An IETF standard for NAT traversal - excellent.

P2P based on HTTP - this is fantastic.

The Xiph Foundation (the people who brought you Ogg/Vorbis) have brought FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec into the fold. The Xiph foundation continues on a steady pace to round out its offering and save the free world FHG/Thomson.

The newly formed Echo Networks will offer music dowloads through a standard and open platform. Does that include Ogg/Vorbis downloads?

Artima.com has published Part III of an interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum, in which he talks about about the source of Python's famed programmer productivity and the joys of exploring new territory with code.

Here's an excerpt:

I like programming problems where you think, "There has to be something really interesting over there, but I can't see it clearly." All you can do is move one step over there, with a small bit of code, and start exploring to see it more clearly. And maybe it actually wasn't there, it was over here. Or it had a different shape than you thought initially. Maybe it wasn't interesting at all, and you didn't waste a lot of time.

The danger of planning is that you plan for the contingencies you know about, but by definition you don't plan for things you don't know you'll encounter. So when you do encounter an unexpected event in your programming endeavor, you have to fix many interfaces and change multiple method signatures. If you've already committed to your original plan and that's no longer where you're going, then you have a problem.

I'm not particularly worried by the fact that people say you can prototype more easily in Python, but eventually the Java version makes it easier to build a robust large system. You can prototype in Python. Once you've explored the space more, you can do the planning and design that the Java version requires. If you start writing in Java knowing as little as you did when you started writing the Python version, you'll waste way more time exploring than actually building the system you'll eventually build.

Artima.com has published an article by Bill Venners, Matt Gerrans, and Frank Sommers in which they explain why JUnit didn't solve their particular testing problems, and how they created Artima SuiteRunner, a free, open source test toolkit and JUnit runner.

Here's an excerpt:

Because JUnit links the concepts of running and reporting in the notion of a runner, we made Artima SuiteRunner a JUnit runner. You can use Artima SuiteRunner to run and report results of JUnit tests, just like you can use JUnit's text or Swing runners. The three main advantages of using SuiteRunner to run your JUnit tests are reporters, runpaths, and recipe files:

• A reporter collects and presents test results in a highly customizable way to the user. Examples are text, graphics, Web pages, database output, CSV files, XML, and email alerts.
• A runpath lets you load classes for your tests from anywhere with an easy- to-configure list of filenames, directory paths, and/or URLs.
• A recipe file captures and saves in a file the run properties of a particular suite of tests for easy reuse.

It's no surprize that label revenues are dropping, since consumers want MP3s but the labels won't sell them.

WiFi enabled car stereos present a new kind of file sharing network that works for you while you're stuck in traffic.

SBC is claiming a patent on html frames or any other web interfaces that lets you keep a nav bar or some other content static while content in other windows changes. How's that for broad? MuseumTour.com was contacted by SBC lawyers demanding that a licensing fee be paid. ARGGGH!

A federal judge ordered Verizon to disclose to the RIAA the identity of a KaZaa users accused of serving up a shocking 600 music files. Courtesy of the DMCA.