In the not too distant future, laptops will come pre-loaded with Vista. Which means that we're in the end days when you can still buy a laptop with XP. Will there be a last minute rush?

I reckon my next laptop will run linux with WINE.

What are the chances of Parallel for Linux?

So, what is DRM?

I'm running the old plugin on Winamp for Last.FM (v1.1.10). Scanning the source code I found a hidden registry entry. allowhttp in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAudioscrobblerWinamp Plugin reating this value and setting it to a DWORD of 1 and now the Winamp PMP plugin for PFS devices streams into Winamp and is then reported correctly into Last.FM. Result! I was a bit worried that LastFMProxy would also report to last.FM from inside Winamp as well as from the Last.FM radio stream and I'd get dulicates. But it turns out that the Winamp plugin can't understand the metadata on that stream and gives up.

So it's all good. I just have to make sure I don't watch any pron in Winamp or that fact will get spread all over all the places I've now got my listening habits being reported!

Yet Another Extended Acronym (YAEA). With Yahoo! announcing a Single Sign On system we have a new acronym. Yet Another Single Sign On System or YASSOS.

So what happens when every major player plus a host of others each have their own SSO? Yup, we have another incompatible mess just like Instant Messaging. And we're back to sign on systems that only work within the owner's silos. Does anyone seriously think MS CardSpace, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay are going to interoperate?

As usual, this is a tax on independent software developers. Groups like Drupal and Wordpress will need to spin off development projects to support each YASSOS. Or just ignore all of them. Which will then work against any of the major players getting enough traction to become any kind of standard.

Out of all these, I think Yahoo! actually has the best chance of getting some traction in the low end of hosted PHP apps. Purely because they've chosen to use a very simple REST+XML interface. And one that doesn't require fancy browser add-ins.

I have a Zen Xtra 30Gb 2.5" HD player that I've hacked with an 80Gb disk. I've just hit yet another limit. If you have more than 60Gb of tracks on the disk, it no longer plays playlists on the player. The playlists exist and you can see them and play them on the PC either in Creative's explorer, Windows explorer or in winamp with the PMP plugin. But the player won't open them or play them. This is after previous problems with the PlaysForSure (not!) firmware that has a metadata limit on the total number of characters in the filenames and ID3 metadata tags. Apparently this is a known problem with the Creative firmware. It stores the playlists near the end of the partition and the internal software can't open them, although the files can be accessed via the USB port. Some programmer somewhere put a hard limit on disk size by mistake and based on Creative's biggest production player being 60Gb.

And BTW. if you're in this situation, don't upgrade to WMP 11. It breaks PFS and Creative firmware updates no longer work.

The PFS firmware came out in 2005 and there's been no updates since. And there's still no way of downgrading the system back to the old NJB firmware.

This is so frustrating. I really want a Not-An-iPod that uses 2.5" disks and plays Rockbox; that looks like a USB mass storage device. I don't care about or want DRM. But I want to stash my entire collection in my pocket. This is possible. It's not particularly cutting edge. But nobody makes one. Now that 80Gb 1.8" disks are coming on stream, maybe it's going to be possible in the near future to switch. And 100Gb and 120Gb 1.8" disks are not far away but they're premium price. So perhaps somewhere in my future is a late model iPod hacked with a big disk and with Rockbox loaded.

I'm almost tempted to go back several generations and try and find an old Archos Jukebox on eBay.

Yet again, I'm struck that hardware companies should just get out of the software business. They're no good at it. It would actually make sense for them to fund the open source community (ie RockBox) and use that. And this is not just about Creative. Linksys/Cisco could do the same with their wireless routers as could Apple with WINE. There's a catch of course. FOSS is never going to support DRM and that in turn deep sixes any business model based on implementing DRM in order to get customer lock in.

So Just Say No To DRM!

Just step back a moment and look at your mobile phone. You have a contacts list with almost no information behind each entry. And you can engage in slow motion conversations via SMS. Now look at your instant message client, like Skype. There you have a contacts list with a rich profile behind each one. You can see if the people are on line. Some times you can see what they're listening to or where they are. And you can engage in relatively high speed text only conversations.

