Erie Looking Productions

Happy Canada Day

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-07-01T12:57:18-04:00

Let's take a look at the software purity of one of our main Linux boxes at Erie Looking Productions courtesy Virtual Richard M. Stallman (a.k.a. vrms):

             Non-free packages installed on Hitae-Khan

album                     HTML photo album generator with theme support
album-data                themes, plugins and translations for album
festlex-oald              Festival lexicon from Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictio
icc-profiles              ICC color profiles for use with Scribus, Gimp, CinePai
lha                       lzh archiver
linux-powerpc             Complete Linux kernel on PowerPC.
opera                     A fast and secure web browser and Internet suite
t1-xfree86-nonfree        non-free Postscript Type 1 fonts from XFree86
tth                       TeX/LaTeX to HTML converter

 Non-free packages with status other than installed on Hitae-Khan

foiltex                   ( dei)  a collection of LaTeX files for making foils a
latex2html                ( dei)  LaTeX to HTML translator

             Contrib packages installed on Hitae-Khan

festvox-don               minimal British English male speaker for festival
festvox-rablpc16k         British English male speaker for festival, 16khz sampl

  11 non-free packages, 0.4% of 2525 installed packages.
  2 contrib packages, 0.1% of 2525 installed packages.

A June Miscellany

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-06-13T15:05:46-04:00

Cross-posted from LISNews

A June Miscellany
By Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS
Head Writer, Erie Looking Productions

The Search For Studio Space

With the main move out of the way, we are kinda lacking in studio space. This is why the hiatus is running as long as it is. We are attempting to raise money and are looking at real estate. Three possible partners have been contacted but it is too soon to have heard back from them. There is a building previously used by a Charismatic Episcopal Church for sale that costs roughly ten thousand dollars in the Ashtabula Harbor Historical District. While the building is quite tempting and would make for a lovely base of operations, it is not yet economically feasible to purchase. The local real estate market is in fairly bad shape where there are an infinitesimal amount of properties for rent/lease compared to properties up for sale.

The World Radio Network

A private company based in England, World Radio Network provides transmission services for quite a number of content providers. Considering that some of the content they air is geekier and appeals to a narrower niche compared to LISNews Netcast Network programming, they've been contacted to see what cooperation is possible. We have not heard back yet if there are any opinions positive or negative about the programming we produce.

Voting & Intentional Self-Destruction

Over a year into the presidency of Barack Obama, the economy of the United States is hardly recovered. A meme on conservative websites for a while was to plot against the unemployment change projections of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act what the actual unemployment rate happened to be. That such diverged was mocked. When the divergence was significantly out of line from the projections used to sell what was popularly known as "stimulus", the laughter turned to grimacing.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was sold as a panacea. There were some fundamental kernels of nastiness deep within the bill that continue to produce unintended consequences. This has been clearly seen in New Jersey where Andy Woodworth has assumed a role akin to a minor prophet of the Old Testament documenting not the decline of ancient Israel but rather the decline of libraries.

It is without doubt that the Recovery Act disbursed money to put people back to work. A trip west from Conneaut to Ashtabula on Interstate Route 90 here shows in fairly graphic detail the impact of money as new lanes are added to the highway. The disbursement of money from the United States Treasury came with strings attached. As there are no free gifts from the federal government to grant recipients, it bears consideration as to the consequences of those strings.

The term "maintenance of effort" sounds more like a euphemism for benign accounting issues. That term is hardly benign. A key condition for quite a bit of education funding and funding for road works was that the states had to agree to sustain funding for those areas at or above a minimum benchmark. Failure to comply with funding above that benchmark would disqualify the state from receiving federal funding in that area for a set number of years. Maintenance of Effort, which a term of bureaucracy, would perhaps more appropriately be termed "Advance Commitment To Spend Certain Funds Without Regard To Changing Circumstances For A Fixed Period Of Years".

Considering the proportions of state budgets spent on education, road works, and the like it is hardly surprising that governors like New Jersey's Chris Christie have done what they have after their predecessors signed up for stimulus dollars that had strings attached. No powerful lobby acted to get provisions included in the Recovery Act to exempt entities like public libraries, parks, mental health care services, and the like from possibly being cut. With the top-down imposition of spending priorities with draconian penalties attached if a state made cuts, public libraries were among the targets set up with very attractive targets painted on them.

