I ran into an interesting new feature for Firefox 2 today. They’re called microsummaries. They use regular expressions and XSLT to take data from a webpage and use it as the title of a bookmark. The data is constantly updated so you can quickly get stock prices, auction information, headlines, etc. dynamically without having to constantly reload a webpage. This sounds like a great way to keep up-to-date information at your fingertips. This provides an entirely new framework for many extensions such as email notifiers, weather services, and stock tickers that all require their own backend to pull data. This is a win for everyone. It will take less time for developers to code extensions, create less bloat when many such extensions are installed, and make for more stable extensions, all of which are only positives for Firefox.

In other news regarding the internet world, Dave Hyatt has written some blog posts regarding Hi DPI Web Sites. With the inevitable introduction of high-resolution monitors (they have to come around eventually), providing web developers the opportunity to give users a “high-definition” version of their website is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, many people fail to understand key concepts of the proposal. What Hyatt proposes isn’t redoing standards to force upon people high resolution. Rather, he’s proposing a system where users are given a choice how to view a website — at a higher resolution or at a smaller size on the screen. While I won’t dwell further on other misconceptions, let me just say that I think many don’t understand the difference between a CSS pixel, which is an abstract and relative concept, and a physical screen pixel, which is concrete but varies widely, even now, between monitors. To fully appreciate the difference, try looking at a web page at the same resolution on two different monitors. A good example would be to take a 20″ Apple Cinema Display and 15″ MacBook Pro and view websites at the native resolution of 1680×1050 on both.

However, what I think is more interesting is the issue of operating systems adapting to higher resolution displays. Vista will be able to adapt to different resoultions as will the next revision of Mac OS X (10.5; codename Leopard). This will involve making almost everything in the operating system vector-based so that widgets can be arbitrarly-sized and still look smooth. What I think people are missing is the accessibility factor. Being able to grow and shrink OS elements will allow people to optimize their computer for maximum visual comfort, whether you are a sharp-eyed developer or a less visually acute executive.

Currently, some laptop manufacturers are including EV-DO support on their machines to allow computers to access the web via Verizon’s cellular network. Soon, they will have the same thing for 3G networks, support UMTS/EDGE. I think that integrating cellular data access into laptops will be a boon since cellular networks have much better coverage than wireless hot spots. People already pay for data access via cell phones; it stands to reason that they’ll use their laptop to access the internet and make calls via their same plan. This cellular integration into laptops will only become more popular, that is, until free municipal wireless internet become ubiquitous across the country.

Oh, and finally, I am officially a year older. Yay birthday! I took it easy on Thursday night but ended up going out with a bunch of high school friends, some whom I haven’t seen in years, and celebrating two other birthdays. Old friends, lots of birthdays, and easily available alcohol made for a good time.

In other news, there’s an article in IBD from a couple days ago discussing how internet outfits might buy spectrum to do an end-run around AT&T and others who want to create a tiered internet by providing their own wireless service. Not surprisingly, Google is on the top of the short list of companies who would be able to pull this off. The theory is that big internet firms like Google, eBay, Amazon, and others would form a consortium to buy up the spectrum and create a broadband wireless network with it. It’s not exactly the most probable thing to happen, but it is certainly possible. The first auction will be in June when the FCC auctions off spectrum in the 1710-1755MHz and 2110-2155MHz bands. The next one will involve spectrum in the 700MHz region, but will only occur after television companies ditch that part of the spectrum for OTA HDTV. That may occur as late as 2008.

For those who think that an internet company consortium forming their own wireless broadband network is a far-out idea, there is some corroboration to be considered. Back in November, Robert X. Cringely wrote some articles about how Google is playing around with putting 5000-processor, 3.5-petabyte servers into 40-foot shipping crates for a worldwide Google network at a cost of around $3.5 billion. The idea of Google and/or others setting up their own network for public dissemination has been circulating in the rumor mills for years. And, unlike the GoogleOS rumors (which are spawned from the fact that Google runs a custom Linux kernel internally), it’s a rumor that has some legs. Between their shipping crate servers and purchase of dead fiber, the disappearance of network neutrality may be the spark needed to put the wheels in motion.

