Late Night PC

Intro

I did a poster presentation on podcatching yesterday at the University of Windsor's Campus Technology Day. I liked the other presentations at the conference, but today I just wanted to post to make sure I remembered to share mine. I did some research on podcatching. That's right, not podcasting but podcatching. Subscribing to podcasts and automatically downloading new episodes of those podcasts, then getting those on to a media player. Considering all the copious talk there is out there about podcasting, there's surprisingly little help for the listeners. I've done a couple podcasts, but by and large I just listen, I was just downloading manually the episodes of podcasts I like until a few weeks ago when I started really getting in to the research for this presentation. I was pretty happy with what Amarok can do but for my fellow podcast listeners on Macs and Windows machines, you'll just have to wait. The most-referenced names I saw were iTunes and Juice (formerly iPodder). I was disappointed in iTunes in that it considers subscribing to any podcast not in there directory to be an "advanced" option. Then there's Juice, which claims to be open-source but I can't seem to find the source for it. So my choice is clear but at the conference I tried to give as much choice as I could for an interested user so I've included all three.

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I start out talking about how SVG can one day be abused the way html is today. Abused in the sense that new technology is first adopted by people who want it to work, later it's used just as a means to an end. That end sometimes is achieved at the cost of loss of the intended use of a service. In short, new technology means new kinds of spam. How do we allow user-created SVG to be published in communities like forums, wikis, blog comments and anwhere else - but without risking user security or letting in new kinds of junk? I end up with an idea for the Javascript problem that I called bbscript. (Why is it that podcasting makes me get ideas?) I bet that's already used. The inspiration here was just the idea that we should be careful not to repeat all the problems built in to the Internet technology we're building on top of. Anyhow, have a listen and if you're inspired then go build something. Links to stuff I mentioned:

• The top link on a Google search for VBS refers to a VBScript worm
• Jeff's Crap Wave
• BBCode

Thinking about suggestions on the SVG developers and SVG Open 2006 Yahoo! groups, I've made a short podcast on the subject of SVG advocacy. I realized after I recorded it that the 'like putting salt on it' phrase came to me because I'd just read Scott's opinion of Ajax.