Is DRM finally going away for real?

October 24, 2008 by 2 Comments

Back in 2003, when I started working for AOL, there was a race to launch a digital music store for the Windows platform. The company to beat was Apple, who launched their Windows port of iTunes in October 2003. At that time, AOL was still claiming to have over 24 million subscribers. Clearly, if AOL could push out a digital music store offering as part of their service to that many customers before Apple, it might have made a difference.

But, wait … AOL launched its MusicNet offering as early as February 2003, you say? Beating Apple didn’t make much of a difference, after all, right?

I wasn’t directly involved in any of that work at AOL so I’m just speculating here, but I know a lot of effort went into rights management systems and DRM. I’m willing to bet a lot more effort went into getting all that stuff working than actual work on making the product–the music store–kick ass. I kept complaining that AOL should take advantage of its then-800-pound gorilla nature and spend its budget and manpower to invent and pioneer a business model that was DRM-less, rather than spend all that time trying to satisfy everyone’s wacky demands trying to implement DRM.

At the time, I kept hearing responses that all boiled down to: it’s not going to happen. I’ve learned that nothing happens unless someone makes it happen and AOL certainly could have been one to make it happen. This reminds me of a quote I love: “People aren’t resistant to change. Matter of fact, people will change just about anything in order to maintain the status quo.”

Fast-forward five years to 2008: Amazon, Walmart and even Apple (through iTunes Plus) are offering completely DRM-free music downloads. Somehow, things are changing from “not going to happen” to “it’s happening” to “it’s happened.” What makes me sad is that instead of rendering itself irrelevant, AOL could have pioneered this.

Regardless, I’m happy that we can finally start saying goodbye to DRM for real. Now, companies can start focusing on really innovating where it counts–identifying, funding, producing and distributing quality digital content–instead of on meaningless technology like DRM.

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Filed Under: AOL, Apple, Geeking out Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

This is “high speed” EDGE?

October 5, 2008 by Leave a Comment

This is my BlackBerry Curve 8310 tethered to my MacBook Pro over Bluetooth:

Not the “high speed 3G EDGE” I was expecting. Is this really the height of technological achievement for 2008? Where’s my flying car? Jeez.

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Filed Under: Apple, BlackBerry, Geeking out, Piss and moan (Rants) Tagged With: , Leave a Comment

Migrating from Windows Pidgin to MacOS X Adium

September 4, 2008 by 1 Comment

In replacing my aging Dell C840 laptop with a new MacBook Pro, I need to switch from using Pidgin to using Adium for IM. Since they’re both based on libpurple underneath, I figured there ought to be a way to migrate my settings from one to the other. As it turns out, it might be possible.

Your libpurple settings are stored in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\.purple on Windows. Similarly, they’re stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/libpurple on OSX. If you simply replace the blist.xml and accounts.xml that Adium creates with the ones from Pidgin, that should work, right?

Wrong!

Adium’s preferences are stored in plist format which, can now be easily edited since 10.5 (Leopard), even through AppleScript. Luckily, there’s even a simple utility called plutil that can convert from XML to binary plist format.

It would be pretty straight-forward to write a simple script that parses the libpurple XML and wrote out the appropriate plist XML then use the plutil tool to convert to plist binary format – but, I’m feeling lazy and only have about 10 accounts to migrate, so I’ll just do it by hand. Of course, there’s more to migrate than just accounts (old chat logs, etc.) but it’s not enough to overcome the inertia of my lack of caring to do it right now.

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Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source 1 Comment

Google’s Protocol Buffers …

July 8, 2008 by 2 Comments

… or, “Everything old is new again!“

Yesterday, Google announced Protocol Buffers, their data interchange format and API libraries. Before I say anything else, I want to say I’m glad they did it: it uses neither XML nor ASN.1, which means someone at Google has a clue.

