You can read more about the job posting on monster.com.

Va. Ban On Spam Is Ruled Unlawful
E-Mail Restriction Called Violation of First Amendment

[Note: I would have provided a link, but registration (free) is required.  After registering, use the keywords "spam court" or something similar to find the headline.  The article appeared on 9/13]

The sensational title worked and I read the article.  The facts were not as dramatic as the title implied.  An excellent analysis of the situation is available on Groklaw.

Whew, I feel better.

The seven sessions are…    

Friday:   Internet Security (10:30 a.m.)
speakers:  Mac McMillian, internet security expert from CynergisTek; Keith Garner, CRT.

Data to Syndicators (12:30 p.m.)
speakers:  Bob Hale, CEO of the Houston Association of REALTORS® ; Jorrit Van der Meulen, Zillow;  Mark Wise, ThreeWide Corporation; Chris McKeever, CRT.

Bloggers’ Lounge Reception
Stop by the Bloggers’ Lounge on Friday night between 6-8 p.m.  This is the perfect opportunity to meet other social media folk, network, and engage in pleasant conversation.

Saturday:  Digitally Expose Yourself (9:00 a.m.)
speaker:  Evo Terra, one of the authors of Podcasting for Dummies. 
Take a minute and give Evo some input on what you want to know/learn about new media during this session. 

VoIP: Recognizing the Opportunities for Your Business
(11:00 a.m.)
speaker:  Bill Miller, Digium, Inc.

RETS: Impact of the Rule Change (1:30 p.m.)
speakers:  Ryan Bonham, Transparent Technologies, Inc; John Holley, North TX Real Estate Information Systems; Andrew Tillman, CRT.

Sunday:  Using Social Media to Engage Clients (11:00 a.m.)
speakers:  Dustin Luther, RE.net guru; Rudolph D. Bachraty III, Trulia; Jeff Turner, Real Estate Shows.

CRT’s own Ian Smith will be giving a digital video primer at the NAR booth theater on the expo floor. (3:30 p.m.)

Monday:  Services You Can Use in Your Business (9:00 a.m.)
Speakers:  Daniel Rothamel, Strong Team REALTORS®; Amy Chorew,  Matthew Ferrara Seminars; Keith Garner, CRT.

Location and room names are currently pending. Once that information is finalized, updates will be posted here and at Realtor.org.   We look forward to seeing you in Orlando!

First, I wanted to let folks know that REBAC is offering a Green Designation course, taught by Terry Watson, during the Annual meeting in Orlando this year.

I also thought I would pass along some tips related to reducing the energy consumption of computers.  Yes, I know the designation is about housing, but my contribution should be considered tangentially related.  Although each computer uses a relatively small amount of energy, it is amazing how quickly it can add up.    Remember, even “wall wart” (hideous, I know) power supplies use energy if the are plugged into the wall and not attached to a cell phone, laptop or other device.

Maybe we are all Treehuggers to some degree!

Luckily, Grammar Girl comes to the rescue here.  Today’s podcast entry from Grammar Girl covers this very topic.  I should also point out that this top was adapted from her print book, which I’ve been thinking about picking up.

From what I’ve remembered what I’ve done I seem to follow must of the suggested stuff without thinking about it, but its good to have another source to point to (or doublecheck with) when writing.

Of course, the first thing I did was pop my T-Mobile SIM card into the phone to see just how open the Freerunner was.  To my delight, I was able to make a call to a co-worker.  I wonder if the folks I call when testing things ever get bothered?  Next was to receive a call.  This I did from from land line (preserving the patience of my brethren).  I can tell you that the ringtone of the FreeRunner is very “retro”, sounding like a landline in the UK.

The next order of business was to look at the applications.  The preloaded applications are based on the QTopia platform.  Phone … check.  Contacts … check.  Browser … check.  Good.   Now to hook up my various e-mail accounts.  Hey, not e-mail client (grrrrrr).  An e-mail client is a Google Summer of Code project, but the fact that it is missing keeps me from trying to use the phone daily.

Scanning the wiki, I decided to try updating the applications.  Since the applications are open source, this should not be a problem right?  Hey correct!  I was able to upgrade to the latest stable versions that are updated daily.  Curiousity got the better of me, so I decided to venture into the “bleeding edge” and update the unit with untested, development quality versions.  Bad move, I made my new phone into a high-tech brick.  It would not boot.

I did not need a new toy for the shelf so I decided to see if I could resurrect the FreeRunner.  In my haste to play, I bypassed all of the reading material (bad move, I know).  It turns out that the device can boot from a microSD chip (supplied).  All I had to do was follow the directions.  This took me several attempts due to office interruptions, but it did work.