So now I will add my own future of Google theory to the melting pot. In my opinion, I think it’s a good bet that Google wants their own public network. Google is all about gathering information, but creating very little original information on their own. The ultimate in this is to control the network. With the information that comes from running a network, Google could further optimize their current businesses and services, including their profitable ones like AdSense. Partnering with Earthlink to provide municipal Wi-Fi to San Francisco could serve as a spring board. Google’s core isn’t running an ISP, so they provide the capital, set up the shipping crates, light up their dark fiber, and let Earthlink manage the ISP aspect of the network. That way, Google does what they always do, hands off what they don’t do to someone else, and now collects, disseminates, and exploits the wealth of new information they will receive. And if they decide to provide people with a set-top box or some other internet appliance, all the better for them.

In the end, Google wants to manage the world’s information. It’s their mantra, along with doing no evil. What better way to do so than to own the pipes that users’ information travels over? If they can do that while teaming up with others to flip the bird at AT&T, then the question isn’t if they’ll create their own network, but when.

I started work this past week. I was going to start reinstalling Windows 2003 Small Business Server on their network, but apparently a predecessor of mine stole their discs. So I had the pleasure of calling Dell to finagle new discs out of them, which was surprisingly easy but came with a one-time-only warning. I installed the new router to decrease their reliance on their server. (Inline sidenote. Whoever set up their previous configuration was a complete moron. What they did would be good for a network with plenty of DCs, redundancy, etc. However, to pin the entire operation of all network functions on a single server, with no backup, is incredibly stupid. That’s just asking for huge problems (which already have happened at least once). When I get done with it, no more stupidity like that will exist.) Installing Windows will be one of next week’s tasks.

Last night marked my first trip to Commerce in quite a while. It also marks the first session of setting up an actual bankroll, which should be helpful to increasing my poker exploits. I played 9-18 limit for about four hours and came out about 450$ richer for my efforts; so it was an excellent session overall. Sharon accompanied me and played some 2-4 herself with success as well, leaving about 60$ in the black. We saw Andrew there, who had been there since last night, and he was still grinding away at the 100 NL games.

We also saw V for Vendetta on Thursday night, which was quite good. In my excitement, I picked up the comic and read it before seeing the movie. The comic has some different plot elements, some nowhere in the movie, that definitely make the comic worth reading if you enjoyed the movie. It’s definitely the best movie I’ve seen in quite a while (granted, I hadn’t seen a movie in theatres for four or five months prior). I’ll probably write a more detailed post about the movie and comic in the near future, because there areq quite a few interesting concepts and ideas in the story that I’d like to comment on and analyze.

England Prevails.