So how could the phone improve and take on some of the characteristics of an IM program? I'd *really* like a Skype client on my phone, not for VoIP but for text and for the contacts list. This feels do-able to me mainly because the bandwidth requirements are pretty low. But of course it would cannibalise the *huge* business cash cow of SMS.

Google - Search History

I just discovered that Google Talk can now track your listening and have ti turn up in your search history. Inevitably it doesn't quite work right.

So here we have a Creative Zen Xtra with an 80Gb disk and PlaysForSure firmware. This plays into Winamp using the beta V5.25 build which can stream tracks from a connected (iPod/Creative NJB/PFS/USB) player. Google talk then picks this up from the winamp window name, it then reports it up to Google. Except that the default Winamp layout is "Artist - Title". Google reverses this in Googletalk status to "Title - Artist" which makes more sense. Except that I agree so I've modified my playlist display in Winamp to "Title : Artist (album : track number)" which works better for me. So google then can't always find the artist and sometimes reverses my reversed display. Hey Ho.

I've also written a bot to grab the Winamp window title and drop it into my Skype status.

But then there's Last.FM. Last.FM's scrobbling refuses to scrobble streams. Which means that when I play back tracks from my external player they don't get scrobbled and added to my Last.FM profile. Which is a shame. Especially when I'm picking that up via RSS and dropping it into the box over on the right. Now it turns out that the Last.FM plugin for winamp did do streamed music once and the source code was available. So clearly I'm going to have to hack that.

Any Road Up. Looking at Google Music vs Last.FM It's clear to me that Google doesn't grok community in Web 2.0 stuff. There's no way to aggregate music into friends although they do encourage you to join the GoogleGroup for an artist. And their music genres suck just as much as everyone esle's. That's another story, which Last.FM's music tags don't quite fix. And that luscious google data about what you listen to isn't visible to anyone else and has no RSS/Atom feed. Just like your personalised search page isn't visible to anyone else.

There's a disconnect here. Google is fascinated by the statistics of it all. And it constantly pushes the short head of the zeitgeist. When we people out in the long tail want to find the other long tailers in our little niche, not be told that ColdPlay and Snow Patrol are at the top of the short head. And that fascination with statistics and Internet scale search works against individual people communicating with other independent people.

This all started when I found out that GoogleTalk no longer requires a Gmail address to sign in with. Great. Except that my other three Google accounts with other email addresses are independent. I can sign in with them, but then Google thinks I'm another person with another set of contacts and friends. We really need to separate "Identity" here from "Authentication" and I badly need a way of telling Google to merge and aggregate my accounts. It's not 3 people with 3 email addresses. It's one person with 3 email addresses. Yahoo discovered this problem as did LinkedIn and they dealt with it. One day I'll deal with it on Ecademy.

Skype Journal: Eight Ways to File Transfer Using Skype :

There's something weird about when Skype relays file transfers. My PC is normally in the DMZ of my linksys router so I run the risk of being a supernode[1], but I also get fast transfers. But then I did one a day ago and it was relayed. Really not sure if this was a bug in beta 2.6 or I'd changed something and forgotten about it.

This is one situation where a centralised relay could help. Or where there was something we could do to the firewall to speed up just file tranfers. P2P apps like Bittorrent or Soulseek manage much faster file transfers direct between PCs but you usually have to mess with firewall or router settings to get it.

For a while there I thought supernodes were just handling call setup, switching and NAT busting, but once the connection was established they stepped out of the way. But relayed file transfers suggests they still participate in the conversation.

Given all the FUD about Supernodes it would be good if we could get some definitive information about where they sit and what they do in all situations.

[1]I can tell when my laptop is a supernode and being used for a call because the fan kicks in. ;)

An interesting comment here. The Engadget Interview: Viodentia, creator of FairUse4WM - Engadget : My suggestion to future designers is simple: don't bother with weak client-side decryption. Instead, provide a public specification for licenses using digital signatures, manage the PKI through a not-for-profit organization, and apply social and legal pressure to programs that don't comform. Accept that folks can trivially patch around the system, but if the restrictions aren't onerous most people won't go through the hassle.

