloaded (legally!) from the Internet. My granddad was a big fan of both radio programming from WWII and big-band music from the same era. I guess I inherited the love of both. I’m not as big a fan of big band as he was, but I’m totally hooked on the radio serials.

Dave Slusher points out, rightly, that those kinds of things are great stages for your imagination. It’s so easy to get caught up in them and to “see” the drama as it unfolds before your — ears. It’s a great diversion for me in my morning and evening commute and there’s something really engaging about imagining the story as it plays out. It’s very much like reading for me. Another activity that I love, reading’s got all the same elements of imagination as radio does, using a different delivery mechanism.

I’m kinda partial to the mysteries, detective and the sci-fi stuff and I can tell you that I’ve spent far more money than I ever planned to on this material. I have a pretty fair collection of stuff that the Smithsonian/Radio Spirits has released. Too bad it’s still under copyright, because I think that everyone should take a listen. Some very famous people that you know from TV and movies got their start in radio. Folks like Orsen Wells, Bob Hope, & Vincent Price more are just some of the many examples.

For a gander at a nice compliation of radio material for free, check out Radio Lovers. It’s a wonderful site that contains tons of programs from varying genre’s. They’re MP3 formatted so they should play on virtually anything. The quality is sometimes not so hot, as the source material has aged badly, but I still highly recommend trying it out.

Perhaps I’ve become a bit of an old-fogey, but I can’t imagine (or can I?) a better or more enjoyable workout for the imagination than reading a book or listening to a radio program.

…more often.

We’ve been having work done on our house. It started on Friday and is continuing today. I’ve been eating like a pig. The stuff’s right there and so…I eat it.

So, if it ever comes down to me working full-time from home there will have to be serious changes made in how I go about things and my self-control will have to get a boost…

I was doing my usual fast-pass on some blogs and came across a headline something to the effect of : “CPB names new anti-public-interest chief”. I wish I could find the link to that post. Anyway…

I have the title completely wrong, but the part that stuck out was what followed. It held out that notion that the new leader, Ken Ferree is a Bush administration puppet who has no interest whatever in the public interest and in fact has only administration-approved conservative propaganda to push. Please.

It’s not like the CPB has been some kind of bastion of all things American, Mom and Apple pie for lo these many years. I’m a fan of public radio and TV but one could hardly claim that it’s been impartial or right-leaning as a whole. So, I do what anyone would do: I watch and listen to the material that I want to and pass on the stuff that doesn’t interest me. I don’t feel like I’m forced to take in crap that I don’t like or want to hear, nor do I think that anyone else is forced to listen/watch the things that I do.

What always slays me is that notion that if the prevailing leadership of some organization shifts from left-wing to conservative, suddenly the constituency will suffer a mortal blow due to loss of democratic freedoms. For all the hand-waving about Conservatives being “intolerant”, this kind of overreactive post carries the same one-sided slant as the subject is supposed to be.

Let time tell whether or not you like what Ken Ferree does. Don’t let somebody’s paranoid post about the erosion of public-interest values stop you from seeing for yourself.

It’s your brain.

I use a really nice little Mac RSS aggregator called NewsFire ™. It does a fine job for me, has an elegant interface and gets out of the way when necessary. It integrates nicely with Safari, the Apple Web Browser for OS X. And, it cost $19.00 US. One of the nice little convenience features of NewsFire is that it will attempt to discover the RSS feeds for the page that you’re currently displaying in Safari. It’ll do the same for a specified URL if you know it. Anyhow, I was trolling the Engadget site and saw a reference to a research product called the “Hug”, developed at Carnegie Mellon University here in Pittsburgh.

As it turns out, the site that this came from is called “gizmag“. They have a print magazine as well as the site. It’s a cool site for gadget geeks like myself. I’m glad I stumbled across it and in the process, found a nice feature of NewsFire. Take a glance at the site and if you run across NewsFire, try it out too.

I learned a few new things about a couple of my favorite apps. First off, I found a nice little extension to FireFox that I really like. It’s called “ForecastFox” and what a nice piece of work it is!

ForecastFox allows you to get Weather Channel ™ info in FireFox. It’s extremely configurable, letting you set options such as where in the browser you want the weather info displayed, if you only want the current conditions, what locales you’re interested in the weather for, etc. It’s available from the Mozilla site that contains a variety of extensions. If you select “Tools:Extensions” and click on the “Get More Extensions” link, you’ll be taken to the Mozilla site that has this and many others to choose from. I highly recommend this one. I have mine set to show me the current conditions, the day’s forecast and the extended forecast. I decided to have this stuff shown in the status bar at the bottom of FireFox. Try this one out.

The next thing that I found that I really like is the fact that Google’s Gmail supports RSS. This is particularly important to me when it comes to using it in my Mac. I don’t like having to have my mail client running all the time so that I get notice of new mail from that site. Add to that the fact that I run an RSS client all the time to get news, blog updates, etc., and you can see why I’d want Gmail-to-Aggregator integration. In Windows, Google has provided a little tray notification client that lets you know when you have new messages. However, as far as I know there isn’t an equivalent for the Macintosh. But, having found that Gmail provides an RSS feed, I have a nice little auto-notification mechanism for my non-Intel box that keeps it in the domain of RSS that I’m already using.

Here’s the URL to put into your aggregator/reader:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

You’ll get a dialog that asks for your user name and password to Gmail. From that, it starts working. Sweet.

Perhaps you already know about these little tidbits, but I’ve recently found them to be great utilities for the way I work.

So, a few posts back I mentioned having recorded the Easter Sunday service at our church. To date, I haven’t put a huge amount of time in on it, but I have done some work. I’m learning a thing or two along the way.

1. Even with a Dual 2.5 Ghz Mac G5, it’s possible to slow things down. All you need to do is load up a ton (!!) of real-time effects on each channel (16 in this case). To help with that, you can do several things in Digital Performer. Perhaps the most useful is to pipe channels on which you want to apply some common effect to an Aux channel and put the effect there. That way, you can use a single instance of the effect for those channels that share it in common.
Another thing to do is to disable play mode when you are mixing with channels that you don’t presently want to hear. That eliminates processing overhead on (currently) unused channels.

2. Mastering directly in the application is ok, but not ideal. The bounce-then-print process is one thing, but if you want to apply some effects, volume leveling, etc. it’s probably best to use some outboard software. Again, it’s certainly quite doable, but it would seem that DP is more oriented to the recording/mixing part and somewhat less focused on the Mastering phase. Plus, it doesn’t directly manage creating CD images. So, if you have a collection of songs that are all mixed really nicely and you want to build a Redbook image, you’ll need to look elsewhere. What I did as a fast first pass was to create the roughly-mixed tracks, then imported them into iTunes. Next I built a playlist in iTunes and used the “use Sound Check” to force the volume of each track to be the same. From there, iTunes burned the disk.

So, it’s moving slowly but I’m making headway and learning as I go. It’s fun and the product is sounding better and better.

Ok, maybe not “the masses”. But, if you haven’t heard the BBC’s “In our Time” podcast, you really should. It’s subjects change weekly and the topics are fascinating. The ones that I’ve listened to have not been technology related thus far. For example, the current show covers John Ruskin, a 19th-century art critic who was also an eloquent social commentator. The host, Melvyn Bragg, will have one or more guests that discuss the topic in a round-table fashion.

So, if you’re not into listening to a techno-bazillionaire discuss Web services or Search or Web identity, you should seriously consider trying this one out. It’s intelligent, interesting stuff with a British twist.