billso.com

The’re not really the RIAA, but the sound is out of this world.

According to BoingBoing, one of my favorite mashup sets from 2005, Sounds for the Sun-Set, has spawned a sequel: Sounds for the Space-Set. The 22-song set is available in this ZIP file.

I mentioned musical mashups in my February 8 post.

Cory Doctorow has posted a wrapup announcement about his copyright course at the University of Southern California, with links to several student projects.I first heard about Cory’s course on BoingBoing, a blog that he edits. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article about Cory on April 6. I didn’t follow the class blog or Cory’s podcasts very closely over the term, as I had 4 graduate sections of my own to teach, along with my own writing for this blog.Of all the student projects in the course, my favorite is teachingcopyright.org. This site by Richard Esguerra helps California K-12 teachers fulfill that state’s requirements for technology grants. I’ll take a look at the site and try to use some of this material in my fall courses.Cameron Parkins did an interesting project on the restrictive copyright policies of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. USC asserts copyright over student films, and dissuades students from posting their work on the Web and sites such as YouTube. I’m surprised by Parkins’ assertion that SCA faculty and staff avoid discussing this policy with students. His white paper attempts to address these problems.I hope that Crystal Larsen’s examination of Major League Baseball’s press credentialing policy results in some changes. As we approach another season of steroids and violence, MLB needs all the good press it can get. Credentialing bloggers would provide baseball fans with some interesting reading.I do agree with RobotSkirt’s comment about Cory’s announcement: Cory’s students may have done some excellent work, but “brilliant” seems a bit extravagant for an undergraduate COMM499 course.

Gordon Bruce, the director of the City & County of Honolulu’s Department of Information Technology, announced yesterday that the Earthlink WiFi project in Chinatown will start service in June.

EarthLink is providing the service, which will be free for the first year. After that, the C&C will have to find a company to pick up the tab, possibly through paid subscriptions. The main competitors for subscription wireless in downtown Honolulu are WiMax (Clearwire), and mobile carriers that offer cellular data cards and limited WiFi access (Sprint, T-Mobile and Cingular).

EarthLink operates municipal WiFi networks in 8 other states and cities like New Orleans, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Anaheim. It’s been a a steep learning curve, and EarthLink has decided to limit its bidding process for future sites, to concentrate on current markets. An AP story from May 21 questioned the entire business model, based on problems that another vendor has encountered in a publicly-owned project in Lompoc, CA. I agree with the PF HYPER Blog that these problems don’t seem likely in an outsourced project such as EarthLink’s.

The coverage are includes the core of HPU’s downtown campus. The university has operated its own WiFi network for several years. I’m eager to see how far the EarthLink signal penetrates into our classroom and office buildings, and how much interference HPU and other businesses encounter from the EarthLink service.

“Once up and completely running, the network will provide Internet access across a 27-block area ranging from North Beretania Street to North Nimitz Highway, and from Fort Street Mall to the Nu’uanu Stream.” Here’s a map of the coverage area, courtesy of the Honolulu Advertiser.

The system includes 19 antennas mounted on traffic lights and light poles to create a mesh network capable of delivering 1 Mbps of bandwidth throughout the coverage area.

I’ve finished the maintenance cycle and there are a few minor changes.

I’m using a different theme. Let me know if you like it.

Much of the content that was in the left sidebar is now in the right sidebar.

The menu along the top border is gone. Most of the links can be found in the right sidebar under “Pages”.

I’ve archived the course pages for my Spring 2007 IS 7010 and IS 6100 courses. The content of those pages is still available, but it will take an extra click to reach these archived pages from the default http://billso.com/7010/ and http://billso.com/6100/ pages.

I have not posted course pages for my Fall 2007 courses. They’ll be available by August 2007.

The tag cloud now lists only the most frequent tags that I’ve used. The old tag cloud listed every tag.

The Honolulu Advertiser ran an article this morning about Mobi PCS, the only locally-based mobile carrier in Honolulu. Mobi plans to expand to the neighbor islands, as its flat-rate business model gains traction among island residents. The service makes sense for locals who rarely travel outside the state, as Mobi’s mainland roaming plans are expensive and have very limited data support.

The article does include this interesting chart. If I worked for HawTel, I’d be worried. Many of these users either dropped their HawTel landline service or never had a HawTel residential landline in the first place.