[Edit: run Python using Javascript too.]

“IDEs are draining users away, but it’s not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It’s the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox…

“… [N]ow the browsers are starting to sprout desktop-quality apps and productivity tools. It won’t be long, I think, before the best Java development environment on the planet is written in JavaScript.”

I’m more of a vi user these days—it behaves much more consistently over emergency ssh sessions—but as a general advocate of Emacs over IDEs I can see his point. Browsers should want to be like Emacs, or at any rate more like the VM of your choice.

Between browser-as-VM, Firefox, ECMAScript and compatibility frameworks there’s the seeds of an RIA revolution. After all, to what extent will industries gladly rest their financial weight on RIAs, so long as they’re all written in Flash-on-the-browser, and so long as browsers remain so unpredictable and Flash remains… well, Flash?

Despite the argument of what constitutes openness being largely resolved in the open-source community, we still found rich pickings of our own. It’s trivial to define openness in, say, data, with its analogies to code; but it would be an error to equate data and knowledge or understanding thereof. The broad consensus was that open knowledge was a combination of both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but also free-as-in-educated and free-as-in-enfranchised. In this way, its analogies lie more in open computing, or open web-navigating, than in open source: a combination of freedom, autonomy and opportunity. Solutions will therefore need to be a complex, messy combination of social, political and technical: less like Python, but more like One Laptop Per Child.

Ben Spigel, who made the connection between OS-then and OK-now explicit, missed the mark a little when he likened the OK community to Linux’s. After this conference, I think we need to stretch even further back, to such early efforts as the FSF and GNU. There are still moral complexities to be resolved, difficult decisions about direction to be made, and occasionally vehement arguments to be had: only once all that is settled can we sit back and just worry about the OK equivalent of killer apps, whatever those might turn out to be.

Certainly marketing genius and total orphan Lily Allen, and internationally renowned cuttinge-edge futurologist Gene Simmonds are pulling the sort of pouts you’d expect from them both, and Guy Hands has a look on him like they just cancelled Christmas. But even in these hilariously gurning faces of criticism, and amid the wafting and intermittent atmospheres of genial misunderstanding of how content works these days from the TV and radio monoliths, Radiohead are keeping chipper. Far more so than I’ve ever seen them before, in fact. And when everyone’s on YouTube for free, letting rip with their Thumbs Down webcast, and accepting its reappearance—syndication, if you like—all over the shop very shortly afterwards, was a refreshing change from everywhere else exercising rigid control at the loss of an audience.

But for those of you (like me) who were thinking of taking part in Radiohead’s distribution revolution, yet weren’t keeping an eye on the time:

• The download-only area of “In Rainbows” closed this morning. I just managed to get a copy of the tracks yesterday: I’m sure if you’ve missed out then you’ll all know someone who’s got a copy they can loan you, right? Loan you until the plain old CD comes out at the start of 2008, right?
• Discboxes (40-quid monstrosities that I was secretly waiting till next year to buy) are actually already out and limited stock. I thought from various reportings of the event that they too weren’t going to be on sale till the new year. Get yours while it’s hot.

If there’s demand I bet there’ll be more discboxes, but frankly if Radiohead don’t stamp “SECOND IMPRESSION” over the next lot then I might sue. Actually, if my discbox doesn’t have “A TOTAL W.A.S.T.E. OF CARBON” scrawled over it then I’ll be terribly disappointed.

Seriously: who among us is just itchy and fidgety, waiting for analogue TV signals to be switched off? Who wakes up of a morning thinking, ooh, Whitehaven have to buy Freeview boxes now! with a frisson of glee? Radio switchover would be even more disastrous, of course: whereas TVs normally have a gap between themselves and an aerial into which to insert a Freeview box and convert digital to analogue, most radios are monolithic: receiver, “decoder” and audio equipment all together. That means that the average of five radios per household would be simply landfill material, useless fizzing boxes capable of picking up nothing but static. Future generations will already find a sliver in the geological strata that they can classify as “analogue to digital”; FM switchoff would add a shiny, plasticky laminate to that layer.

