Check out the paper linked from this blog post. I haven’t read this one before. More later if I get the chance, maybe even some code.

Mark

I don’t plug my employer very often, but I must admit, I’m having enormous fun working on our current project, and received a message from our PR department that an animation test of ours had been released to multiple outlets. It is kind of cute, and I think a good example as to just how terrific our animators are. Enjoy.

[tags]Pixar,Disney,Ratatouille[/tags]

The net is abuzz with the comments that Steve Jobs made about DRM the other day. The best commentary that I’ve found (meaning, the person who says most of the stuff that I think, except more eloquently) is Ed Felton over at the Freedom To Tinker blog.

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Apple Offers to Sell DRM-Free Music

[tags]DRM,Apple iTunes,Music Licensing,Steve Jobs[/tags]

I may bring this website down for a bit of spring cleaning this weekend.  It’s been running without problem for somewhere close to six years, and in that time I’ve let it get a bit messy, as well as nearly filling the 60gb drive that it’s got in it.    I’ve got a cheap 160gb drive sitting on my desk, and have been intending to upgrade for some time, and I might just get around to it soon.

The webserver itself is running FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE on a mini-itx motherboard with a 1ghz Via Nehemiah processor with 1gb of memory.  I’d consider a hardware upgrade except that there is no real point:  the server loafs along with loads of well below 0.10 most of the time.   Providing web services simply isn’t that big of a deal.  The main question that I have to answer is whether to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.2, or to just continue the trend that I have towards running Ubuntu everywhere and just go to that.  I’ve kind of got a bug in my bonnet about running my webserver in either a FreeBSD jail or perhaps a Linux VServer to provide some degree of isolation and protection, but I haven’t got a strong feeling one way or the other.  Opinions?

[tags]FreeBSD, Linux, Upgrade, Downtime, System News[/tags]

Check out the amazing “Astronomy Picture of the Day”.

Damn, wish I could have seen that.

Just read the coverage. If LEDs and batteries are the telltale signs of terrorism, I can only hope that nobody searches my house.

Still, I thought this was damned funny.

Addendum: Assistant Attorney General John Grossman is a total retard.

“It’s clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location,”

The men did not speak or enter their own pleas, but they appeared amused and smiled as the prosecutor talked about the device found at Sullivan Station underneath Interstate 93, looking like it had C-4 explosive.

“The appearance of this device and its location are crucial,” Grossman said. “This device looks like a bomb.”

Some in the gallery snickered.

Just how many improvised explosive devices have you seen that are covered in brightly lit leds? I mean really, does this scream “bomb” to you?

apparently Lycos’ motto is “never miss an opportunity to piss off your customers”.

Addendum: Lycos?  Are they still in business?

A bunch of different blogs are complaining about the fact that the important 9/11 Commission report is protected by DRM. If you try to copy any text from it, you get prompted with this:

Let’s be clear. This is a federal document, paid for by your tax dollars. As such, it is entirely and indisputably in the public domain. If, however, you try to circumvent the DRM that protects this document that we all own, you are guilty of circumventing a digital rights management system, which is a federal crime. What this means is that a technological measure has circumvented your rights. This isn’t just a case of fair use: you actually own this material (as we all do).

I had previously been annoyed by the idea that this copy of the Constitution was protected by DRM, and it doesn’t seem like it is getting any better.

[tags]Public Domain,9/11 Commission,DRM,Digital Rights Management[/tags]

The Hubble’s main ACS camera appears to have suffered a short circuit that has resulted in the camera powering down and entering a safe mode. The engineers seem to think that it is rather unlikely that it will be returned to working order, and the problem may affect the actual praticality of the scheduled final reservicing mission. Bummer.

Today, Microsoft has finally released their long coming upgrade to the venerable XP line. I’d say that now is the perfect time for you to move on. No, not by upgrading your box from Windows XP to Vista, but by keeping your $200+ dollars in your pocket, and shifting to an operating system where the authors still work for you.

I’ll make a specific recommendation: try out Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu is an African word, meaning “humanity to others”. It’s a software product with a philosophy, one that goes beyond the basic ideas of free software. In their own words:

The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

More than just a philosophy though, it’s a great product. The basic distribution fits on a single CD. It installs quickly and painlessly. It has versions which are optimized for the desktop and for servers. The desktop version includes OpenOffice (which includes a wordprocessor, spredsheet, presentation software and a database, with the ability to exchange documents with Microsoft Office), Firefox for web browsing, Evolution for email, and software for goofing around with pictures and ripping and playing CDs. The server version includes all the software needed to create a LAMP webserver (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), and can IBM’s DB2 and other databases like Postgres. You can install any of over 16,000 ported packages to either of them.