After booting with the new image, I was confident that my phone was alive.  The next order of business was to “flash” the phone with the factory defaults.  Through the USB connector, you can access the bootloader, making flashing pretty simple.  Overall, I would recommend not “bricking” you phone though.

I have now updated the phone to the OM stack and will give you a progress report soon!

Being a “staffer”, I don’t have any listings, so I decided to try it out on the logo for REALTOR.org.  Just to “push” the envelope, I used a PNG rendering of the logo.

To my surprise it worked!  I received a page full of search results that I could click on to see the image in context. In my case, the logo was found on several International association sites.  The result set also contained similar logos.  At NAR, all of our groups use a similar “swoop” in the logo, including REALTOR.com.

You must set up an account with TinEye before you use the service.  Please read the terms and conditions of service.  The site is in BETA right now and has both a Flash and non-Flash interface.

Your mileage may vary, but I would be interested if TinEye can find all of the places you expect your property photos to be.

To get started, you should have a computer with Windows XP or a newer version of Windows, some video footage, and Movie Maker. You may already have Movie Maker on your computer; to find out, just go to your start button, select “Programs”, and navigate to “Accessories”, then “Entertainment”. If you already have it, then Movie Maker will be listed here. If it isn’t, then you can download it for free from Microsoft.com.

(1)image of Movie Maker application- click to enlarge

Movie Maker only supports specific video formats, so check the Movie Maker help section(2) to determine if your video’s format is supported. If your video is in an unsupported format there are free utilities you can download that will convert your footage to a supported format.

(2)image of Movie Maker help section- click to enlarge

Once you have Movie Maker and a properly formatted video file, start the application and import your footage. The easiest way to import is to use the Toolbar: click the “Tasks” button on the Toolbar to open the “Movie Tasks” pane. From that pane, select “Import Video”(3)—this will cause a window to pop up. Browse through your video file(s), highlight the one you want then select “Import”(4). Your footage should then appear in Movie Maker’s Collection window.

(3)image of “Import video”- click to enlarge

(4)image of Import pop-up- click to enlarge

Now you’re ready to start editing. To edit your footage, you need to move it into the editing pane. The editing pane(5) can be found in the lower portion of the application window, so all you have to do is simply click and drag the footage there in the order you would like it to be played in your finished video. Clips can be rearranged at any time, so don’t be afraid to experiment.

(5)Image of video drag to Storyboard- click to enlarge

Once your footage is in the editing pane, you can start to make your changes, including splitting clips of film. While you can split clips from either the player or the editing pane, I’ll outline how it works in the player. If you click on a clip you will see it appear in a video player on the upper right of the application. There you’ll also find a button that shows a dotted line between two film frames; this is the split button. To split a clip, you can either play the clip or drag the playback indicator to where you want to split it and then click the split button. Now you will see two clips in the editing pane(6).

(6)Image of “split” button and split clips- click to enlarge

You can use the editing pane to make even more changes. In this pane, there are two views to choose from, Timeline and Storyboard. In general, the Storyboard view is best for arranging your clips and adding transitions. Transitions are effects that smooth the change from one clip to another. And now you that you have two clips, you’ll want to put a transition between them. On the Movie Tasks pane on the left side of the application window, click the arrow next to the “Edit Movie” section, then select “View video transitions”. This will bring up a list of transitions. Drag the transition you want to the small rectangle between clips in the Storyboard(7). If you want to change a transition’s length, you can modify if with the “Options” section under “Tools” on the Toolbar.

(7)Image of transition addition- click to enlarge

You’ll need the Timeline view to remove footage from the beginning or end of a clip (called “trimming a clip”). If you would like a specific section of a clip, use the trimming function. On the timeline, click one side of a clip and drag the playback indicator to the desired trim point, then release(8). The clip is now trimmed down to that time . If the section you want is in the middle of a clip, split the clip near the end of the section you would like, then trim.

(8)Image of trimming- click to enlarge

Splitting, transitions and trimming are tools every video editor employs. Before attempting a big project, try playing around with these features so you can get the hang of how to use them. For more information, use the help function in Movie Maker; it’s located on the Toolbar.

Now that your video footage has been edited, it’s time to finish your video. Go to the left pane and click the arrow next to “Finish Movie” then select “Save to my computer”(9). Movie Maker will then walk you through the saving process, but if you want to find out more about saving your video, go to the Movie Maker help section.

(9)Image of video finish- click to enlarge

To learn more about Movie Maker, go to Microsoft.com. Or, as they say, Google it.

