If... If I would start my own company... But I won't. I do not have the skills, money, balls and most of all, I am rather happy with my current employer Dutch Open Projects. But if I would start my own company, the services would not be based upon Location Based Services, a carbon copy of free available software or "Social Networking two dot ooo". It would be based upon my hobby in combination with my "vision"

Part of my (IT) related hobby's include Drupal (the best Content Management System), MythTv (the best way to watch less junk TV) and everything Mac related (the best way to communicate with a CPU).

Combining these elements will give you nice opportunities. For example your iPhone could be your remote control for your telly:

(Youtube)

But you could also use your iPhone as a device to watch television on; recorded streaming television based upon your preferences towards your telehone!

(Youtube)

And these are just two simple examples; it could be expanded to controlling and integrating the Squeezebox (cheesy: WiFi to your HiFi) I own and towards all the other electric equipment in my house with X.10 (cheesy: control your house from your mouse) like Mr House does. But you will directly see two problems; all these devices and software packages act like they are the master:

1. they do not talk to each other
2. they do not provide a nice consistent user interface

In fact, most of the user interfaces these devices provide are really really bad, if you think Drupal pre4 sucked usability wise, try a MythTV distro from one year a go or even the current version of MrHouse! Now the time might not be right for my "business plan". I know that in the USA the concept of Tivo is rather normal for early adapters but here in the EU harddisk based PVR's are just catching on. It will take some time before the public sees and needs that these devices should be integrated .And by that time I am sure that our friends from RedMond have a very nice "solution" for you; "Vista Home Automation # 1984".

By not combining, not integrating, they do not give the user the option to co-related information about their house. For example, if my central system that my family would not be in the house since there are no blue-tooth telephones detected at 2:00h in the morning while the camera sensors motion, I would like to be paged, see the camera images from my iPhone and when I will not react within a certain amount of time, the system should dial out to the police. Okay, bad example, I do not want that since most likely I forgot my phone or the battery is dead and I am in the kitchen to make some milk for my son to get him to sleep. But you get the idea; a centralised place where information is gathered from multiple sources, co-related and with work-flow, action upon this information.

And by not combining, not integrating, they do not provide the user with a good user interface that is consistent and adapts (context aware) towards the client (text messaging, instant messaging, telephone, full browser etc). A key factor forsuccess beyond the usual geeks.

I would like to be able to solve these two problems, make a central place that talks to all devices and can be "smart" and provide the user with the best UI (s)he can get. Now before you state that there is such a product, I am aware of pluto. Pluto combines music (squeezeboxes), television (MythTV), voice (asterisk) and much more into a central box. See for more information their (nasal!) presentation. But they do not combine it in what I would call a "central smart box". That and the fact that they can use some competition :-)

A central smart box would be able to adapt fast, if there would be an API for a grocery shop, it will be in the software in the box within days, weeks. It would know my spending habits and my income and would swap money to places where it would get the most interest, it would read my RSS feeds and based upon time and location "read" them to me, it would know my agenda and the availability of my friends and it would do so much more that I can think of right now.

And by now, you should see why I would like to add my other hobby; Drupal. I think that a central system that acts upon actions and can do more then that could be a Content management Framework like Drupal. I know that PHP by nature would not be very good for acting as a real time broker between information, but I still would go for a Drupal solution instead of J2EE. Drupal is easier, it adapts way faster, can integrate, has a geeky loving community that probably has some of the devices I mentioned, can look beautiful, has a very small footprint and can be context aware.

I would like coin the phrase Home Service Bus, after the Enterprise Service Bus. More the Home Automation that enables a user to control electronic elements, it would be able to make decisions on its own, based upon input from my actions and the status of electronics devices. It would be a broker of information; it would be a Home Service Bus! Now let's just wait until the Gartner People catch up on this phrase in half a decade :-)

So, if I would start my own company it would be based on building this. But since I will not, you a free to make it. And -lazy as I am- I will buy it from you!