Until the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expires, libraries are in a bind. Libraries are deemed from the top down to not necessarily be a funding priority. As education matters and road works gobble up quite a bit of state budgets, any growth in their funding consumption will threaten libraries. The Recovery Act insures education and road works will never be cut unless a state had almost a death wish to lose access to federal funding. There are no financial consequences if libraries are dealt budget cuts, though.

In the end, elections have consequences.

###

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

SSH Key Test

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-06-11T20:44:41-04:00

With luck this test of password-less use of SSH by way of key exchange should hopefully allow for some automation of updating this blog. No moving parts exist on the server for updating the blog as it is the NanoBlogger platform which uses shell scripts locally. While this helps keep server-end maintenance down, it can make uploading updates tricky.

Production Hiatus

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-05-06T11:22:02-04:00

With the release of LISTen #116, podcasting operations with Erie Looking Productions are now on hiatus until August 23rd. If special events arise, special episodes might be released. Heads-up warning of such will be posted to the Identica presence of LISNews.

What will be happening in the meantime? We have to look for studio space. We have an operations move to have happen. We will be undertaking further work in the realm of delay-tolerant networking. There is a potential for us having to adopt delay-tolerant networking in whole or in part at some point depending upon local circumstances. The tools produced by UUPlus are of special interest as are the services of Super Dimensional Fortress.

This will be an interesting summer, it seems.

Cross-Post of Piercing Curtains

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-03-16T17:49:56-04:00

Piercing Curtains
By Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS
Head Writer, Erie Looking Productions

The news as of late does not bode well for any sort of Global Information Infrastructure. While that may be the more formal term previously used for the Internet, it is hardly what we have today. Whether it is an ally of the United States, a member of the Axis of Evil, or firmly planted in the squishy middle the nation-states of this planet are creating challenges for the Internet. For sites like LISNews, this gives just cause for worrying.

The Digital Economy Bill proposed by the United Kingdom's First Secretary of State, Lord Mandelson, as most recently amended protects online communication far less than more traditional communications like newspapers and radio programs. The People's Republic of China has made it clear that Google's presence is incompatible with its laws and ideals. This is currently pushing towards a likely withdrawal by Google regardless of the economic damage done to local partners. The Islamic Republic of Iran is taking a page from the playbook of Communist China by attempting to squeeze out Google's Gmail in favor of a locally operated service that the Iranian government could monitor and control. In Australia efforts by Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy, continue toward creating an Internet filter covering the entire Australian continent. Word has leaked out that a national filter was created in New Zealand by their Department of Internal Affairs but it is not certain which Internet Service Providers there are participating in its use. The Venezeulan leader Hugo Chavez has called for outright regulation of the Internet and has advocated for the suppression of free expression online.

Instead of having a global architecture for the exchange of information that might otherwise be converted into knowledge and/or wisdom, we see perhaps a divided virtual realm that looks less cohesive than the FIDONET sharing network between dial-up bulletin boards of old. It should be remembered that while the concept of the dial-up bulletin board is on the decline in the United States, FIDONET remains alive in the Russian Federation of all places. Whether or not the Internet moves in that direction is something hardly predictable at this point, though.

With the Internet experiencing such a period of storm and stress, the question does not go away relative to what action should be taken. If anything it must be remembered that major action cannot be taken in a time of crisis as it most likely takes time to implement a solution after you determine what the solution is. Preventive, prepared action is how you handle such events.

From the LISNews perspective, there is some debate in play. While the site tries to serve more than just the local North American world of librarianship, censorship efforts in the other lead nations of the RDA world leave the site vulnerable. Since LISNews is not a massive media conglomerate like News Corporation under Rupert Murdoch, getting slapped with a shut-down injunction in the United Kingdom would likely go uncontested as there simply are not financial means for the site to defend itself. Under a previous version of the Digital Economy Bill there would have been notice to LISNews of court proceedings but due to recent amendments concentrating power in Lord Mandelson's hands we would now only know if something were wrong just as in Australia and New Zealand if an astute reader noticed we suddenly dropped off the planet. Saying LISNews is vulnerable now is an understatement.

