Disk RAID is a way to take multiple inexpensive harddrives and to use them together to provide improved performance, redundancy and fault tolerance. Now, the basic concepts of RAID have been applied to SQL databases with Clustered JDBC (C-JDBC) [Slashdot]. The basic idea is to put a thin JDBC layer in front of any JDBC compliant database. All JDBC calls are proxied by C-JDBC and replicated to the underlying databases themselves.

The potential advantages in load balancing, redundancy and fault tolerance are clear. For instance, queries can be handled by any single box, thus minimising the load on a per-database basis. Inserts and updates will still need to be performed on all boxes, but this could also be optimized. Plus, if any of the database systems goes down, the other boxes in the cluster will assure that the overall system keeps running, though possibly in a degraded state.

MySQL has been working to add these features and Oracle has had much of this for years. But, with C-JDBC, it is now a simple matter to slap this functionality on top of any database you like. 10:50:17 AM    comment []  

Finally, someone is launching a digital music service that makes sense. Apple is changing the way digital music is distributed with its newly launched iTunes Music Store [Yahoo! News]. Apple's new offering is doing things the right way by providing downloads in the standards complient 128kbps AAC format. You can think of it as MP3, only better. Furthermore, the service is not a subscription service, but a flat fee per download service.

It's time to buy, mix, and burn, according to Apple Computer Inc. The Silicon Valley company that angered the recording industry with its "Rip. Mix. Burn" ad campaign has won the support of all five major record labels for its new Music Store service, which makes more than 200,000 songs available online at 99 cents a download

Apparently, there is some kind of DRM solution involved that will prevent some types of copying, yet you can apparently burn to CD. Does this mean that they are using DRM that works even on CD's? I doubt that. So how are they keeping the recording industry happy. It seems likely that any DRM will be stripped as soon as you burn to CD. Of course, the CD's you buy in the store (with only a few exceptions) can all be ripped and encoded at any time. Well, I applaud Apple and I will likely use their service as soon as I am able to play their media on both Linux and Windows.

update: Here's the inside skinny on Apple's new iTunes Music Store [Fortune].

And anybody who tries to upload iTunes Music Store songs onto KaZaA will be shocked. Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful.

That sounds dubious to me. What technology are they using to degrade the audio through the burn->rip->encode cycle? I can see how the DRM in the original AAC file would be able to thwart direct sharing over KaZaA, but once you burn the AAC file onto CD, any "digital key" will be stripped. Music on a CD is just digital data and can, therefore, be directly copied without degradation. It should then be possible to encode the resulting raw audio PCM data without any abnormal results, thus completely bypassing the DRM.

The only thing that I can think of is that they might have included something in the raw audio that thwarts either the subsequent ripping or encoding process. It would have to be something along the lines of Macrovision that exploits some unique feature of CD technology to degrade the resulting ripped audio file. Macrovision is able to do this by taking advantage of image correction circuitry that is built into every VCR. Is there an analog to this in the rip->encode process? I'll believe it when I see it (or hear a convincing argument describing the technology).

10:32:27 AM    comment []  

This was originally intended as a comment to yesterday's post [April 25], but started to get too long, so I have posted it here.

I think the Windows vs. Linux debate is more complex than many Linux advocates might like to admit and Microsoft certainly won't admit anything. Lance will surely agree that I am an ardent Linux advocate; I have been continually pitching Linux to Lance for years and even helped him install Debian on a couple of boxes a few weeks ago. However, I also see value in some of the Microsoft offerings. For one, Windows does offer ease of use in certain domains that is not currently matched by Linux. Secondly, for the same reasons that a software ecosystem completely dominated by Microsoft is a bad thing, one dominated completely by Linux would also not be in the average computer user's best interest.

I use computers to develop software, keep up with current events, learn new information, communicate with co-workers, family and friends and even to play. Each of these tasks and others share many things in common, but each of them can work better in some environments than others. Linux provides a flexible, stable and customizable environment that is great for development, however it is not yet quite as easy to maintain for most users as Windows is. Windows provides a more seemless experience for business people and makes it easier for the average Joe to work with. Of course, the Linux community is working hard to overcome some of these remaining barriers and they're making good progress.

Much of the progress that the Linux community is making is partially and sometimes greatly influenced by the presence of Microsoft products. Developers with the mission of toppling Microsoft are donating huge amounts of time and energy to create applications in Linux that can compete with similar Microsoft products. If Microsoft products were all bad, there would be no need to duplicate this functionality. But, the reality is that these products are useful. This is not surprising since Microsoft copied many of the ideas found in their products from other products.