I've been saying for a while that DRM (and software copy protection) is inevitably flawed from a cryptographic point of view. Because you can't give somebody the private key, the public key, the algorithm and the encrypted text and expect to have any control over the plain text. But I wonder now if there is any mechanism whereby part of this can be retained and the DRM made cryptograhically secure. In reality of course the plain text does eventually get out and so the "analog hole" must always remain. But this would prevent tools like Hymn and FairUse4WM from working. I suspect that the trick is to never give out the private key and to create a one time hash based on it that is passed out on demand. This would then imply that the playback device would only work while it was on line which pretty much counts out things like iPods.

I'm getting out of my depth here on cryptography. But it seems to me that TLS/SSL works something like this.

Ultimately, the content ends up as a bitstream that can always be captured so DRM is still a dead end. Even if we see increasingly draconian measures to try and prevent us getting anywhere near it. See Trusted Computing and HDMI.

Will Apple sue PodTech.net? (My employer) « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger :

Does anyone actually listen to podcasts on an ipod? Or any portable media player?

RSS enclosures were a great solution to a scarcity problem when bandwidth was expensive. As bandwidth becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous the need to download in background goes away. And it's questionable whether it's cheaper for the provider to deliver thousands of enclosures that are then discarded or to stream fewer on demand. The one thing that would have changed this dynamic would have been widespread use of BitTorrent as a delivery mechanism.

So let's celebrate audio and video blogging, and the democratisation of audio and video production and back off from promotion of a specific product from a specific company. Especially one that doesn't want to be inclusive.

Inspired by Dave Winer's Convention Bloggers I built a "River of News" aggregator of UK Political Blogs. I was at the Mashup event last night with Marc Canter on Digital Lifestyle Aggregators.

So anyway. Maintaining UkPoliBlogs is a little time consuming and I get the pccasional complaint about the primitive user interface. It occurred to me that any of the online RSS readers could do something like this. They could allow me to drop in an OPML subscription list and then handle all the heavy lifting of presenting the RSS feeds. Of course this should be a barn raising so that other people could add to the list. We'd then have a number of topic focussed composite News Rivers on niche topics. Perhaps something like a dynamic version of Amazon's Lists. "UK Political Blogs" would be just one list within thousands. Now maybe somebody's already doing this. But a quick scan of Newsgator, Bloglines, My Yahoo didn't turn up anything.

This in turn leads on to a problem I have with all DLAs as they have appeared so far. They're all built round the old Portal idea of a collection of reading matter in one place for one person to read. This is all supported and underpinned by very Web 1.0 ideas of sticky eyeballs, monetizing via advertising and so on. There's nothing especially wrong with this, but I want to invert it. I want to build a big Web 2.0 AboutMe page that is all the content I produce for *other people* to read about me, to enhance my online reputation. And I want the DLA people to think in terms of "How can they help me make money" and "How can they help me self-publish", rather than just how they can monetize my eyeballs. My good friends at Opinity are starting to do some of this stuff.

We will be doing some engineering work this evening (Friday 22nd September) and expect some downtime. We plan this to start at about 6:30pm UK Time and last for about half an hour.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Apple Store, Regent Street London! | DefectiveByDesign.org

Oct 3rd. 2pm to 5pm. Wear your Anti-DRM T-Shirt and stick it to The Man!

Music via Google
Another nail in the coffin [from: del.icio.us]

If so, where? I had a look around last weekend.
- All the local record shops have shut down.
- Virgin and HMV have pulled out of the local large towns and their Malls.
- We're left with top 20 in Tescos, WH Smiths and Woolworths and the DVD section is now larger than the audio section. And I haven't bought a top 20 album in 20 years.

Meanwhile, Tower is going bust in the USA.

What hapens to the music industry when there are only really two places you can buy music and they're both online, Amazon and iTMS.

The last couple of days I have mostly been listening to Atmosphere. Chilled, blunted, rap. Imagine the sort of thing that would be the soundscape for amateur grainy skateboard videos on the extreme sports channel at 2am.