There have been at least two streams of preventive action that have been discussed. The first would be to get the LISNews Netcast Network relayed via one or more shortwave stations to blanket parts of the planet. Such would remove the need for all those other layers of the OSI networking model for people accessing that content through the Internet and replace such with simpler tools. We know stations are out there that we can hire to do this but we have to shell out cash we do not have to make such happen. Strangely enough, conveying audio content through such a primitive and antiquated form of communication would have greater protection as of late than Internet-based transmission would.

The other stream of preventive action is something that has only been hinted at so far. Efforts are presently underway at creating a one-off test issue of what is being called "The LISNews Bulletin". This small test issue is going to have a mix of content in it and is going to be distributed through fairly unique means. If we manage to successfully print these up, make sure you see Blake at Computers in Libraries 2010 to get a copy as the plan currently says that he will be the main distribution channel there for this test issue. Strangely enough, conveying textual content through such a primitive and antiquated form of communication would have greater protection as of late than Internet-based transmission would.

The fiction of Arthur C. Clarke remains disturbing as our world today sometimes mirrors his art. In his short story simply titled "Superiority", we hear the tale of an interplanetary war fleet defeated by the inferiority of the weapons of its opponent that also were far more reliable than the protagonist's whiz-bang inventions that never quite worked as intended. As the lights start to go out on Internet-based freedom of expression as we see the erection of virtual curtains of suppression, that story by Clarke keeps coming to mind as the simplest example of a solution to the conundrum of Internet censorship.

###

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

The Latest Animatic

ELP-OPS — 2010-03-01T23:19:41-04:00

Diversifying How LISNews Communicates

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-02-14T22:39:44-04:00

Blake and I do communicate with each other. It is rare to have a week go by without at least one e-mail passing between us. I know Blake is copied on most interview requests so usually he sees at least something from me.

We did hit a big topic of discussion that frankly I need to open up for input. While I normally love putting together online surveys, I wanted to lay out the case on this first. The idea is simple. What would you do with a print supplement to LISNews?

Recent news events help draw this into focus as being a possibility. Much of the United States recently experienced winter nastiness on par with what Blake and I see along the Lake Erie shoreline each and every winter. While Blake somehow ducks most of the snow that hits Buffalo, the farm where Erie Looking Productions currently operates is normally ground zero for getting dumped on. I've put the farm truck into ditches three times so far this winter and have helped economically enrich towing companies thereby.

For our region, this sort of weather is routine. It was not routine for the rest of the United States that got hit with what we would describe as routine light snow. After all, a committee of the United States Senate had to cancel hearings on Anthropogenic Global Warming on account of severe snow. Andy Woodworth posted at "Agnostic, Maybe" about how he realized how much tech-mediated input there happens to be in his life every day in New Jersey. Technology is great when the infrastructure is there to support it. When that infrastructure is disrupted the First World looks little different from the Third.

As strange as it may sound, I actually subscribe to my community's weekly newspaper. There is no option for electronic delivery and likely never will be. Regional large newspapers like The Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Erie Times-News barely cover my community so I rarely have cause to read them except for maybe Dick Feagler's columns in the Plain Dealer. The nice thing about receiving a newspaper in this way is that even if the weather took away electrical lighting for me, I could still turn to a hurricane lamp. On the farm we have at least three such lamps safely tucked away.

Creating a print edition of LISNews for things like essays would create something quite resistant to technological failure while also possessing with a lower overhead for use. This would also provide a tangible item perhaps bi-weekly or maybe monthly that would allow for simpler sharing of essays that do not rise to the level of academic journals but also do not fit the pages of glossies like American Libraries and Library Journal. This might be a good thing but fear, uncertainty, and doubt exists as to whether or not this would be the case.

I wish I could say this was an announcement of something coming. It isn't. Right now, what is needed is some notion of what interest may be for this. Comments by the Anonymous Patron are going to be utterly useless in terms of gauging interest as some geographical information is necessary for a Request for Quotes if we started looking into fulfillment solutions. There is no print on demand entity like Lulu or a custom-printing group like CafePress that make this an easy click-through solution. Geographical data is necessary so we can ask potential fulfillment providers how much they would whack us for shipping out copies over the circulation cycle. Geographical clusters of potential recipients means lower costs while having recipients more spread out will increase the cost of distributing something like this.