Matt Lavallee from MLSPIN and I will host a small talk on “RESO, RETS, & Syndication and stuff.” We figure it’s a meaningful piece of content we can bring that few others in the room can provide.  Many of the events of the day seem to around social media information.  (Personally, I’d like to talk more tech, but we all know my geek preferences.)  There are many other planned talks through out the day, and I’ve included some photos of the “topics board.”

As I type this, I’m in a session where Ben Martin is sharing the results of the CREST survey.  When the full survey is published, we’ll cover it in a later blog post.  More later…  (And I’ll fix the orientation on the photos later.  Bandwidth is terrible here, painful to post…)

But recently I have been working on writing a syndication tool and I am beginning to agree with a lot of people that question the use of XML for simple data exchange. XML was originally supposed to be both machine and human readable, and in the case of using XML to create structured documents, like XHTML, it is. It was an offshoot of SGML but had much stricter and therefore simpler syntax rules. But then people started to try and use XML for any sort of communication over the network; CSV files got turned into XML (at no real gain other than it’s XML), protocols for method invocation over HTTP (SOAP), to defining the interface for those method invocations (WSDL) and now it seems, for any data exchange out there, a lot of people think that you need to do it in XML, and that you should define the XML via an XSD (XML Schema Definition).  Now XSDs I hate!  In defining the schema of an XML document using XML you are using an crude tool for the task of exchanging data by using a terrible tool for the task of defining a schema. XSD is painful unless you have some sort of tool to to help you.  Don’t believe me, here is the XSD for syndication. Maybe I am crazy but I think that a schema definition language should be human readable and I don’t think XSD is.  The arguments for XML are many, but mostly seem to revolve around it being a standard, and that there are a lot of tools that exist for it.  So XML has evolved from a simplification of SGML for the creation of structured documents, to a catch all hammer in the toolbox of many software designers. Soon people will start suggesting that we just write the programs that run XML based files in some sore of XML based programming language (oh wait, they did that already with XSL and XSLT). There has to be a better way.

Right now I have been looking at other data exchange formats and have been focusing on JSON and YAML. Both are more human readable (YAML even more so than JSON) and have less weight to them than XML for data exchange.   They are standards with decent library support and can cover any structured data format that XML can.  There is even a tool out there to create verifiable schemas for both JSON and YAML called Kwalify. I also am starting to think that there needs to be a language for defining schemas in a language/platform neutral way. This language could be used by tools to generate things like XSD (if you have to use XML), YAML for Kwalify, SQL etc.  This language becomes like a DSL (Domain Specific Language) for defining schemas.  I know there are a lot of people that think that creating a parser for a new language is hard, but using tools like ANTLR and yacc it’s fairly easy and a powerfull addition to your developers toolbox.  As Martin Fowler says, don’t be afraid of creating parsers! We need to start thinking about the proper use of XML as a tool. It has it’s place, but there are better tools out there for doing many of the things that XML is currently used for. Also, is the obsession with using XML for everything preventing us from creating even better tools?  It’s something we need to think about.

PS: Apologies to Max Cannon, and many thanks to folks that helped create Build Your Own Meat!

Today I wanted to go get an iPhone 3G and do a first day impression report if the speed was the upgrade and being shackled to AT&T for another 2 years.  Sadly, that won’t be happening today due to long lines and activation problems.

I personally underestimated the demand and I didn’t think the line would be all that big.  I made my way over to the store at about 9:40 this morning and the line was a block and a half long.  A friend of mine that works on the other side of Chicago’s Loop reported that the AT&T store on Monroe had a similar line.  To give you an idea of the length of the line, I’ve drawn on a Google map.  One difference in reality from that map is that people weren’t standing in the cross street, but you know…

View Larger Map

However, I do have some good things to say about the new iPhone OS that also was unleashed today.  If you’re not in a 3G covered area, this is the big news.

The upgrade process I did last night went smoothly and downloading and installing apps from the iTunes story did as well.  I haven’t had a chance to play with many of the apps yet, but I’m really excited by mobile NetNewsWire and Twitterific.  I love both of the desktop versions of those apps and I am very happy to have pocket versions.  The AIM client is nice to have as well, but I’ve read reports that its buggy.  I haven’t used it enough yet to run into that.

I won’t list all the new features as there are many web sites that cover that, but there are some really nice changes that affect my daily life.  The calendar is now multi-calender  aware, which was something that was killing me on the old OS.  Mail has bulk move and bulk delete now, which will save me a bunch of time.  You can BCC mail now as well, which is useful in business contexts.

As I do more, I’ll do another post.  So, with only a few minutes really into it, and not waiting in the long line, the OS upgrade is worth it.  Not sure about the hardware.  Luckily, everyone gets the OS upgrade even if they don’t buy a new phone.

