Technology

Potentially huge ramifications for CU:

The clock begins ticking Tuesday for local governments to decide whether they are willing to accept a $22.5 million grant to fund the Big Broadband proposal after officials received word this afternoon that the project will be funded by the federal government.

The announcement ends months of anticipation and gives public bodies 30 days to decide if they are willing to accept the grant.

The Champaign City Council is scheduled to meet March 16 with a Maryland consultant who audited the high-speed Internet proposal. Champaign Mayor Jerry Schweighart in February said that there is a possibility the council may deny the grant.

Discuss.

Wolfram Alpha, the search engine/knowledge engine project by local company Wolfram, was named one of Time's Top 50 sites of 2009.

A local angle:

Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's Photoshop software.

Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.

Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.

Heh.

From Reason.com's Hit and Run Blog:  Really Great Stem Cell Research News.  From the article, "Researchers at Harvard and Advanced Cell Technology are reporting that they have been able to turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells by dousing them with the proteins made by four specific genes. The researchers were then able to turn the stem cells into mature cells of various tissues."  Very interesting, I thought.  As IP says, discuss.

HG

Rich Miller had a bunch of stuff on the abject stupidity of the Associate Press prior to the local elections:

Lemme explain this to you, APers, since you seem to be so clueless.

I, or Drudge or the Google or somebody else makes linkies to AP stories and your members then get all the ad revenue (which they share with you in the form of dues) when readers click on those aforementioned linkies. That’s somehow bad?

On the right side of this here page, you will see an automated news feed for AP stories - the sort of feed you appear to hate. Well, dingbats, that feed drives readers to your subscribers’ sites. The Chicago Public Radio people have told me that this blog is one of their top referral sites. Unlike y’all, they are not the least bit moronic. They welcome the traffic and appear to love the attention. CBS2 designed a video news feed especially for this site. They’re smart, unlike you AP goofs.

He sent me another link today (read the whole thing) that just perfectly illustrates the idiocy of the people running the AP.

Is there anything more stupid than the AP threatening an AP affiliate for embedding video from the AP's YouTube channel?

So, just to annoy the idiots who run the AP, I'm going to embed on of the videos off the AP's YouTube Channel. 

Yes, the AP has a YouTube channel with embeddable videos but - to be clear - they really don't want any websites to embed their videos. 

The people who run the AP are so stupid it hurts.  Please use this thread to discuss whatever aspects of media and/or blogging you like, or to give thanks that the people who run our local media companies (who are also facing numerous revenue challenges in a changing industry), aren't as abjectly stupid as the Associate Press.

(Rich Miller has another post on this today.)

Another option for area television viewers/subscribers is inching towards availability:

AT&T officials Marc Blakeman and John Quinn explained the new service – which they tout as a price-competitive alternative to cable television – Wednesday afternoon to the Champaign-Urbana Cable Television and Telecommunications Commission.

"We hope to launch this summer in the central Illinois market, and we will be continuing to build out for two years after we launch," Blakeman said. He said AT&T will also provide U-verse in Decatur and Springfield.

He declined to say what specific areas in local communities will receive U-verse and what areas won't get it, saying the information is proprietary. Under the Illinois Video Competition Law, AT&T is not required to serve the entire community, he said.

Rick Atterberry, chairman of the commission, said that while state law might not require it, one of the commission's top concerns "is to be sure all of the community is being treated fairly." By not sharing its planned service area, AT&T isn't helping the commission, he said.

U-Verse has been discussed on here before.  I've heard it's gotten not-very-good reviews but haven't taken any time to do any real research.  I'm pretty happy with my current setup so I doubt I'll switch, but I wanted to post this for your input regardless.

Today's News-Gazette:

"The opportunity presented to the campus, the university and the local communities is clear," read a brochure from the meeting. "Investment in a local advanced Fiber-To-The-Home network will stimulate the local economies, provide long-term educational and employment opportunities to the communities where they are built and also serve as examples other communities can learn from."

What is proposed is called big broadband, which will deliver many times more bandwidth than what is available today from cable and telephone lines. The infrastructure would be publicly owned and operated in the public interest, and telecommunications companies could provide their services on the common infrastructure and compete on the basis of price and service.