Over the last month or so, I have been using Linux again as my primary desktop environment. However, I have been annoyed by a number of issues that do not come up in Windows. For instance, I can't copy and paste in a unified way from any given X Windows application. In the old days, you would select text with your mouse by pressing the left mouse button and paste with the middle. This still works on most of the true Unix apps, but generally does not work correctly from Java apps or apps that have been ported to and are maintained in multiple operating environments (Windows and Mac OS 10, specifically). In many cases, copying using the old method will store the copied text on a different clipboard than CTRL-C, so when you paste, you need to keep track of which copy method you used. To make matters worse, I work with Unicode and Shift-JIS character encodings as part of my work. Support for rendering this type of text is pretty decent in most Linux apps these days, but copy and paste functionality for these codings simply sucks. Of course, it is possible that I just don't know how to do it right, but that is just the point. I shouldn't have to "know" how to copy and paste. It should just work.

Seemless integration of graphical applications is one area where Linux falls far behind Windows. Of course, the Unix heritage of Linux benefits from far better integration of text based utilities than anything within Windows, but for the average user, this is irrelevant.

I am happy to be back in a Linux environment, but I have yet to fully cut my dependance on Windows. For instance, I am still using Outlook for company email because it integrates nicely with the Exchange server here. I have heard that Evolution can also be setup to use Exchange, but the integration piece is partially commericial and is therefore not part of the Debian distro. Also, since I write web applications that are used primarily by users in a Windows environment, I have to have a way to test my work. Yes, I know there are ways to do much of this within Linux, but it usually requires purchasing third-party tools that emulate some layer of the Windows environment under Linux. I'd rather just use Windows. This is pretty easy with the help of a KVM switch.

Anyway, Linux has come a long way in a short time and will continue to improve. But, Microsoft has felt the pressure and is bringing more and more of its resources to bare against Linux. This includes marketing hype, but also true improvements to their offerings. Expect the OS world to heat up and continue to be interesting over the next few years.

As to the question of whether or not the new round of Windows servers actually have anything useful to offer... I will have to defer. .Net is mostly hype at this point and only time will tell if it was just hype or really has value. 11:41:57 AM    comment []  

Most of the information you get out of Redmond about their products is full of marketing fluff and rarely honest about potential deficits. It is uncommon that you hear a Microsoft employee say that anything about Unix or Linux is better than Windows. Here's an interview detailing some of the issues that have been dealt with and some that are still on the back-burner for Windows 2003 Server [ZDNet]. I think Microsoft's efforts in the last couple of years is clear proof of the validity of competition in the marketplace. Of course, Linux isn't about making money, but the presence of Linux on the market has forced Microsoft to make some important changes and to look at issues that they might have otherwise overlooked.

Why is there no command line only version?
We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter. A lot of the tools depend on having the graphical interface. Printing, for example, requires all the graphics subsystems because we have the "what you see is what you get" model. You need to have the whole of the display stuff to render it. It's a very tangled subsystem.

There are some interesting trends developing that could change the interaction between Linux and Windows. First, Windows is getting more and more stable. Second, remote administration of Windows has improved dramatically. Terminal Services is a big improvement over PC Anywhere or VNC. It is much cleaner and smoother.

However, two big areas that I think the Windows team really needs to work on is a) the command line interface and b) the scripting environment. Of course these two things are closely linked. More command line utilities makes scripting much easier. Add to that a more robust scripting language and Windows could become appealing in places where Linux would currently be the defacto choice.

I use Windows and Linux in my work, but when I can I always use Linux. I don't see this changing anytime soon, but it is way too early to dismiss Microsoft. They have a lot of brainpower working on the problem and the more Linux eats into their marketshare, the more Microsoft will strive to make Windows competitive. 10:58:07 AM    comment []  

I've been working back at Loudeye for the past few months to build a video streaming media product for a Japanese company, DMI. They finally launched our player tonight in Japan [Toshiba EMI] (click the banner that says "TOEMI Channel"). If you have trouble finding the link in the midst of all of the Kanji (which is probably showing up as gobbledy-gook unless you have Japanese support installed), then you can just click on my little back door launch page [back door].

This first product launch features music videos, mostly from Japan. Some of them aren't half bad, for instance, you should check out the track "Slow View" by ACIDMAN. However, many of the tracks are pretty cheesy. Anyway, I'm happy about how the player turned out. It may buffer a little since it is streaming from Japan at 300kbps and don't even try it on dial-up. 12:07:09 AM    comment []  

I first heard about this story a week or so ago, but thought I would post it since it seems to continue circling around and, today, made its way to Slashdot [Yahoo! TV].

