I wondered when something like this would happen. Any bets on when the US Government will use political influence to shut this company down? My guess? A couple of months.

Earth Station 5 Declares War Against The Motion Picture Association of America

This article is about much more than personal fabrication technology. It is about how extremely advanced technology, when placed in the hands of non-technical people, can enlighten engineers.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gershenfeld03/gershenfeld_index.html

The edge always has some amazing articles, although some of them could be edited a little better. The philosophical concepts in this article are a little buried under the technical explanations and academic writing style.

musicolab aims to use technology to put powerful tools in the hands of musicians. We can learn to predict the properties of the entire system that may emerge, without ever knowing the motivations of its constituent parts (the musicians). In fact, a major concept in the article is that a system that emerges may act in a very different manner than one we may predict if we view only the motivations of the individual peices.

It really throws a wrench into 'use case' modeling when considering large scale networking systems and technologies.

In your WWDC (2002) talk you explained the O'Reilly philosophy of watching the 'alpha geeks' to spot the next shift in thinking. In terms of art and technology - who and what should we be watching?

Well, I don't want to give too much advice to my competitors. But in general, I'd say that you want to watch the folks who are figuring out that applications are no longer local to a single machine. Whether it's p2p or web services or distributed computation, we're moving to a world captured by Dave Stutz's great phrase, "software above the level of a single device."

Well, before things have goten too far off the ground, I have taken a hiatus from this project.

I am moonlighting as a contract developer at EA Sports developing interfaces for FIFA 2004.

This does give me the opportunity to learn some code architecture tips from some of the best in the business. I am working on the online portions of the game, so many of the concepts will directly translate to musicolab development.

I'll try and continue to post, hopefully on a more frequent basis.

Very nice documents.

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/usability/documentscss.html

Maybe a little strict for many applications, but exhaustive like no others I have seen.

An old article but a good on:

Interface Design for Programmers

I like his ideas. It amazes me to realize how new and cutting edge all of this is. UML doesn't even seem to play into these pictures, but it is earmarked for the challenges suggested by all levels of software development.

Ok - I am already getting emails about musicolab (how do people find this ?) requesting information and the like.

I have a few options
   1) Set up a mailing list
   2) Set up community forums
   3) Set up a wiki
   4) Set up a news site
   5) Combination of the above

It is hard not to dissapoint a growing community, so I don't want to get expectations high.

A community forum type set up would allow me to start people trading music on their own dime. It could act as a meeting place to facilitate a simple file sharing model. I'd also be able to scrape signed up users into any system we build in the future.

Still - finding and administering a good forum is a pain.

Any thoughts?

I saw the matrix - reloaded again last night.

This post has nothing really to do with that fact, as you likely have both seen that movie and this tool:

The ASP.NET Web Matrix Project (Reloaded!)

A WYSIWYG IDE for ASP.NET developed by MS. I love acronyms.

I have a feeling you already have it, but I'll archive it here regardless.

Download for the .Net 1.1 Framework SDK

If you haven't downloaded it since April 9, 2003 then these are updated versions.

Due to the change on the musicolab site (splash page) I've hidden the contents of the entire /musicolab/ directory using .htaccess (with the exception of the splash and extranet)

If you experience any troubles finding data that you previously found, let me know the url you are attempting to access and I will see what I can do to open the door wider.