What bothers me is that yet again, what was old is new again–their on-the-wire encoding of the data is simply TLV and AOL has been using SNAC/TLV for at least 15 years now. However, AOL’s SNAC/TLV covers a lot more use cases than what Protocol Buffers does. Then, there’s AOL’s FLAP transport for SNAC which Google hasn’t even approached. There’s still a lot more “work” that Google has to do–or, just use what AOL’s already proven works.

Of course, Google gets the community pat-on-the-back because they released this publically whereas AOL still has it hidden behind some proprietary lock and key. AOL, this is another technology opportunity missed: you could have continued to keep your internal, proprietary technology relevant if you’d simply opened this stuff up, first. Now, you’ll have to continue to replace it–at a huge sunk cost–with “standards-based implementations.” Oops.

In the end, I’m glad to finally see someone not blindly drinking the XML Kool-Aid. Maybe there’s hope, yet.

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Filed Under: AOL, Geeking out, Open Source 2 Comments

Announcing Blackbird, a Twitter client for BlackBerry phones!

June 17, 2008 by 11 Comments
Blackbird logo

About a week ago, I mentioned on Twitter that I was working on a Twitter client for BlackBerry smartphones called Blackbird.

After an initial limited release to a few people, I think it’s ready for general use. I’ve already stopped using TwitterBerry and TinyTwitter, now exclusively using Blackbird and I don’t miss a thing.

If you have a BlackBerry and are a Twitter user, I’d love it if you’d go and install Blackbird and let me know what you think! It’s still fairly new and it’s my first BlackBerry application, so I’m sure there’s lots of ways I can improve it.

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Filed Under: BlackBerry, Geeking out 11 Comments

Migrating from VirtualBox to VMware

May 23, 2008 by 14 Comments

As part of the Gnash buildbot farm, I run several virtual machines as build slaves. I started with VirtualBox because it is free software and I prefer to support free software, but it’s still a bit too fragile and it still lacks x86_64 guest support.

When I discovered that VMware Server is now available for free–well, free as in beer, anyway–I happily installed it and set up some new VMs on it. Best of all, it supports x86_64 guests! Of course, now I have the problem of migrating those VirtualBox guest VMs over to VMware.

VMware uses its own VMDK format for storing virtual disk images, while VirtualBox uses its own VDI format. The first step is getting a copy of vditool, VirtualBox’s command line program for manipulating VDI files.

The host OS I used to run VirtualBox is Ubuntu‘s 8.04 Hardy Heron on AMD64. The VirtualBox 1.6.0 .deb package didn’t include vditool, for some reason. Fortunately, the VirtualBox package in Debian’s “lenny” release includes it, so lets just grab it from there.

$ wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/v/virtualbox-ose/virtualbox-ose_1.5.6-dfsg-6_amd64.deb
$ dpkg -x virtualbox-ose_1.5.6-dfsg-6_amd64.deb vbox-1.5.6
$ sudo cp vbox-1.5.6/usr/lib/virtualbox/vditool /usr/lib/virtualbox/vditool
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/virtualbox/vditool /usr/bin/vditool

There, now we have vditool installed. Next, we use it to export our old VirtualBox VDI back to raw disk data. However, if you used VirtualBox’s “Snapshots” with differencing VDI’s, you need to discard all snapshots before the one you want to write out as the raw disk: only the “base” data gets written out, not the “Current State”.

$ cd ~/.VirtualBox/VDI
$ vditool copydd win2000-i386-32gb.vdi win2000-i386-32gb.dd
vditool    Copyright (c) 2004-2008 innotek GmbH.

Copying VDI image file="win2000-i386-32gb.vdi" to DD file="win2000-i386-32gb.dd"...
The operation completed successfully!

Be careful, this could consume a lot of disk space, if you were using compacted VDI’s instead of fixed size as the raw image will be the full size of the disk image, which in my case was 32 GB even though the VDI only took ~6.5 GB on disk.