Here is a clip of what Arthur posted on the VieleRETS mailing list about the plug-in:

I could use a lot of help testing this, and if anyone knows
PHP/MySQL/has experience working with Drupal modules, please help make
this better and get it to a point of stability!

Let me know if you're interested at all in testing/coding.

There has been talk about RETS as a Wordpress plug-in too!

This survey is typically sent out earlier in the year, but due to being one staff-member short during 1st quarter 2008, we’re trying to catch up now.  The survey report will be available later this year at www.realtors.org/crt.  I’ll make sure to alert everyone once the report is available.  Stay tuned!

My embarrassing blunder….Just as I got ready to celebrate the deployment of this survey -  It was brought to my attention that my U.S. state list was incomplete.  (BLUSH!)
Dear REALTOR^® friends in Texas, Virginia, and  West Virginia,  Please accept my apology for the oversight.  Fortunately, LimeSurvey - the survey tool CRT uses - allowed me to go in and add these missing states. (Whew! And, thanks to the person who made us aware of this unintentional omission.)

CRT looks forward to learning about your technology usage & needs.  If you have a few minutes, take the survey and let your voice be heard!

If you’re a REALTOR® who write and maintains your own blog, the first survey is aimed at you.  Why don’t you toss them some answers?

Or in other words - Some clarification on the recent NAR/DOJ settlement…..

There has recently been various blogs, comments and observations that have created some uncertainty regarding the requirements and obligations imposed on MLSs and brokers who operate websites under the recently announced settlement of the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against NAR relating to NAR’s VOW policy. As part of CRT’s mission, we will continue to help clarify and navigate through this questions as much as we can.

Below are some clarifications from Ralph Holmen, Associate General Counsel for NAR. Hopefully this can be a first step in clarifying the nature of the settlement and address issues raised by it.

First, the settlement does not affect in any way the NAR IDX policy. In 2005 NAR adopted the Internet Listing Display (ILD) to combine into one policy the existing IDX policy and rules and the Virtual Office Website policy and rules, but the ILD policy was suspended almost immediately upon adoption when it and the VOW policy was challenged by the U.S. Department of Justice. The IDX policy was reinstated, and has remained in effect ever since, although it was subsequently modified to a limited extent. The IDX policy was never challenged by DOJ, and in fact the settlement expressly acknowledges that DOJ “does not allege that the (existing) IDX policy … violates antitrust the laws.” MLSs that have adopted IDX rules in conformance with NAR’s policy need not and indeed should not change those rules. MLS participants operating IDX sites pursuant to those rules may continue to do so without concern that DOJ may allege that those sites violate the law. Note that once the new policies and rules are fully implemented any website that an MLS participant operates to display MLS listing data that does not comply with the requirements specified for a VOW site is deemed to be an IDX site, that must comply with the IDX rules.

Second, there is also some confusion about when MLSs must adopt the revised VOW rules and when MLS participants operating VOW sites must comply. The settlement is subject to a 90 60 day comment period that will begin when DOJ publishes the Competitive Impact Statement required by law. That is anticipated in the fairly near future. Following that comment period the court will make the settlement final and enter the Final Judgment to which NAR and DOJ have agreed. That will likely occur in late August. MLSs will have 90 days from the date the Judgment is entered by the court to adopt the revised VOW policy, and MLS participants must make sure their VOW sites comply with the new rules within 180 days of the date the MLS adopts those rules.

Update Ralph sent a correction regarding the comment period. 60 days, not 90.

For some geeky fun, I took the C++ source code (and header file) to librets::RetsSession from the libRETS source code, and generated a could. Who woulda that that in C/C++ return was the most recurring word? Okay, yeah, EVERYBODY.  Click on the image for a larger view.

PS - it looks like it even respects when you set your status to ‘BUSY’. SCHWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!

My REALTOR (yes my place is on the market) sent me some weekly stats of traffic to the listing page. I looked at it and had a semi eye opening observation. Most of the traffic came from Craigslist! How awesome is that? I still don’t think people realize how simple it is to really get major exposure. I keep reading about ‘gaming the search engines’, optimizing pages for placement, the big debate about Trulia and its linking practices, or one of the many other ‘best practices’. All of which to me seem like you are trying to outsmart the search engines. But look how simple and effective just getting yourself in front of some targeted eye balls really is.

To me, I still believe, if you provide something that has true intrinsic value, it’ll rise to the top. When you build things for search engines, and not people, you create limited value to those people that you attracted. It’d be like attracting bees with a fake smell of honey. Eventually, they figure out the game and not care. Real honey, with real value - will get them everytime.