[SGVLUG] Podcasts -- not just pirate radio anymore...

[Emerson, Tom]

One of the classical radio stations I listen to, k-mzt, had at one time offered a "streaming audio" feed of their regular broadcast.  This was great for listening inside of a building where perhaps regular radio reception was "spotty", and was actually fairly close to real time (if you played both a regular radio and this stream, there was a noticable "echo" effect going on)

Then the ugly concept of "copyright" came up, and the radio station stopped their feed for fear of some unknown violation that they /may/ have incurred.  It's now back, but in a strangly altered form.  First off, they now "require" you to register with their site (for which they give you a membership card presumably good for discounts to local shows and events), but once you know the "link" to get the feed, it looks like you can get to it without (technially) logging on to their site.  Now, the weirdest part of this new feed is that there are distinct periods of "dead air" and they even mention this on their website: they won't stream any COMMERCIALS due specifically to copyright requirements (yeah, that seems completely counter to what I might expect, OTOH, since the station will have "broadcast" the commercial over two distinct mediums, they may expect to get paid for it twice...)

The second thing they are doing are "podcasts" -- in particular, they are "podcasting" /future/ concerts!  Talk about "time displacement" to the extreme :)

Seriously, though, while they cannot podcast events that have not yet occured, what they are really doing is a pre-show of the event -- in some cases with interviews of the performers -- to give you an audio version of the "liner notes" or program highlights of the concert in question.

Since the version of the "media" player that is installed on my workstation doesn't (yet) know how to do "podcasts" [so far as I can tell], that prompted me to load "iTunes" and "go to the source", as it were, of podcasts in general.  That led me to my next find: the "command line" podcast!  The main website is here: http://cmdln.net/ but it apparently got listed on Apple's "front page" of podcasts.  (apparently, they pick a few "categories" each week and highlight about a dozen entries within each one, and he got lucky last week...)  In any case, his "blog" page is where I got the link to the article I mentioned about "unknowing and unaware".  There are also a couple of other "interesting" links -- one is about "DRM done /really/ badly" [a publisher decided that in order to deter illegal copies of their PRINTED manual, they would print the buyer's name and credit card information on each page...] and another entitled the "coolest social engineering hack ever" -- an abortion clinic is holding a fundraiser based on the number of protesters that show up to block their customers (i.e., you "pledge" an amount, say $0.10, per "protester" -- if 10 people show up in protest, you owe a dollar to the fund...)

There are some other podcasts of a "technical" nature that you may find interesting: there is one on PHP, another on Ruby, and so on.