The other day, I had a rather weird problem. My iPhone was full yet there were no songs on my iPhone. Now I am the type of person that installs everything that is called "beta do not run on production iPhones" software on my jailbroken iPhone so I run into problems every now and then. This time being that the iPhone was full of MP3's that were not indexed as music anymore by the iPhone, but as "other".

(and no, I do not have 10GB of software on my iPhone)
I had two options, do a factory restore (the windows lusers way) or troubleshoot and solve from the prompt (the Unix way). Since the first option would be still available after the second and would need a re-jailbreak and re-simlock-free, I went ssh-ed into my iPhone.

Here you can see that it was full:

I first try to mv the iTunesDB file on the iPhone to a bakup but that did not solve it. iTunes created a new file but nothing was solved.

So I had to do the dangerous thing and rm the music files:

And yes, that clean a lot of space for sure:

Then I moved -just to be sure- the iTunesDB file on my iPhone:

Then I resynced my iPhone with iTunes and yes! Al my data was -after a long waiting period- back! So if anybody experiences the same problem -all music is there but the iPhone sees it as "other"- and you have some UNIX skills, this might solve your problems:

find / -name *mp3 | xargs rm -f {};
mv /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB.bak

Do not blaim me if this does not work.

Op NRC een stuk over de "downloadgeneratie".

Twintig jaar na zijn commerciële doorbraak is de disc namelijk geen serieuze muziekdrager meer

Een goed geschreven stuk, immers: de LP is dood, de casette is dood, de CD is dood en de DVD is niet het meest geschikte medium voor muziek en ook al ziek. Dus de fysieke dragers voor muziek zijn wel redelijk weg. En nu DRM door de meeste platenbazen intussen ook dood is verklaard, is het benoemen van de huidige generatie als "downloadgeneratie" een logisch gevolg. Dit betekent niet dat dit om niets ("gratis" )hoeft te zijn of illegaal, er is veel muziek legaal via CC licenties downloadbaar van het internet en er zijn ook genoeg internet zaken als iTunes van Apple of de MP3 dienst van Amazon waar je legaal muziek kunt kopen.

Wat ik wel kenmerkend vindt, de eigenschap van "de vorige generatie" om "de hudige generatie" van een naam te voorzien, meestal een niet al te gunstige naam. Zo had je de babyboomers, de juppen, de nix generatie, generatie X, babyboomers, achterbankgeneratie, patatgeneratie, nintendogeneratie en tal van andere namen worden verzonnen door de "vorige" generatie om het verschil duidelijk te maken met de "nieuwe" generatie.

Nu dus de download generatie. Het voelt alsof ik dat mijn hele leven al deel van uit maak. En dat is voor een groot deel waar, sinds 1989.

Mijn oude iPod Nano gebruik ik in combinatie met de iTrip van Griffin om in de auto naar MP3's, podcasts en audioboeken te luisteren. Jammer is dat de ether in Nederland sdtampvol zit, van Haarlem naar Amsterdam ZO kan ik op een frequentie luisteren via de radio naar mijn iPod maar rond Utrecht moet ik van frequentie veranderen.

Een goed product, ik kan het een ieder aan bevelen. Voor 2 tientjes heb je je iPod aan de auto radio "gekoppeld" en de buren in de file kunnen mee lusiteren :-) Een van de grote voordelen van ding is -laat de politie dit niet horten- is dat bij flitspalen er schijnbaar een frequentie wordt gebruikt waarom de iPod ook zit en dus hoor je zo'n 100 meter voor de flitspaal een paar tikken, gelijk aan een mobiele telefoon die stoort op de radio. Een nadeel, er zijn ook wat flase postives maar tot nu toe redelijk wat boetes voorkomen.

Gebruik een iPod, bespaar geld!

Via the Twit network I found out about a great serie of Podcasts over at Magnatune. They are free (as in beer), DRM free, advertisement free and well categorized. Sure worth listening to it on your iPod.

Talking about iPods, yesterday I bought the new fat Nano, my second iPod and .. my first Mac; an iMac! I ordered them online and hope to have them in a week or so. In even more unrelated news, Apple is worth more then IBM! (well, maybe not, but still)