Here’s a thought, though: how about a little digital-to-analogue converter for radio? It could be the size and construction of, say, a Fon, and configurable over USB. It would transmit FM in the style of an iTrip to fill perhaps the room it’s kept in, plus neighbouring rooms. It could transmit multiple FM stations at the same time, and even mimic the frequencies of the analogue stations (if they were ever, say, switched off without anyone wanting them to be: God forbid!)

But what if your converter’s chosen frequencies conflict with next door? FM transmission depends on phase coherence, so even if your two boxes were within an electronic ace of each other frequency-wise, they’d still interfere with each other and cause all sorts of beating, flangeing and other dirtily-named auditory confusion. At least when someone passes you on the motorway and their phat BMW iPod transmitter briefly swamps yours then they’re gone quickly, hopefully to come to some sort of messy grief on the next bend. But if you’re stuck near someone who permanently foxes your radio listening—and it would only take maybe three or four such converters for a conflict to be inevitable in the narrow FM band—then what do you do?

Answer: let the converter boxes know how to talk to each other. Let them negotiate their frequency spreads. Let them, moreover, report back to you over what sort of understandings you and your neighbour’s radios can come to. Let them synchronize, if possible, on stations you both want to listen to, strengthening the signal and meaning both of your houses are entirely covered by the FM cloud. Exploit, don’t squash, the wisdom of the group.

I’ve never known the first in (hopefully) a series of events go so well. Clearly from the reaction of the crowd this night fills a hole in the Oxford geek community’s calendar. I can’t comment on my own talk, of course, but there was some interesting stuff there: without doubt the two keynotes from Simon W (OpenID) and Olly Willans (Photoshop CS3), but also Tom’s peastat, James Wheare’s scraping of bus timetables LiveBus.org, and the Drupal and Mapnik introductions.

My talk went as well I could expect: I hope to put some slides and screenshots up here shortly. Unfortunately it touches on work that I’m trying to make live by the end of this week—the new version of my short story site—so I’m snowed under with that right now. Gosh, it’s all go, isn’t it?

(Note: I work with, for, by or under several people mentioned in this post. Take it as fawning sycophancy if you like.)

RSS, the standard millions of us use to syndicate content, and view other people’s syndicated content, was originally invented by Ramanathan Guha at Netscape, for use on its my.netscape.com portal. Soon afterwards, Netscape lost interest in the format, leaving it ownerless and later on picked up by a development community spearheaded by UserLand Software.RSS 0.91 became 1.0 and 2.0, yet despite the deprecation of the grandaddy of them all 0.91 is still around and in use, arguably because of the vast overcomplications in its immediate successor and the divisions that it caused in the community.

The problem with that is as follows. Every time someone views an RSS 0.91 syndication feed with certain types of syndication software, their computer attempts to get the DTD from this location on the my.netscape portal—it’s hardcoded into the way that the software understands what XML format it’s dealing with. So this URL gets plenty of hits:

http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.9.dtd

Which is great, until Netscape decide—legitimately, one might argue—to update the my.netscape portal and get rid of the DTD. Which they did, at the start of the year. At that point, a good portion of the syndication lights go out across the world. And although we now have a moratorium until July 2007, nothing has really been solved in the long run.

Anyway, Netscape shouldn’t have to support the bandwidth of millions of DTD downloads for a standard they declared defunct—when did they sign the don’t-be-evil contract?—and maybe people should “just” move to a newer version of RSS, or Atom. But this whole episode is an Ozymandian warning of what is to come. We’ve reached the point where the URLs of industry (one-time) giants are simply no longer to be trusted as the location of standards.

One day Microsoft, and Sun, and IBM, will cease to exist, and their websites become the 22nd century equivalent of Google-adsensed search engines (Google, of course, will be around forever, more’s the pity). Sooner or later something really horrible will happen for the open communities, say Purl disappearing for good, taking things like the Dublin Core XML specification with it. We need to know how to deal with the loss of their specifications and standards now: the unreliability of the URL as a locator for DTDs and schemata. Or is the only lesson we can draw from history, that we’re destined to wander from standard to standard as the specifications drop off the radar, leading the nomadic life of those standardized today, obsolete tomorrow?