The BFC Computing Weblog

People are a tizzy about some ‘magical’ technology NBC got Microsoft to put into its Zune to prevent ‘unauthorized’ episodes from playing. Of course, a he-said, she-said spat ensued, and they’re probably both lying. Anyway, this magic isn’t, it’s just watermarking. It’s well-defined how to make this unnoticeable and non-trival to remove. NBC just adds watermarking to the shows before they air, the Zune detects the watermark, and refuses to play the file unless there’s also an authorization key.

The trick with this approach is that it’s 100% DRM; hardware player support is required, and any other player will not have a problem. Also of note, this does nothing to stop copying, it’s just a revenue-enforcement model and is anti Fair-Use.

Nah, neither GE nor Microsoft would do something like that… good on Apple for refusing to play Evil Ball.

Jeff Dwyer has published a new book, Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT.

Google Web Toolkit is a development framework which lets you write web applications in Java and have it automagically converted to AJAX/JavaScript/HTML and deployed to all kinds of devices for you. Jeff did a demo of GWT at the September 2006 DLSLUG Meeting.

Jeff is a really smart dude, which he proved to me when he worked as an intern under me at PreviousJob™ where we did some work playing with Catmull-Rom splines for fitting endovascular grafts into abdominal aortic aneurysms. I was able to say, “hey, this looks like a good use for Catmull-Rom splines,” and Jeff could go off and learn all the math and implement it. Good intern! So, Jeff was an easy hire once he was graduated. Any book he’s written is bound to be fantastic.

He’s now the CEO of MyHippocampus.com, which I barely understand. :)

Congrats, Jeff!

One problem with LinkedIn is that every contact in your network is treated the same. This could be improved by adding a trust weighting to every contact.

For example, I have a best friend from high school, and some guy I just met at a conference yesterday. I want to give the old buddy a 10 and the new guy a 1, because that relates to how much I can trust them.

But, why?

LinkedIn has great potential for me to find people I need to find. Say I need a designer, an artist, a graphics pipeline optimizer. I can probably search the LinkedIn graph for these kinds of people now, but all I really know about them is how many hops away they are and maybe there are some recommendations.

But with trust weightings, I’d get better answers. I’d much rather hire somebody on a 4-hop 10/10/10/10 path than a 2-hop 1/1 path, for instance.

And, of course, the trusts would be kept secret by LinkedIn, but they’d use them to help you find people.

Any LinkedIn users out there - would you actually be willing to set trust levels on your contacts?

My, these are hard to find. Scroll down to part# PWS17904. I need them to put SATA drives in a 1U case with Molex power connectors and very little clearance, on my quest to build a powerful, quiet, 1U server (no compromises!).

I have a couple on order. I’ll post back here if there are any problems.

Last week I attended and presented at FOSSVT, a conference focused on Open Source in Education. Organized by the National Center for Open Source in Education, FOSSVT, at Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, VT, was attended by over a hundred educators and technology specialists.

Executive Director Bryant Patten did yeoman’s work organizing the inaugural event, arguably the most successful Open Source event in Northern New England in recent memory. Kudos to Bryant.

I presented “Taking Control of Your Network Using FLOSS Software”, a talk about why it’s important to have a well-regulated network, and a whirlwind tour of a bunch of Free (Libré) Open Source Software (FLOSS) tools that could be useful for educators and technologists looking to take control of a school network. We covered some concepts, troubleshooting techniques, and resources available for further study.

As promised here are the slides . (3.3MB PDF)

It looks like there might be some bad updates out there for TurboTax for Mac. I ran an update, and it hosed the app:

I tried twice more, and it worked on the third try. I’m guessing I got balanced onto a server that wasn’t corrupt, so keep deleting the folder and trying again.

Spin off Zimbra again.

Microsoft’s talk about gettting all Webby is just the party line.

Zimbra is the most significant competition to Exchange and Microsoft’s stranglehold on ‘The Enterprise’ and the real reason that Microsoft wants to own Yahoo!.

Of course this won’t happen - I think the Yahoo! guys are smart and bought Zimbra so that Microsoft would finally acquire them. And they know what the Exchange monopoly is worth to them, so they can hold out until Microsoft gives.

This group is looking to block the deal with government intervention on these grounds.

Amazon has half a disruptive idea in its TextBuy service.

Here’s how it works: You register your phone # with your Amazon account and then if you find something you want to buy (however you do that) you SMS the UPC Code to Amazon. Assuming you have 1-Click setup, it places an order for you and sends you back a text indicating either success (it’s going to ship) or failure (out of stock, not carried, etc.). You can optionally set a preference to not ship the item right away if you want to be able to cancel the order later on their website. In this case, the order gets executed, say 12 hours after you place the order.

Cool, huh? Sorry, I lied to you. That’s not how it works, it’s how it should work. Here’s how it really works:

• You SMS the UPC code to Amazon
• If Amazon stocks the item, Amazon replies with the first two search results for that code.
• To purchase am item, users reply with 1 or 2
• They get an SMS back prompting them for their email address and zip code.
• The user types in their e-mail address and zip code on their crummy phone keypad using 3-tap input.
• The service then calls the user’s phone and completes the checkout process using an automated voice menu system.

I’d use the first system I described but not this one. Coming soon, perhaps?

Running Thunderbird 2 with IMAP accounts on a dovecot server, one out of four accounts couldn’t move any files to the Trash. The symptom is a message saying “Could not create folder INBOX.Trash”. Well, right, dovecot doesn’t nest under INBOX.

The workaround is to show the subscriptions for the account and uncheck the subscriptions for the INBOX.Trash and INBOX.Sent folders, then it will properly use the existing Trash and Sent folders.

Congratulations to everybody who’s participated in the Mozilla project on their 10 year anniversary. Even the smallest contributors have been necessary to get us to this point.

There’s an old saying in the industry that it takes 10 years to really get something right, and Firefox 3, due imminently, seems to re-enforce that rule - it’s fantastic, and I haven’t said that about a browser upgrade since Firefox 1.0. Currently at beta 4, it’s better than Firefox 2 enough that I’m recommending it even though it still has the ‘beta’ moniker. For most people, it’s the best web browser available anywhere, bar none.