Texting your ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code followed by your postal code to the telephone number 702-714-0397 will allow us through the magic of Google Voice to collect indications of interest and plot them on maps. International texting to that number is possible but please be advised that your messaging plan rates will apply. Whether you are in a cafe in New York or hanging out near the waters of Jervis Bay, this will not be a free text. Your personal data will be safe as frankly we really do not want to call you back nor do we want to send you offers of free stuff.

If a print supplement to LISNews is something you might find of note, please let us know. We need to hear from you before February 21st.

Cross Post -- Revenge of the Miscellany

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-02-09T14:34:22-04:00

Cross-posted from LISNews...

Revenge of the Miscellany
By Stephen Michael Kellat

Why Kiwis Get Airtime So Much

It might be an interesting question to ponder why the Library Association of New Zealand, LIANZA, gets so much airtime on LISTen while the American Library Association and its myriad components do not. Was the air staff bribed? Are there agents of New Zealand's intelligence services working on the air staff?

What is going on is a simple point in terms of media relations. Libraries where library staff cannot afford the benefit of having a media relations officer stand to learn something here. When media people make an inquiry about setting up an interview or simply request information there is normally a deadline involved. It is a very grave offense to the media member when you ignore them entirely and act as if they do not exist. Timeliness is also a grave concern as taking over a week to even return a call generally means that not only has the pending story died but the media member likely moved on to the next project.

The main reason why LIANZA gets the airtime they do is that Megan Button, the media relations contact for the association, actually replies to our inquiries. After multiple repeated failed attempts to book guests from the ALA and OCLC since December 2007, we gave up on them. There are often plenty of stories out there and we have a hard upper limit on program length of thirty or so minutes anyhow. If we have to wait well over a week after the launch of a new product to even start discussing an interview, the editorial thought processes kick into high gear questioning whether the release is actually all that interesting if those making the release are so seemingly unenthusiastic spreading the word. If I had to choose between a product release that has no seemingly enthusiastic backing and a feature on Linux in Libraries, I will definitely be choosing Linux in Libraries when I put together the Order of Show.

While LIANZA has had plenty of cool stories come up as of late that have caught my eye, I do not doubt I have probably missed a few throughout the Anglosphere.

Release Frequency

What can I say? Frequency is a matter of concern to librarians. Librarians have such as an every day concern when it comes to serials like magazines and journals. We sometimes forget, though, that online resources fall under the relevant cataloging rules known as continuing resources that happen to be shared with serials.

Just as a serial item has to meet or exceed a minimum publication cycle to be considered an actual serial, so it may need to be with podcasts. At the barest elemental level, all a podcast happens to be is a set of audio or video files with appropriate XML description. The problem with that look at the barest level, though, is that it does not recognize distribution frequency.

What do librarians call a serial publication released only once per year? Our piece of jargon for that is annual. Such continues onward with weeklies, dailies, and more existing. When there is not a normal pattern, we often see coded in the 362 tag in USMARC-based records a notation of irregular frequency which recognizes leniency on the library's end when postal authorities might well decide the publication is not quite a serial.

When it comes to podcasts, though, cycles sometimes are ignored.

CNET's flagship podcast Buzz Out Loud is released weekdays with occasional special episodes. At LISNews you can find LISTen released weekly on Mondays with special episodes released on-demand by the air staff. Far too many library-related podcasts take months or years between making releases and do not follow any conformed release pattern. Podcasts are conventionally considered regular programs on regular schedules that mimic magazines and journals.

How could a cataloging record be best handled for a podcast? How can the library world include teaching not only about the preservation of cultural expression but also how new professionals can best create their own cultural expressions?

Internal Insecurity

In the past couple months we had a post at LISNews about a community in California having to choose between cutting the library budget and cutting the public safety budget. At the time, it was only a hypothetical exercise that led to plenty of hyperventillation. Nobody ever thought such could happen.