• I’ve had my Motorola v600 since June 2004. It’s a great phone; it has a camera (frivilous, but fun sometimes), Bluetooth, good voice quality, and an aestheticly pleasing and durable form factor. Unfortunately, over the past six months, it’s been getting finicky. It likes to randomly soft reset upon opening it and the exterior screen sometimes gets irrevocably screwed up without hard resetting. Also, sometimes people would call me and it would ring on their end but not on mine. I happen to know this isn’t a service issue for reasons not worth enumerating here. And most recently, starting about a month ago, the earpiece on my phone got screwed up and I could barely hear anybody on it. That is a deal breaker. So, with it being almost two years since buying it, and since I got a one-year contract instead of two (at the time, there was a rebate program, and I tend to be itching for a new phone in the last few months of a two-year contract — it *really* paid off this time), I was eligible for an upgrade. So, after looking at phones, I realized that cell phone technology has gone nowhere in the past two years. Not wanting to cough up 200$ for the same technology that I’d be stuck with for two years and after having friends rave over their’s, I got myself a Blackberry (with a two-year contract such to be eligible for the current rebate, and it damn well better last at least two years). I was looking at the 7100g at first, but after consideration, I ended going a step up and getting the 8700c. Now I have e-mail and web access over EDGE and a full QWERTY keyboard along with PIM functionality that I need. I am quite pleased with my new toy, but no more of those for a while.
• Dan, a friend of mine from my elementary school days, offered me a job to do network administration work for his business along with coding for some interesting stuff. I don’t want to say too much, but this should fill my employment void in the near-term. I doubt this will turn into anything long term (over six months), but it should be lots of fun, and it’s work until I find another job up my alley.
• I would be remiss to not note that today is Pi Day! Sharon said that the math club at UCLA is selling Π/4 pie for 2$. If I had time to go to UCLA today, I’d be all over that. But I will eat a slice of pie today. It’s a requirement. And an excuse to eat pie.
• Running has been going pretty well. I haven’t been quite as consistent in doing it as I would like, but given my fluid schedule right now (which should end soon because of aforementioned job), it’s hard to prevent. Upon commencing work, I will have some structure in my life around which I can run on a consistent basis.
• I’m leaving for New Jersey on Thursday night for Sharon’s brother’s (Marc) Bar Mitzvah. I haven’t been to one of these in a long time, and I even had to go buy a new suit, because I haven’t had the need for a suit in many years (weird, I know). I’ll be back Sunday night.

That’s it for personal goings-on for now. And I apologize for the title of this post. It won’t happen again…at least not for a while.

It seems to me what we’re moving into a world with two main choices in what I call “content services.” The first is picking one company to provide everything you need. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Adelphia, etc. all want to give you everything including the ktichen sink. A single bill and discounted service are two big advantages that such a scheme provides. However, are you going to get the best services from such content service conglomerations? Other companies providing a single service want to make sure that doesn’t become the case. DirecTV, Dish Network, Vonage, Skype, T-Mobile and others want you to use their services, which are better than the big corporations’ since they only do one thing. Somewhat counterintuitively, these individual services are actually cheaper than their counterparts offered by the huge conglomerates.

Only time will tell whether the one-stop shop or the niche companies will win in the oncoming battle over content services.

This underlines my luck with hardware components. I’ve hardly ever had an optical drive last more than 18 months, but I haven’t lost a hard drive to old age yet. In fact, atlas’ 80GB drive is in odin. I recently install a new WD 400GB in odin and have moved everything of importance off of the old drive. The next step will be to back up everything important on atlas onto odin, in case of doom.

Getting you’re music in every form one could desire isn’t very difficult nowadays. There’ s no CD copy protection (any music disc which purports copy protection is not a CD according to the red book standard), which allows fair use without violating the DMCA. You can pretty easily rip your CD to various formats with a plethora of freely available software. What if you don’t want to pay insanely inflated prices for music CDs? You’re remaining (legal) options are DRM-laden. iTunes is by far the most popular online music service, despite Apple’s FairPlay DRM. Of course, the iPod, iTunes’ target device, can be pretty versatile nowadays. It’s good in your pocket, in your car, and now your home stereo. If you have an iPod, you probably will never notice Apple’s DRM. Unless you try to authorize too many computers or play your music via non-Apple software, FairPlay will probably be transparent to you…if you own an iPod. I shouldn’t have to own an iPod to use music the way I want.

Video — movies, TV series, etc. — is a much hairier situation. All video has DRM “protection” (I use the quotation marks since DRM gets hacked pretty quickly.), which makes it illegal to circumvent for any reason. So if I want to legally watch my favorite movie on my home theatre setup, iPod 5G, PSP, and computer, I have to pay for it three or four times. What if I want to get in HD? I have to wait for either the BluRay or HD-DVD release and cough up more dough. My pocket is being dipped into multiple times to watch the same movie on my myriad of devices. This is the future of music and movies. The RIAA and MPAA are not going to bother to release quality content continuously. They will hook you with your favorites and welcome you to buy them over and over and over again. Prior to the DMCA, this wasn’t possible. Now the RIAA and MPAA do an end run around fair use by making it illegal to exercise it.

