Blueant Stereo Headphones

Following up from my previous post regarding the BlueAnt bluetooth headset. As you may recall I could not get the software to work correctly, meaning I couldn't use the headset outside of being a hands-free kit. After talking to tech support I was pointed to this file which is the Blueant Browser which should have come with my headset. The version that did, I assume was older and not compatible with the new headset.

So to my objective analysis. I quite like the look of these headphones, however, it really puzzles me why you would make them wrap around the back of your head and not have them be adjustable. One-size-fits-all? I don't think so. It is a real shame, as they are just heavy enough to get uncomfortable after longish periods of wearing.

As stereo output devices they work quite well. Not as well as a pair of hifi quality headphones, but well enough for my purposes.

Under linux, using the alsa-bluetooth driver the headset works quite well as a 2-way (sco) ALSA device, working with my Access Grid and Skype software. However, the A2DP stack didn't work with this headset. To the best of my understanding this is because the blueant headset doesn't support AVDTP which the alsa-bluetooth stack requires. I'm trying to follow this up at the moment, but for now we can only hope!

Drupal and digital libraries

A Digital library (DL) is an approach to storing, and cataloguing information in the digital age, and many CMS projects have been attempting to achieve, whether they call them digital libraries or not. However a lot of packages make the integration very disjointed. Lets take an example:

A website devoted to building boats. There will be articles, photos, links, files, and forums.

However with a lot of existing CMS software each of these object types will end up with their own set of categories, often only allowing one category. This is the first breaking point of the DL idea. In a DL you should be able to take a cut along and category, keyword, etc combination and get a list of all the content in the collection.

Then when someone writes an article about building a boat, and links some of the articles in the downloads or files area they would normally copy and paste url, as opposed to putting in some semantic representation, which can be followed, transformed and interpreted nativity by the system.

Drupal

There is one exception I have found to this is Drupal. It may not be a complete solution but it has one main advantage over many of the others. It is data centric, not application centric. By this I mean it offers a complete categories/taxonomy system, and all content is represented as a node, in a single node table. This allows the system to easily search all the content within the system. Each node type is displayed and edited by its own renderer, so images, links, articles, etc have their own specific functionality, but at the data level they are interoperable.

The only feature not provided by default is the ability to link nodes together, both from within written items (articles), and arbitrarily.

Article linking

The ability to link items in the system into an article is provided by either the freelinking module and/or the interwiki module. Freelinking allows item titles to be used in a Wikimedia style link, to link items together. Similarly, interwiki allows node id’s to be used to link items. I have also made a small modification to interwiki to allow it to do both.

Arbitrarily

It is sometimes useful to group nodes into groups of related items, without wanting to create a separate category for each group. In drupal this can be done with modules link Node Relativity which “allows parent-child relationships between nodes to be established, managed and searched”.

Conclusion

By providing a complete and flexible taxonomy system, and a data centric design Drupal lends itself to digital library applications. New digital object types may require new nodes to be defined, but you can be assured that they will fit smoothly into the framework.

Hopefully soon I will be able to do a good case study on this, from within one of the community groups I am involved in.

Oh no, no mobile phone

Right, my mobile phone contact is about to expire, and I don’t want to stay with Telstra, cause they cost way too much (ie no capped plans), and I don’t want to join Optus (or any of it resellers) due to the policies of one of its major share holder companies… But my only other choice is Vodafone, and they have closed down over-the-phone sign-up service, and their phone menu’s don’t even chain together. You have to copy down a series of numbers and call different departments…

OH MY GOD

Time for Bendigo Phones (ie community based phone carrier)