Fred Halenar, the city of Champaign's information technologies director, said that at this point it appears a grant of at least $5 million to $7 million would be sought to install big broadband. A local match of 20 percent would be needed, he said.

"It's not going to be free" Internet service, Halenar said. "Infrastructure put in there would have to be maintained, and there would be some cost to it. Costs would certainly be considerably more reasonable."

Interesting.

We talked about this a month ago, but the NG is now announcing it, and some other steps:

It's also another method of direct communication with people who are reading The News-Gazette's headlines and stories, and the paper's Twitter followers can immediately respond.

They can offer feedback and tips for stories. Plus, it will help the paper understand which topics and issues are important to community members, said Executive Editor John Beck.

Visit www.twitter.com/news_gazette to see The News-Gazette's Twitter page.

The paper will also redesign its news Web site within the next year, said John Reed, vice president for information technology. The new site will emphasize ease in finding the news readers care about, and will augment and diverge from the information printed each day in the newspaper. This will include more multimedia storytelling, using slideshows, video and audio.

The News-Gazette is committed to providing information to readers in a variety of ways, Beck said.

"We want to be able to give information on whatever platforms they want to receive it," he said.

I'm hopeful that they'll also consider giving subscribers the option of getting their paper via email as a .PDF (complete with ads, etc.).  I know I'd much rather get my paper that way, in the early afternoon, than getting a print copy at home in the evening.

And if anyone cares, I'm twittering IP.com posts and related stuff at twitter.com/gordyhulten.  If you're twittering, post your address in the comments so I can follow you.

The News-Gazette is twittering.

Twitter is one of those things I've never really "gotten," but some people are using the heck out of it.  What am I missing?

Today's News-Gazette:

The UI Board of Trustees on Thursday authorized a proposal to seek accreditation for the online education initiative. The plan would ultimately allow the university unit to award its own degrees and contract directly with professors to develop more programs.

"The question is not whether we go ahead, but how," said Trustee James Montgomery at Thursday's meeting in Springfield. "We must go ahead."

Early on, I was enthusiastic about Global Campus, but this is starting to feel like throwing good money after bad....

I'll be the first to admit that I had high hopes for the UI's Global Campus, but things aren't going very well, and now UI President Joe White wants a new structure:

University of Illinois President Joseph White said he wants to turn the school's Global Campus into an independent, accredited university to speed up development of degree programs.

So far 121 students have enrolled in just five degree programs -- far short of the 9,000 students White projected would enroll by the end of the Global Campus' first five years.

When it started offering classes in January, White hoped his professors would quickly create online programs in business, engineering and other high-demand fields.

For the most part, ''That has not happened,'' White told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. ''I'm not mad at anybody about that. I think we've come to realize that we have a university faculty that is at capacity.''

White said the Global Campus is hamstrung by its status in the university system -- it lacks the autonomy of the campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield -- and by the fact that its degree programs have to be created by departments on those campuses.

Discuss.

One of my favorite diversions during the past weekend was Google Maps "Street View."  It's not available for C-U yet, but it does cover Chicago, Springfield, St. Louis, and a number of other places.  I was able to look at the house where I'd grown up.  To use it, just pull up http://maps.google.com and type in the name of a city which has Street View available.  (You can also select a state to get an idea.)  It'd be easy to spend hours on this, IMHO, but I also like geography.

I'm trying out Google Chrome today. It seems stable enough, and very fast, but feature-lite compared to my extension-heavy install of FireFox. For IP.com, for example, it doesn't use the WYSIWYG editor for IP.com, which is also a problem with Safari.

Anybody else have any impressions yet?

The new Apple iPhones (commonly known as 3G) are being released today, but I feel no urge to rush out and get one.  First, AT&T isn't offering its 3G network here in Champaign yet, so the biggest reason to upgrade the hardware is moot.  And the software updates - which finally include Exchange support and the all-important App Store - are available to the older iPhones like the one I have.  I installed the new firmware and iTunes yesterday, and configured Exchange support, and it works flawlessly.  My Contacts and Calendar now sync with Outlook wirelessly, so the only reason to plug in my iPhone is to charge it (which is rare due to excellent battery life) or to sync music.