The situation only continues to worsen. The new high-definition formats, BluRay and HD-DVD, are going to be swamped with DRM. You won’t be able to watch content at its full resolution unless you have an HDCP-compatible device. Only newer HDTVs have the necessary connection. Older ones don’t and neither do any current video cards on the market. So now to watch the content I rightfully purchased at its full, intended resolution, I have to buy a new HDTV and acquire a new video card when they finally release ones with HDCP on them. In short, if you’re equipment isn’t adequately secure, you don’t get what you paid for. This isn’t going to hinder piracy, it’s going to encourage it. Why buy a legal copy that I can only view at 1/4 of the resolution when you can download one for free at full resolution? I don’t need to pay 3000$ to watch the latest movie release at 1080p. It’s just a few clicks away.

Well, you might say, what about the AACS encryption scheme? That will prevent piracy of new content at full resolution. My response to that is simple: name one DRM encryption scheme that hasn’t been broken in the face of people trying for a significant period of time. You can’t because it doesn’t exist. Every DRM scheme for media to date has been broken. And it only takes one hacker from one rip group to distribute pirated movies in full HD resolution for it to permeate the internet. What about when the industry changes the encryption keys? It will get hacked again, and again, and again. There is no reason to think that AACS will actually stop hackers from pirating movies.

So what should the RIAA and MPAA do to not piss of consumers while trying to control the distribution of their content? Separate form and function. Make content as independent from its encoding — physical and digital — as possible. Why just give playback devices keys? Give each consumer their own keyring. Then you could have media players play content by decrypting it on the fly, without storing it on the hard drive, and then play the movie using a standard codec (H.264, MPEG Part 2, Divx, etc.). That would make it very difficult to gain access to the unecrypted data, especially with well-written software that would thwart such attacks. When people buy video, they could provide their public key and get the content. Heck, they could buy an encrypted copy online using their player’s public key, burn it, and then have a protected, useable media disc to put in their player. As long as the private keys stay guarded, the only risk is that somehow someone figures out how to derive a private key from a public one.

There are some issues with this, of course. Using a public key infrastructure (PKI) like OpenPGP is expensive computationally. It’s one thing to wait a few seconds for video to play on a computer. But a set-top box is completely different. Anything much longer than a noticeable delay is unacceptable. Also, there are a hell of a lot of players out there. Do you assign them all the same key or set of keys, or do you give each their own keyring? Practicality issues come into play here. Finally, who is to say that someone won’t share their private key along with the encrypted media? You could do what Apple does and authorize a computer to use a key. You could also have the formation of a keyring correspond to a computer, and then allow a person a certain number of keyrings for that number of computers.

While the solution I propose is by no means perfect, I think it is a step in the right direction in the debate on how to balance the rights of consumers while defending against piracy. Legitimate consumers must be allow to get what they paid for in full and without having to pay for it multiple times. Then implement measures that maintain this while thwarting piracy. Jack Taylor, founder of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, started his company on a single principle: “Take care of your customers and employees first, and growth and profits will follow.” This is the kind of thinking that will benefit all parties involved.

I finally started up running again on Thursday. My legs were pretty unhappy yesterday and not a whole lot better today. Despite still being a little sore, I think I’m going to go out again before it gets dark. Before I ran on Thursday, I knew I was pretty out of shape, but I didn’t quite expect to have as much trouble as I did. With luck, today’s run will go better. I’d love to get myself back up to where I was at the end of the first semester of sophomore year at Columbia when I was running at least 6-7 miles four days per week. I was hoping to get some other exercising in after a while, but I don’t know if I’ll have that much time for working out.

