The german city "Mannheim" is suing the twitter user "Mannheim", a guy living and working in Mannheim. CAN YOU HAZ TWITTER?

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Mark has now received a letter via registered mail from the City of Mannheim, which says that he must sign the letter and give up the Twitter account, or suffer the full force of a city’s legal team as they try to drag our a**es through the courts.

In my opinion, the city of Mannheim can fuck off. If they forget to register their own name on twitter, they are clearly years behind. And they will always be too late in all the good services, so if they start doing this with Twitter, where will it end? The german legislation allows you to sue for DOMAIN names, which is kind-of-ok, but with web 2.0 accounts? Anyway, I am with the small David here against Goliath.

In the NEPOMUK EU project, we have created standards and implementations for the semantic desktop. Based on which assumptions?

To get an understanding what people do at various companies and what support they need, a set of personas was created. Based on interviews with real people, a persona is a fictitious person that represents a user group.

Here is Claudia, she and her colleague Dirk were the two most popular personas within our project group:


The personas helped us to think about what the software must do for the users, demo the software, create prototypes, and create test data for unit testing. As they helped us, maybe they can also help you, so I asked around in the consortium if we could publish them, and we could, so here they are:

• NEPOMUK personas.zip
• NEPOMUK testdata (this was public before, both is related, so having the link here will help you)

A definition was given by the authors from the Human Computer Interaction Group at KTH:
A persona is a fictitious person that represents a user group. They are based on users studies on real people.

Personas are a detailed description and a visualisation of the users. They have a life, goals and scenarios where they fulfill their goal. They help us to focus on the users during the design and give all stakeholders in the project a clear picture of the users' needs and requirements. Everyone in the project has the same view of the users and personas are also a constant reminder of the users.

When personas are used in the design work and they make it easier to design for them. They "depersonalise" discussions on functionality and allow the designers to focus on designing for the personas.

you can also find the personas in the list of deliverables:
nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deliverables

p.s. The personas were so good, we continued using them at the NEPOMUK KDE Workshop. There, the story continues with news on Claudia's private life. In fact, she is having a wedding with her long-term friend Berit in Holland! Read the fascinating news and N3 files yourself...

Videolectures has put my talk at ESTC 2009 online. We made 3rd place for gnowsis then. A true winner talk :-)

http://videolectures.net/estc09_sauermann_gno/

of course, it shows all our secret plans to take over the world, so enjoy watching.

Here they are:



"America? It looks like its full of Austria" - this captures the Austrian spirit quite well.

Zweintopf - I love these guys
http://www.zweintopf.net/Main/AustriaForAmerica

They used sheep to draw their company logo into grass (guided by electric fences)
http://www.sheep-ink.com/

Ingrid gave me the great Tevion IWR 394 as a christmas present.


We named it "Adam", our iPod is called Eve, so they are a good pair.
Adam has UKW FM radio, playback of mp3s on USB drives, internet radio (the first station I listened to is, of course, slay radio), management of favorite radio stations via the wifiradio-frontier.com webservice, Wifi connectivity, LAN RJ45 connectivity, playback of your own media collection using microsoft windows media player 11 media sharing, and he also has an alarm clock.

See it in action:


now the problem is of course: how can Adam playback my iTunes library from my Apple iBook G4 "Eden"? I have a backup of this iTunes library on my linux home server "Franse" - so hosting some magic server on Linux should do it, right? right.

My device is a Tevion IWR 394. I can't find anything about it in the interwebs (crazy?! nobody bought this before?), so it is probably a branding of an asian white-label product. The menu shows a software "ir-mmi.arts.ven6-jupiter6.1_V1.5.6.21635-1A19". It connects like a baby to a breast when using UPnP and my Windows XP laptop. FM/UKW radio, usb, also work easily.

Background: accoring to microsoft help of windows media player 11, the following ports should be opened to have media streaming working:
1900 UDP, 2869 TCP, 10243 TCP, 10280-10284 UDP. There is a wikipedia page on the Media_Transfer_Protocol which is to connect your media library to your USB device. For network media streaming, UPnP_AV_MediaServers seem to be the right place. There is a upnp server comparison table on wikipedia also.

My own requirements:

• host a lot of mp3s from my iTunes collection (ideally, also host my DRM protected itunes files, but thats probably impossible)
• be piss-easy to install on a headless ubuntu
• import my iTunes playlists and song ratings

How they meet this:

• xbmc is installable, and it can do a lot more on the playback side which I don't need for a headless box
• brisa sounds hard to install and more a framework than an app
• coherence sounds ok, but is a python easy_install
• x360mediaserve has no proper sf.net homepage
• fuppes looks fine but a bit dead. it has no ubuntu package mentioned on its homepage
• MediaTomb is in ubuntu universal and has a headless option. fine. also there is loads of "this rules upnp on ubuntu" feedback
• mythtv supports all I need and someone hacked an iTunes xml library-to-mythtv-playlist converter script. but its not headless.
• ps3 media server is said to have itunes playlist support, but its missing a clear "headless" installation

ok, having found mediatomb as my "easy way to go", I try
sudo apt-get install mediatomb-daemon
fine! I see it installs it as daemon on rc2.d also, so it will start on system boot.
The various install instructions (ubuntu, official) go on:
sudo nano /etc/mediatomb/config.xml
hm, seems I don't have to change anything in config.xml, that looks fine as it is. The password and username, ok.
I go to my server using
http://franse:49152/
(franse is my server name. it won't work at your place)
Ok, I see a very minimal user interface, fine. Somehow I find the folder I want to share and click "+", it starts indexing. That makes the mediatomb process jump to 80% cpu time on "top" for some 10:50 minutes. good.

But - most amazing - the files show up on my Tevion IWR 394. Life is good!

It does not read/interpret my itunes playlists, though. Googling for itunes playlists in mediatomb does show an empty graveyard. Ok, but its possible to convert an "iTunes Music Library.xml" to several .m3u files using itunesexport, a java tool (here java bytes me again). Sadly, the ericaugherty sf version causes an out-of-memory even with -Xmx300m, so thats a bit annoying. There are zillions of shabby scripts out there to do it, but most don't work, maybe this one does, as the author says. It does! But it needs some tweaking for folder names, which is done using the "-d" parameter. So the command is something like this (note the trailing shlash at -d) which I put into updateplaylists.sh
#!/bin/bash
python /home/leobard/local/bin/itunes2m3u.py -d "/home/media/music/iTunes/iTunes Music/" /home/media/music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml


(at this moment, my newly discovered and totally weird emap.fm internet radio station plays the amazingly happy disturbing song "It's so chic to be pregnant on christmas", greetings to the pregnant-women-we-know B+S)

It seems importing m3u playlists into mediatomb is not out of the box. It goes something like this:

• check the playlists are allright. do they point to the right path? are the characeters fine? do the directories exist?
• in my case, the playlists are in /home/media/music/playlists folder and contain lines that look something like this: /home/media/music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Christoph & Lollo/Schispringerlieder/04 Mika, Du Saufkopf, Hast Du Wieder Verloren_.mp3 - that means, absolute paths do work fine for me
• I import the playlist using the explicit "+" button for the filesystem folder in MediaTomb. Other things didn't seem to work, especially the autoscan did not work.
• I thought about script the adding of the playlists by using the mediatomb --add command ... but that is not optimal. It starts a server and adds the file, but the server is not shut down. Not ideal for a command line thing.

So to sum up: it would be good to have a DAAPD and upnp server in one, which could read iTunes playlists. BUT I am equally happy with my Tevion IWR 394 "Adam" and mediatomb.