Last week, the Board of County Commissioners here in Ashtabula County slashed the budget of Sheriff William Johnson pretty severely. Ashtabula County is the largest county geographically in the state even though the local population is barely above one hundred thousand. Over a county of slightly over seven hundred square miles in size, Sheriff Johnson's staff policed about six hundred to six hundred fifty of those square miles as municipal forces covered their municipalities. With the budget cuts the Sheriff was slapped with, there are now only two deputies on the road covering the county. If you need a police response now for anything less than a fairly drastic felony or an outright capital crime like murder, you will not be getting one. Many crimes will go undetected and potentially unpunished all for the lack of greenbacks.

Due to the byzantine complexity of budgeting for local government in Ohio with a system barely changed from that imposed in the 19th century, the county commissioners could not burgle the library budget to shore up public safety. Ashtabula County District Library will be safe. Kingsville Public Library, a separate library service district in which Erie Looking Productions operates, is also similarly safe as the county would automatically trigger a fiscal emergency situation if they tried to pillage Kingsville Public Library's tax revenue.

This creates a bizarre situation within the continental United States where a community has less of a policing presence than some Third World/Global South nations. That the budget cuts created a drastic enough change to where the fictional Mayberry of The Andy Griffith Show looks like a fascist police state in contrast does not help either. With the question of the county defaulting financially becoming not so much a matter of if but when, a new example for textbooks on failures in local government will soon be created.

Big questions arise from this. What good is it to have a library open when you have no legal way to eject ruffians and others who disrupt the order of the library? Self-help by library staff in kicking out those who might be defacing materials could potentially lead to lawsuits. Assuming good will on the part of all who may come is a nice ideal but as this is a fallen world it must be remembered that there is evil out there. If you like the odds of nothing bad happening to your library in such a degraded policing situation, there are casino owners who would love to take all your cash.

Relocation, Relocation, Relocation

It looks like economic pressures are forcing relocation of Erie Looking Productions by April. There is no plan yet as to what may come. Stay tuned for more.

###

Kellat serves as the Head Writer of Erie Looking Productions.

An Interesting Disclosure

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-01-16T10:47:50-04:00

As things go with FTC-instituted disclosure requirements, it must be noted that Erie Looking Productions has taken an interesting action relative to LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast. Letters over the head writer's signature were sent Friday by way of the United States Postal Service to two medium wave broadcast stations within the continental United States. One station has an asymmetric day/night transmission power profile near Lake Erie. The other is a Native American tribal-owned enterprise west of the Mississippi River with quite high transmission power that is known to blanket much of the western United States at night. The contact letters attempted to open discussion of carrying LISTen on their stations in addition to the present Internet-based distribution the show presently has.

No replies, of course, have yet been received.

A New Project

Stephen Michael Kellat — 2010-01-08T12:44:50-04:00

It might be thought that Erie Looking Productions only acts in the library world. It might be thought that Erie Looking Productions only handles a single program and nothing else. It might be thought that Erie Looking Productions cannot break out of the LIS cloister.

Wrong!

Erie Looking Productions is acting as media partner for a project that has nothing at all to do with librarianship. Using what is known about dealing with librarians, the air staff is assisting a joint marketing effort between the NGO and Ohio community teams of the Ubuntu project. The NGO team is attempting to reach out to non-governmental organizations like the red crosses and crescents and other to get them to adopt Ubuntu. The Ohio community team is needing practice with members producing their own audio so that an Ohio team podcast could be released that would help strengthening bonds between geographically dispersed team members. Erie Looking Productions is here to help tie the effort together so that something akin to the multimedia marketing output relative to the Bowflex exercise equipment can be created.

Right now we will be using Launchpad to develop the scripting for this. This allows for collaborative coding already for software projects. In lieu of changing text files containing programming code, we will be working with OpenOffice.org Writer files to deal with scripts. The version control system in use for this will be bzr.

What's intended as the end product? The joint marketing effort is intended to create an audio program that presents Ubuntu's usefulness from a functional point of view rather than spewing stats. This would be focused on reaching out to those who are specialists in their own field but not necessarily computer specialists.

This is looking to be an exciting project that might also allow for great collaborative opportunities. At least one paper (or at least a research note) could be written about this relative to using Launchpad & bzr for collaborative new media production. Other tools like Basecamp, Citadel, Zimbra, Lotus Notes, and the like do exist. Since Launchpad is used for development mainly within the Ubuntu project, we will be sticking with what possible contributors are already using.

As for a release date, such is not firmly stapled down yet...