For a while, atlas has had a minor display problem that would slightly obfuscate what was on the screen. And it wouldn’t always occur. Since I solely use SSH to use atlas, it’s never really been a problem. Well, the problem got a lot worse and won’t go away now. So now I can’t make out what the computer is displaying on the monitor. And, unfortunately, something isn’t right with the ethernet or SSH configuration, so I can’t just boot it blind and log in from odin. So now both Sharon’s and my work has been trapped on there for two days. Fortunately, we made a backup of all data on to her computer (seaman), so the data is accessible, even if seaman isn’t quite set up for the task.

What I’m thinking (and hoping) is that the intermittent nature of the problem implies that the problem lay in the GeForce4. If it were some sort of motherboard problem, it would have to be isolated to the graphics card (since I know that all the other hardware in atlas works). That limits the number of problems it could be severely, and none of those I can think of could possibly be intermittent. There are no indications of circuits having blown out anywhere, so that’s an unlikely possibility. So Sharon and I are going to try putting seaman’s card in atlas and see if we fare any better (assuming atlas’ motherboard can support a 4xAGP card, about which I’m unsure at the moment). Then I’ll have to buy a new graphics cards (probably a 30-40$ outlay) and see if that remedies the problem. If not, then it’s the motherboard, and atlas’ time will be over.

In the scenario of atlas’ demise, I’d have to consider whether it would be worth the money to create atlas2. Admittedly, I have grown quite fond of and dependent on atlas since it became a Linux box after building and setting up odin. It’s great as a development platform, allows me external access to all of my files on atlas and odin, and gives me a local server for various services (httpd being number one on that list). At the same time, I could use odin for development if I found an IDE to my liking, install no-ip on odin for external access, and install Windows versions of almost any service I need. One thing I can’t do on odin that I can on atlas is compile programs and projects that just make source available without compiled binaries. I currently can compile Firefox on atlas for bug testing/fixing and such. That wouldn’t be possible on odin without cygwin, which I refuse to install because it hoses the hard drive’s MFT with approximately 100,000 files. Also, I had plans to hook up atlas to the home entertainment system, and watch video files residing on my computer on the TV. I *could* do that with odin, but it would far more preferable to have a computer independent from my main machine doing that.

Creating atlas2, given my assumptions, would require a new processor and motherboard. Also, while not absolutely necessary, I would be intelligent in getting a new hard drive for it as well. Currently, atlas is running on its original root hard drive, a standard consumer-grade Western Digital 40GB, for 4½ years. Generally speaking, you don’t want to risk important data on a decently-used hard drive that’s much over three years old. If they were made to last over five years, hard drive manufacturers would have given them five-year warranties long before they were forced to. So to put atlas’ original hard drive in atlas2 as anything more than auxiliary/emergency/temporary storage would probably be a bad move. Could the drive last eight years? Sure. But it’s just as likely that it will fail next week. So, hypothetically speaking, it would cost about 550$ to get atlas2 up and running (200$ for an Athlon 64 3500+, 120$ for a compatible motherboard, 150$ for 1GB of RAM, and 80$ for a new hard drive) on top of the new graphics card. Is it worth it? Well, there are also external factors that would have to be considered, so it’s a decision I’ll have to make if I need to. With any luck, I won’t need to right now.

If atlas does survive this round, it’s debatable how much longer it will survive. Sharon and I feel it’s unlikely that atlas will make it through to the end of 2006. There aren’t many more things that can go wrong without a full overhaul. If the RAM, motherboard, or processor fail, atlas is done. If the hard drive fails, I can put atlas’ 80GB that’s currently in odin back into atlas, but that’s also 4½ years old. Even though it was a secondary hard drive and hasn’t seen as much use, it’s still old and a liability. To summarize, atlas is on its last legs, and it’s only a matter of time and chance before atlas is done for good. Having had it since August 2001, atlas has been loyal and faithful, even if occassionally ornery. Considering it came from Gateway, I consider 4½+ life span pretty good.