Elias Torres » Blog Archive » I'm the lazy web : Now if you want to get some of the OnlineAccount magic, add the following to your foaf:Person:

This is a neat decentralized solution to *publishing* your list of accounts. But from where I'm standing FOAF still looks like a write only format. And aggregating it still looks like a Google sized problem. To
take one example, you can use FOAF to say "Who I know". But you have to aggregate the whole FOAF universe to answer "Who knows me?". If anyone is reading FOAF in quantity and doing something useful with it, I'd love to know.

Technorati and others have shown that it is possible to build a new and innovative search engine. They've done it for blog content. I don't know of anyone who's done it for people. Here's a thought related to the idea of a universal ID convertor. Who's got all the names? There are maybe 10 players with 100m, 100 players with 10m. Anyone of these could
deliberately extend their profile information to be an open ended list of related accounts; not just homepage | blog | AIM | MSN. They could then make this info searchable.

It puzzles me that we still don't have a good schema/format/whatever for wrapping and transferring information about people from one system to another. Most of the talk around Identity is about proof, verification and ownership; Less about standards for transfer of proved information.

We will again be SkypeCasting the Ecademy Event tonight at 7:30. Details here.

To listen to the Skypecast, go to the page for this skypecast at 7:30pm UK time and follow the instructions. If you can't connect, try calling +99001110006940486

Skype Beta 2.6 has a Skypecasting directory built into the client. Recommended. [from: JB Ecademy]

We will again be SkypeCasting the Ecademy Event tonight at 7:30. Details here.

To listen to the Skypecast, go to the page for this skypecast at 7:30pm UK time and follow the instructions.

Skype Beta 2.6 has a Skypecasting directory built into the client. Recommended.


[from: JB Ecademy]

BBC NEWS | UK | Terror charges in full

So after 10 Aug and the War on Moisture along with ever more ridiculous airline security measures, we now have 17 people reaching the end of their 28 days detention. Reading down the list of charges we have:-

1 person possession of a handgun
1 person possession of a map of Afghanistan, and a book on improvised explosives
1 person preparing to smuggle improvised bombs onto an aircraft
11 people conspiring
3 people withholding information

Now clearly we shouldn't pre-judge any trial. And there's all sorts of possibilities here. But just as this could be a terrorist plot to cause unimaginable horror, it could also be a small group of somewhat deluded people with dreams of defending their homeland (Afghanistan) from yet another invasion. And led by somebody with more foolishness than the others who actually got hold of a handgun.

The only information I've seen about the "improvised bomb" was a reference to weedkiller, sugar and ground aluminium found near one of the houses. This isn't a high tech, two part, liquid weapon, this is what the IRA and countless schoolboys[1] have messed with over the years.

You scared yet?

[1]The Amateur Rocketry Society at school was a somewhat underground affair. A 0.22" drill meant they managed to make a 22 Sten Gun using ammunition from the rifle range. It never did go full auto, but did fire single shot. Propellant for the rockets was sodium chlorate, icing sugar and tissue paper. An old life raft gas bottle from Molesworth airfield (when it was a dump for the USAF and before it was a cruise missile base) made a container for an improvised bomb with a fuse wire, zinc and sulphur remote detonator. It made a very satisfying explosion. I always believed that Sodium Chlorate has been sold for years with a stabiliser that stops it being used as an explosive. Maybe I'm wrong.

Niall Kennedy has done a tremendous job of analysing the current state of the art in MyPages:

This area is clearly important because it represents a BIG pot of cash for the majors. But I'm also completely uninterested in it as a customer. My browser is set to about:blank and I would never use a MyPage, though like others I've used them all once. The whole area seems to me to be pure Web 1.0 and to be about lock-in, sticky eyeballs and monetizing via advertising. Bor...ing...

I want to invert the concept into it's mirror image. Not a MyPage with stuff from other people for me to read. But a YourPage with stuff from me for other people to read. Something that aggregates everything I produce all over the web into a page where people can find out about me. Who am I, what do I do, what do I read, what do I listen to, who are my friends, what have I written, what conversations am I in, what am I selling, etc etc.