22 Friday Aug 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
The International Herald Tribune has interesting piece on Peter Gabriel and his subtle but important influence on music in the digital age – Cutting edge rocker blazes trail in digital age – International Herald Tribune.
21 Thursday Aug 2008
Posted in Technology
As someone who is known amongst friends to work in the computer industry I often get asked to help sort out people’s problems. Talking someone over the phone to deal with problems can be difficult, and often it is easier to understand and solve a problem if you can see the machine which brings with it a host of practicality issues. Remote management tools aren’t a new thing, but having one that doesn’t cost you anything to help friends and family with and works over HTTP/HTTPS without needing to know the IPs involved is important an relatively new.
MasterNewMedia.org has a nice little article with plenty of links to tools and services in this area with a review of what they offer which can be found at Remote PC Support Tools: A Mini-Guide, worth checking out. I’ll be trying out TeamViewer which is free for personal use doesn’t require client installation and a small app at my end to sort things out. Good security – the client has to send you details independently of the tool for connecting to them (they suggest the phone). The client tool doesn’t need to be installed – just launched via the website.
20 Wednesday Aug 2008
Posted in Technology
This article (Computer games industry threat to downloaders: ‘pay up or we’ll sue’) makes up the front page of the The Times today along with a photo of Christine Ohuruogu the Team GB athlete. It is surprising such an announcement made the front pages of the paper, but also the fact that compared to the downloading of movies and music the games industry has been relatively quiet about the illegitimate downloading activity. It is interesting to observe that the print edition of the article acknowledges that often people will download games and never play them, begging the question as to what proportion of the downloads do actually represent lost revenue?
I hope that the games industry don’t make the mistakes that the music industry (particularly the RIAA) have fallen into which has done the industry no favours at all.
23 Wednesday Jul 2008
Posted in General, Oracle, Technology
Tags
The title is a bit of a trick question – if the JVM meets all the tests to qualify being called Java then it is portable. However the website JavaSpecialists has a series of brilliant articles about some of the depths of Java, with a rather interesting article called ‘Law of Cretan Driving’ which looks at the way 64 bit value are handled (such as long) within the JVM. The article points out that it is not mandatory for the JVM to ensure that the bytes that are used to represent a long can not be manipulated by separate threads at anyone time. That is to say that any 64bit primitive such as a long is not guaranteed to be thread safe. However problem is that primitive data types are generally considered by developers to be atomically safe – which isn’t necessarily the case. So we can find that a java application which is theoretically portable may actually not port.
Java Standard – http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#17876
17 Thursday Jul 2008
Posted in General, Technology
SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM is the latest evolution in the integration between jBPM which forms a crucial element in the orchestration of JBoss’ SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) stack. We’ve produced some video clips complete with commentary together that show the core parts of the SeWhy for JBoss jBPM along with looking at SeeWhy in the broader context of BI (Business Intelligence) and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). The SeeWhy page here has both low res streaming versions of the videos and downloadable high res versions.
If you’re interested in work flow and how you can monitor and measure its activity both in terms of IT operational performance and in the business context then the three clips will be ten minutes well spent.
Useful links …
16 Wednesday Jul 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
Radiohead’s latest video is certainly gaining a lot of attention, purely because of the fact that it was shot without any cameras. The end result is amazing. As you can see …
But having an engineering background I found the short video clip about how the video was made, just as intriguing…
03 Thursday Jul 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
The BPI (formerly British Phonographic Industry) along with Virgin Media have started getting tough with people they believe are downloading illegally. Virgin Media according to BBC News have sent out 800 letters to people they believe are illegally downloading warning them that they may face being disconnected and possibly legal action. This is probably a step up on the BPI’s RIAA like campaign and probably to help apply pressure with the negotiations with ISPs about dealing with illegal downloading of music (previous blog here). The downloading information has been provided by the BPI to Virgin Media according the BPI’s new page (here) – interesting given that the similar approach by the RIAA is coming under increasing legal questioning in the US.
The chief executive of the BPI told the BBC that the BPI in very bullish terms that if necessary the BPI will take the ISPs to court and win, including ISPs who will not participate in their actions such as Carphone Warehouse. This is also very reminiscent of the RIAA’s early campaign. It seems to me that the BPI have not looked at the way the US litigation for the RIAA is going which has resulted in both counter cases, a lot of embarrassing revelations about how the cases have been built. Not to mention that a number of US record executives and artists have been publicly disagreeing with the RIAA.
Interviews with a few of those affected so far suggests that Virgin Media may stand to lose subscribers as the perceived invasion of digital privacy talks hold, plus the ISP dictating how people can use the service that they’re paying for.
27 Friday Jun 2008
Posted in General, Technology
A lot of pressure has been applied by the government to ISPs and the music industry to sort out some sort of agreement over music downloads using P2P or face legislation. Well according to The Register (here) serious discussions between stake holders have been going on and an agreement maybe reached this year on how to address this.
The interesting thing is what will happen to legitimate services if you can use P2P solutions that are currently described as illegal if you can pay your ISP a normal sum each month. In addition to this how will this pool of money be divided up amongst royalty owners, as measuring the illegal P2P download activity for every individual is going to be pretty challenging particularly when people often go to the effort of concealing the nature of their web traffic e.g. packaging files in zipped & rar files that have passwords, file renaming etc tec.
26 Thursday Jun 2008
Posted in Technology
Microsoft have got a free eBook that can be downloaded that looks at Service Orientated Architecture(SOA). An cursory look at the book suggests that it is pretty comprehensive. But more importantly is very pragmatic, and from the outset identifies that SOA is an architectural concept rather than a specific set of technologies – a common misconeption. Although technologies such as web services and Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) are often used as means to release an SOA architecture.
Book examines a range of issues including:
The book can be retrieved from Download SOA in the Real World in word 2008 or PDF formats. There doesn’t appear to be a treeware version of the book.
20 Friday Jun 2008
Posted in Technology
A while ago I blogged about how Microsoft was wrapping up their MSN Music site in favour of its new Zune site (original blog here). The two online services have been incompatible resulting leaving MSN Downloads effectively locked into their current location and the owners of the music not being able to move their licensed music. Well according to Digital Music News (article here) there is some good news, Microsoft have had a change of heart at least until 2011. Microsoft wont be selling any more music through the MSN site, but the necessary authorisation mechanisms needed to allow the downloads from the MSN store to be moved around and copied onto MP3 players will continue to be supported for the next three years. Not a perfect solution, but a stay of execution for those affected.