Once we have the raw data, we can create the VMDK metadata for our DD image. We compute the size of the raw data in sectors by dividing its size in bytes by 512:

$ stat --printf="%s 512/p" win2000-i386-32gb.dd | dc
67108864

We also need to compute the CHS geometry of the virtual disk. I used the assumption of 255 heads and 63 sectors:

$ stat --printf="%s 512/255/63/p" win2000-i386-32gb.dd | dc
4177

Once we have that information, we go ahead and create the VMDK metadata. Change the elements highlighted in blue as appropriate for your system:

$ cat >win2000-i386-32gb-flat.vmdk <<-__EOF__
# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=4dd210c6
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="monolithicFlat"

# Extent description
RW 67108864 FLAT "win2000-i386-32gb.dd" 0

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "4177"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "buslogic"
__EOF__

There, we now have a VMDK suitable for use in VMware! But, it takes up all 32 GB of space on the disk while only ~6.5 GB is actually in use. Lets use vmware-vdiskmanager to create another VMDK that is growable, instead:

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -r win2000-i386-32gb-flat.vmdk -t 0 win2000-i386-32gb.vmdk
Using log file /tmp/vmware-dossy/vdiskmanager.log
Creating a monolithic growable disk 'win2000-i386-32gb.vmdk'
  Convert: 100% done.
Virtual disk conversion successful.

And there you have it: a growable converted VMDK from VDI:

$ ls -lh win2000-i386-32gb*
-rw------- 1 dossy dossy  32G 2008-05-23 11:26 win2000-i386-32gb.dd
-rw------- 1 dossy dossy  327 2008-05-23 13:40 win2000-i386-32gb-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 dossy dossy 6.5G 2008-05-23 14:25 win2000-i386-32gb.vdi
-rw------- 1 dossy dossy 6.3G 2008-05-23 14:20 win2000-i386-32gb.vmdk

From here, I created a new virtual machine under VMware Server, specifying “Custom” and using an existing virtual disk–the one I just created.

Of course, I couldn’t just boot this VM up because the virtualized hardware from VirtualBox differs from the virtualized hardware in VMware, and the particular VM in question is a Microsoft Windows 2000 guest. To fix the Windows install, I performed a “repair installation” of Windows 2000. I guess this is necessary when you change all the hardware out from underneath a Windows machine. After completing the repair installation, the VM booted up! I went ahead and installed VMware Tools, rebooted, and now everything works as expected.

I don’t know how many folks out there want to migrate away from VirtualBox to VMware, but I couldn’t find very much useful information on doing it so hopefully this will help people out who want to do it.

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Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source 14 Comments

TypeRacer, massively multiplayer online typing!

May 22, 2008 by 3 Comments

(Okay, perhaps it’s not yet “massively multiplayer” but, it could be!)

My latest distraction is a fun web based “game” called TypeRacer, where you “race” against other typists in realtime who are all typing the same text which is often a quote from a book or song lyrics.

I love typing speed measurement games and TypeRacer’s social software aspect and multi-player nature really sets this apart. I’m also a huge fan of educational online gaming. It would be nice to select passages from educational texts to type against your friends–learn something while having fun typing.

I’ve wondered whether there’s truly a better keyboard layout than QWERTY before and have yet to find any solid scientific proof. If Dvorak was measurably better than QWERTY, I would have expected to see two “bands” of scoring on TypeRacer: one of the varied QWERTY-layout typists, and a “break-away” group with speeds far above the rest who are master Dvorak-layout typists.

Either way, I guess I’m going to take a moment to fluff my ego:

TypeRacer screenshot, 143 WPM!
(Click for full screenshot.)

Yes, that’s for real: 143 WPM. As you can see from the larger screenshot, my average speed over the past 5 races is 127 WPM. I know that over time, the average will regress to between 110-120 WPM, but for now, I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts. :-)

Think you can beat me? Lets set up a type-off and see who’s got the fingers of fury! Bring it on!