And mostly, it just works. Gnome, the desktop environment provided, is very nice and should seem very familiar to anyone used to Windows or the Mac. If you use your computers primarily to access the web, send email, do some light word processing, or even some heavy word processing, you’ll probably move relatively effortlessly to Ubuntu. As you gain more experience, you’ll probably find that you want to learn more, and luckily, the Ubuntu community websites provide excellent help. Just surf over to help.ubuntu.com and start reading. You may find that you have to invest a little bit in learning, but this time is far from wasted. You’ll begin to find that you can do all sorts of things with Ubuntu that would have been difficult with Windows Vista.

Cast off your shackles. Try something new!

Adam Dunkels Contiki operating system sported a full TCP/IP stack, and ran on very small microcomputers such as the Commodore 64. Apparently now he’s submitted his PhD these on the topic. It’s a very interesting bit of work, check it out.

The Contiki Operating System – PhD Thesis: Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded Systems

Apparently, this memo has been out for a while, but I hadn’t seen it before. I know, I like to rant about Microsoft a lot, but it’s really quite interesting.

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Some quotes:

… so far no-one has been able to identify any Windows system that will actually play HD content in HD quality, in all cases any attempt to do this produced either no output or a message that it was blocked by content protection. While it’s not possible to prove a negative in this manner, it’s certainly an indication that potential buyers may be in for a shock when they try and play premium content on their shiny new Vista PC.

Protecting all of this precious premium content requires a lot of additional technology. Unfortunately much of this is owned by third parties and requires additional licensing. For example HDCP for HDMI is owned by Intel, so in order to send a signal over HDMI you have to pay royalties to Intel, even though you could do exactly the same thing for free over DVI (actually you could do it better, since DVI is provides a higher-quality link than HDMI). Similarly, since even AES-128 on a modern CPU isn’t fast enough to encrypt high-bandwidth content, companies are required to license the Intel- owned Cascaded Cipher, an AES-128-based transform that’s designed to offer a generally similar level of security but with less processing overhead.

In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content sent to video devices has to be encrypted with AES-128. This requirement for cryptography extends beyond basic content encryption to encompass not just data flowing over various buses but also command and control data flowing between software components.

In the interest of fairness,
here is Microsoft’s reponse. Some notable quotes:

Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs.

This is simply nonsense of course. All available evidence is that the primary added “feature” that Windows Vista has is to degrade or prevent the playback of protected content. Microsoft has delivered a feature which no consumer demanded, and expects us, rather than the content providers to pay for it.

I’d go through more of the absurd marketing speak, but frankly, Gutmann does a much better job of it than I could. His rebuttal is contained at the bottom of his paper. Be sure to read it after Microsoft’s response.

[tags]Microsoft,Vista,No Thanks[/tags]

Addendum: Another terrific quote which accurately reflects the futility of DRM, even in the abstract:

In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you’re reading this document on the web then it’s been copied from the web server’s disk drive to server memory, copied to the server’s network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC’s network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser’s disk cache, copied to the browser’s rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you’ve printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista’s content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you’re not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista’s content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

On Mythbusters tonight, they covered an interesting myth: that it is impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times. My strange brain full of trivia made me exclaim “That myth was already busted, and by a high school student!” Indeed, a few minutes with a search engine revealed the story:

Folding Paper in Half Twelve Times

Note: Britney Gallivan not only busted the myth, but also derived a mathematical model that tells you why it is so hard to fold paper, and establishing limits on the process. That is how she was able to fold a long strip of paper a remarkable 12 times. The Mythbusters glossed over this nice bit of math, which in my mind really deserves more notice.

The Mythbusters did try folding a rectangular piece in alternating directions, beginning with a piece that basically covered the floor of the huge hangars in Moffett Field. They managed a respectable, but not record breaking 11 folds. Nice.

[tags]Mathematics,Mythbusters,Paper folding[/tags]

Here are a bunch of books that are licensed under the Creative Commons and for the most part can be freely downloaded, read, and even redistributed (if non commercially). They include books that I already have in dead tree form, like Asterisk: The Future of Telephony or Lessig’s Free Culture, but also include books that guys like Tom might appreciate, such as The Book of FIve Strings: Strategies for Mastering the Art of Old Time Banjo or The How and Tao of Old Time Banjo, or The How and Tao of Folk Guitar. Good stuff.

I like to read old science books. They serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come, or just as often, how ignorant we remain. This book is nicely illustrated tome, briefly covering topics of astronomy, biology, and particle physics. It’s coverage of evolution seems particularly interesting to me, especially for its (admittedly brief, and altogether erroneous) acceptance of Piltdown Man, but also includes interesting bits on the possibility of life on other planets and other fun. Lots of illustrations and photos, lots to enjoy. So enjoy!

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Outline of Science, Volume 1 of 4, by J. Arthur Thomson.

[tags]Gutenberg Gems,Public Domain,Science,Evolution[/tags]