Episode: 582
Title: HPR0582: Talk Geek To Me #23:Interview:Ken Fallon
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0582/hpr0582.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:30:08

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Welcome to Talk Geek to me.
I'm your host DeepGeek, an admitted corporate America reshew snake, and this is my show
on computers and all things related to geek culture.
This is Talk Geek to me, number two, three, interview with Ken Fallon, released on Tuesday
October 12th, 2010.
Here's the viral statistics for this program to contact me, send your email to dgatdeepgeek.us
That's DeltaGolf at DeltaEchoEchoPapa.govEchoEchoKilo.uniformsier.
The website can be found at www.talkgeektoMe.us.
Ken Fallon is a professional technologist, podcast listener and podcast producer.
He joins us today on Talk Geek to me for a short interview, Ken.
Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me on.
Ken we both have Hacker Public Radio in our background.
Can you familiarize our listeners with its growth and slow down?
Maybe some of your listeners are not familiar with HPR, so I'll just give you a little bit
of background.
It's a podcast network I guess, while it's a podcast feed that releases a show every
week to amund it through Friday.
There are very little restrictions, there's no restrictions on how long the show can be,
no restrictions on what topics they're covered, so long as they're of interest tackers
in general.
And we also allow for a series of shows, so a host can go into more detail on a particular
topic or several hosts can collaborate on a particular topic.
The big thing that differentiates HPR from other podcasts or all the podcast networks
is that the shows are produced for the community and by the community.
The show producers are correspondents, as we call them, sign up to do one show a month,
but you don't have to, you can just contribute to the show whenever you like.
And so far, we've had 73 different people from all around the world contribute shows,
although a lot more than that have actually been involved in some shows that have been
severed in different people.
HPR itself began where today with a techie finished off, that was in 2007, at the very
last day of 2007.
And since then, in two years and ten months, we've produced 574 shows, which I think you
agree is a very, very impressive rate.
For the first two years or so, we've been able to produce five shows a week, but as you
suggested, there has been a slowdown lately, with some shows only been posted once a week.
How does podfading work into this?
Is there a difference between individual podfading and collective podfading?
I forgive the plug, but if you want to hear a great discussion on podfading, tune into
HPR episode 560 by Lost and Brunk's entitled All Soldiers.
Okay, today with a techie and HPR both have been deciding to take individual podfading into
account.
They've been set up so that if one horse pulls out, there's going to be enough people
around to create shows to take up the slack.
For a large part, I have to say that this has worked, you know, even during traditionally
quiet periods where other network's podcasting shows have gone quiet, HPR has still managed
to release one show a day.
But undeniably, there's been a slowdown and there are fewer shows been posted but from
pure horse.
So I guess you could call that collective podfading.
Now, if you've volunteered to work on it, well, so a revival of HPR is at the right
term, can you talk about that and discuss the response and reaction of the HPR producers?
Well, the slowdown had been so gradual that nobody really noticed it.
It wasn't until I heard a comment on the Colonel Panic podcast that prompted me to ask
the question on the mailing list was HPR dead.
For my own part, I didn't want to see the network die, but if it was going to die, I wanted
to see it, you know, have a dignified end.
But the response has been very, very good.
There were a few people who said they wanted to see it wound on gracefully, but the vast
majority of people are excited about revitalizing the network and many have committed to doing
new shows.
So the longer short of that is we're going to revive, revitalize, revamp, whatever.
And when I say we, of course, I mean, yes, myself, but everybody else as well.
I want to concentrate to get back to one show a day, every day, one show a day, every
single day.
That builds trust and it retains listeners, doesn't mean that you're necessarily going
to want to listen to every show a day, but yeah, you know that HPR will always be something
new, something different tomorrow.
And for that to work, we need more shows, we need more hosts, we need people to contribute
to the pool, we need people to contribute to go back to doing one show a month.
And if we concentrate and get more shows, from more holes, everything else is going to
follow.
Now, let's get geeky.
HPR runs on an Ajax basis, but some shows stick with flat HGML.
And I even know one HPR alumni who decided to use the Gulf of Progol for his new show.
Can you speak about technology, the amount of commitment required to maintain it and what
you might think of the phrase, sometimes the new improved is not that improved.
You're looking to start a religious war, I see.
Well, I like text files, so therefore I like Gofer, but I don't think you, if you want
a very popular website, Gofer is not the way to go.
But if you want a cool project, yes, it's really, really, really impressive and cool.
Ajax has its place, but you kind of have to think of a more as an application.
Then as a web page, some people don't like Ajax, but I would take Ajax any day over
to a website that's developed in Flash, because at least you can look at the source code
of an Ajax site and see what it's doing.
But again, use it sparingly, and not just because it's nice and shiny.
Yes, I've seen time and time again where companies are frustrated with this big blob of a system
that they have, and then a vendor comes in with a solution that's going to do everything
that the big blob will do, and it's going to do a lot more.
So they sign on to that, and then it starts with the implementation, and then their implementation
problems, and then six months later you start your words like phase two, and then six months
later again, you hear words like phase one B, and then at the end of two years down the line
you're going to end up with a new system that does one or two things better than the old system,
but it doesn't do everything that the old system did, or it was more expensive or whatever.
And that's pretty much every company that I've ever come across, and it's not any different
in the Unix world.
There's a famous story of a startup that was bought because they had an innovative web
product, and they company that bought them, spent two years rewriting the site and their
language of choice that they used internally.
And then two years later they come out with a new release, but it was too late, everybody
had moved on.
There was another site that had just added those features, so I do like the Unix philosophy,
and that is to quote Wikipedia, Douglas McElroy says, this is the Unix philosophy.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle tech streams, because that is a universal interface.
Oh, yes, and we should all repeat that every night.
However, the beauty of that is if you want to replace the bits that are hurting you,
so there's a bottleneck here with something, and you can replace that component, and you
don't have to throw the baby out of the baby out with the bath water, as I say.
So that's kind of cool.
The only disadvantage of that, of course, is that you're not getting a new shiny product,
so that's it.
Okay, so if someone ever wanted to try a podcast, try to make a podcast, and you want to
podcast, where should they go?
Oh, what a fantastic question.
Anyway, if any of your listeners ever thought about doing a podcast, HPR is a great way to
get started.
I know of several podcasters who have got their start on HPR and went on to bigger and
better things, so if you ever thought of doing a podcast, HPR takes care of all the
RSS stuff that you don't need to do, takes care of the website, you don't need to do.
You can do a topic and anything you like.
You can have a look at the archives and see what people have already done.
You can record it on anything you like, a lot of people use portable media players or just
the built-in microphone on their laptops.
And once you've done that, just email the admin at hack-and-public-radio.org, and then
NIGMA will pick up that and send you all the information about where you need to have
to be the site of the show to and all the rest of that good stuff.
And if you have any questions or whatever, there's always the IRC network, August, Planet,
and a lot of the correspondence, our hosts, will be found in there.
And if all that fails, you can always email me as Ken at KenFallon.com.
Thanks for being on Talk Geek to me.
Thanks for having me on.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Talk Geek to me.
Here's a viral statistics for this program to contact me, send your email to DG at deepgeek.us.
That's DeltaGolf at DeltaEchoEchoPapa.GolfEchoEchoKilo.uniformCR.
The website can be found at www.TalkGeekToMe.us.
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