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Filed Under: Geeking out 3 Comments

Marvell SysKonnect Yukon 2 drivers not usable in Ubuntu Hardy

May 8, 2008 by Leave a Comment

I set out to build myself a new desktop and HTPC. I chose a Ultra Black MicroFly case to put everything in. There are a lot of mATX boards out now, so I decided to try an EVGA e-7100/630i board ($60 at Amazon.com), as I have no experience with them and love to try new stuff.

I typically don’t install removable media (floppy, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, etc.) in my machines. I use external DVD writers, and everything is networked so I just rip ISOs and access them over the network if need be. So, typically when I set up a new machine, I netboot it to start the OS install. This is where I ran into my first hurdle with the EVGA board–it can’t netboot using the on-board NIC. It supports booting off “Legacy LAN” but I didn’t have a spare PCI ethernet card handy to slap in it. Luckily, it can also boot off USB devices, so I just made a Ubuntu Live USB image of Hardy AMD64 and used that to kickstart the OS install.

After I completed the initial Ubuntu install, I went to pull down any updates using apt-get, and the machine locked up hard. I repeated this a few times and each time, it would lock up requiring a physical reboot. Curious as to what was going on, I looked at lspci to see what hardware was on this board. Sadly, I found this:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 14)

Aww, crap. Not another Marvell piece of crap. Only recently I dealt with an Intel DP35DPM board that had a Marvell 88SE6101 PATA IDE chip. When I say “support for Marvell chips under Linux is poor,” that’s being very kind. I was able to find this thread on kerneltrap.org where folks complained about the Marvell Yukon support in Linux as far back as September 2006 through April 2008.

Unfortunately, the sky2 module that ships with Ubuntu Hardy still doesn’t work completely. In dmesg output, I see:

[   39.437272] sky2 eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex, flow control both
[   43.785585] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[  430.085997] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x740002 length 116
[  430.372344] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x780002 length 120
[  430.374110] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x760002 length 118
[  430.544242] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x760002 length 118
[  431.856916] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x700002 length 112
[  431.861653] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x740002 length 116
[  432.072037] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x520002 length 82
[  437.143385] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x4a0002 length 74
[  437.989254] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x560002 length 86
[  438.736323] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x520002 length 82
[  438.769120] sky2 eth0: rx error, status 0x740002 length 116
...

This results in corrupted packets in user space. It’s probably the cause of the hard lock-ups I had been experiencing: if I avoid using the network, the machine runs just fine and doesn’t hang!

I’m going to pick up another PCI ethernet card and disable the on-board NIC until the Marvell drivers are usable. It’s really a pity to have do it, but the board is essentially unusable with Linux because of the Marvell NIC.

Throughout all of this, I had asked EVGA customer support various questions via their online support web form, and was seriously impressed by their fast response time, usually within minutes! Even though I’m disappointed by the product’s poor on-board NIC, their friendly and responsive support definitely makes it an attractive company to do business with. If you have a problem with an EVGA product, I highly recommend you try contacting their customer support to see if they can help.

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Show me some Twitter API enhancements, baby

April 29, 2008 by Leave a Comment

@al3x tweets: I never thought there'd be fapping on Twitter-Development-Talk. I've been proven wrong. Them dudes *really* love some API methods.

Heh.

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Fedora 8 RPM of character counting plugin for Pidgin

April 10, 2008 by 7 Comments

After Callum let me know that the Linux binary of the character counting plugin for Pidgin worked on Fedora 8, I decided to spin a RPM built on Fedora 8 proper. After a bit of reading and hackery, I have produced a x86 RPM for Fedora 8. Here’s the source, which includes the patch and the .spec file, as well as the RPM:

I’ve also spun a new Debian binary, as well:

And, if you’re looking for the Win32 binary, you can still get it off this page.

I’m glad so many of you out there who use Pidgin find this plugin useful. Thanks for all the positive feedback.

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Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source 7 Comments
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