So upgrading is unnecessary, IMO, at least for those of us in Champaign.  If you're in Bloomington or Chicago, where AT&T has already upgraded their network, then the faster internet connection might be worth it.

Firefox 3 has been released today, and it's free and open-source and the good folks that make it are trying to set a some sort of record for downloads. 

Please do them (and yourself) a favor and go download, install, and start using it - Firefox is the browser preferred by smart, good-looking people, and this version seems significantly faster than the earlier version.

Urbana's scaled-down restrictions on cell-phone use while driving have passed:

The Urbana City Council voted 6-1 Monday night in favor of an ordinance banning the use of text messaging while driving. The ordinance also enacts a $750 fine for those who are using cell phones while driving during the time of an accident.

Additionally, the ordinance requires that the Urbana Police Departments track the frequency of car accidents where cell phone usage plays a role. The report will span from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009 and with finding being presented to the council afterwards.

The ordinance does include a clause that would make some city government workers exempt, saying that "all law enforcement, fire rescue personnel, emergency vehicle operators, public works personnel and other government personnel are exempt from this section if a mobile communications device is a piece of equipment necessary to the normal functions of their position."

As I've said, I doubt this will satisfy the nanny-staters, but this law is much more reasonable than the original draconian proposal.

This is one of the easiest, most "common sense" ways to use technology to open up governmental processes to citizens, and one that I've been advocating for our local governments for years.  The Vermilion County Board, though, is trying it first:

The county last week launched a new Web page where public comments pertaining to county business can be posted for officials to read.

"It's something we are just trying. If people are respectful, it could be a good tool to get input, good and bad, on county issues," said Vermilion County Board Chairman Jim McMahon.

Ted Fisher, director of the county's information systems department, launched the online forum last week on the county Web site at http://www.co.vermilion.il.us.

McMahon said he has viewed other public forums, and he realizes that comments can be negative, even slanderous. People who post comments are not required to give their names, and many use "screen names," which McMahon believes is a weakness of online forums.

But he still believes it's a tool that can be of benefit to county officials. He plans to check the site on a regular basis, searching for valuable input.

Vermilion County Board member Bill Donahue, D-District 7, said he also will check the forum regularly.

"I will be curious, and hopefully, we will not get just negative comments but requests for assistance that give us an idea of what we can do to be of better service," he said. "Some people might be more willing to post a comment rather than make a phone call or write a letter."

County officials want feedback on any type of county business, issue, meeting or agenda item. But "we want to keep ours to county business only," he said.

The county's Information Systems department will monitor all comments that are posted.

You can find the forum here.

My proposal has actually been more restrictive.  I've been asking for government bodies to allow online comments on agendas prior to meetings, requiring commenters to submit name and address just as they would at a regular meeting.

Discuss.

I know that AT&T's U-Verse video service hasn't gotten great reviews.  But at this point, I'm desperate for any sort of competition for local cable monopolies.

AT&T plans to install 100 utility cabinets throughout the city to bring video services to many residents.

The telephone giant has already obtained city permits to install 33 of the cabinets, which will link new fiber optic cable with traditional copper telephone wire to provide video services similar to those of cable television.

"I think they're doing installation right now," said Deputy City Attorney Trisha Crowley. She was unable to say when AT&T would begin offering video services.

We've discussed free wireless internet access here a few times.  A recent article I ran across details some of the problems that cities like Chicago are facing.  I'm curious about how the City of Champaign's wireless project is going.

Since this weekend, I've been emailed a half-dozen complaints about problems with Comcast and Insight.  Please feel free to use this thread to post complaints and solutions, if you've found any.

Insight / Comcast is my home internet provider, via cable.  I'd switch to DSL tomorrow if it were available at my home.  I'd already stopped using them for TV last fall.  Luckily, I stopped using any insightbb.com email addresses years ago, to avoid precisely this kind of re-addressing hassle.

AT&T U-verse cannot get here quickly enough.

UPDATE:  It gets better:

Comcast Cable customers in East Central Illinois can expect to pay 6 percent more for expanded basic cable, beginning April 2, the company said today.

The rate for the 69-channel expanded basic package will rise from $49.75 a month to $52.75 a month, according to Melody Brucker, director of Comcast's Champaign-Urbana District.

As I said:  AT&T U-verse cannot get here quickly enough.