First of all, ask yourself this question; if someone were to come to you and inform you that they were born in the future, but had travelled through time to our time, how could you verify their claim? Most people would immediately discount such a claim because it seems impossible to us. The most likely scenario is that the person is either lying or not sane. However, just because it seems impossible, that is not a sufficient condition to completely rule out the possibility.

So, this guy named Andrew Carlssin took $800, bought some high-risk stocks and in two weeks was able to make $350 million! He was arrested and is currently being charged with insider trading because, after all, how could anyone possibly make so much money legitimately? Mr. Carlssin's explanation? He is from the future.

In general, such a claim would be completely ridiculous, but when put in the context that such a huge windfall was earned at a time when the stock market completely sucks, I think his claim has a little more credibility. Either he was extremely lucky (highly improbable), he performed insider trading on a large scale (improbable) or he travelled in time from the future and brought with him specific knowledge of how the stock markets had behaved in his past (highly improbably). Now, if we were to apply Occam's Razor, I suppose we would still favor the insider trading explanation, but not by much.

"It was just too tempting to resist," Carlssin allegedly said in his videotaped confession. "I had planned to make it look natural, you know, lose a little here and there so it doesn't look too perfect. But I just got caught in the moment."

In a bid for leniency, Carlssin has reportedly offered to divulge "historical facts" such as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and a cure for AIDS.

In the end, I, like the rest of you skeptics out there, don't really believe this man's story. But, I am more than willing to play along for a little while if only because it is a fun real life story in the midst of so much terrible news. And who knows? Maybe he does know where Osama is... 5:38:15 PM    comment []  

I've been thinking for a while that the time is ripe for the open-source community to start building software to compete with TiVo. Even though the cost of a PC is high compared to most consumer electronics, the total cost of a DVD player, TiVo unit and some type of MP3/music player would definitely put a PC solution on firm economic grounds. Add to that the features that could be provided by a PC that would not be provided by those consumer electronics: games, Web surfing and even productivity tools. Not that the TV is the best place to do all those things, but the possibility is certainly there.

The Freevo project is building a clean, easy to use interface for viewing DVD's, TV, digital video and audio files and more [Freevo]. It looks like the project has reached a level of maturity that would make it appealing to early adopters like myself and it doesn't appear to be too far from being accessible to a much wider public. I plan on setting a system up at home in the near future and I will get back to you on my experience. 10:57:44 AM    comment []  

Chris Winstead made the observation the other day that C++ programs he had written just a few years ago won't compile today without modifications, yet Euclid can still be read and used after 2300 years [comments]. What a timely comment that was [The Hundred-Year Language].

What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all, is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program with the least possible effort. At least, that's how we'd describe it in present-day terms. What they'll say is that they want a language that's easy to program in.

There are many things that are going to change because of speed. On the one hand, the tools we use to construct programs should be using that available speed. Emacs should finally die and the editors we use will become more proactive in helping construct the program. Furthermore, interfaces should become simpler since the libraries we use should start to do more work for us. For instance, it isn't necesarry to use specialized data structures that allow for efficient iteration if you have tons of cycles to spare. Instead you can use simple lists and sets and iterate over them in an inefficient manner. The point is to save development time.

The desire for speed is so deeply engrained in us, with our puny computers, that it will take a conscious effort to overcome it. In language design, we should be consciously seeking out situations where we can trade efficiency for even the smallest increase in convenience.

I've been trying to incorporate these principles in my own development for years. Even now, it is very often the case that time spent optimizing is time wasted. I generally try to find solutions to problems that are easy to implement. After I have a solution in place, then I will go back and optimize trouble spots. The key is to save development time, not processor time.

I am not as confident as Paul Graham about how well we will be able to predict the 100 year language. I think the work of Stephen Wolfram has shown that the central paradigm of mathematics has been very limiting to both computer science and science in general. The current generation of computers and software is based on building systems that are predictable and reducible at every layer. The next big shift may start to exploit the potential of systems were the underlying operation is not understood clearly, but only the finaly results.

Finding "algorithms" where the underlying process is not clearly understood will require brute force searches within the problem domain. Genetic algorithms and other possible techniques will help in the search, but vast amounts of computing power will bring it all together and make it possible. This approach will mark an important departure from the way things have been done over the past 50 years. 9:38:46 AM    comment []  

Fears of the end of the world have been pervasive around me for my entire life. Not that I have given into those fears, but they have certainly been around me. The future potential causes of the end of the world are many; nuclear holocaust, global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, fossil fuel depletion, water shortages, crop fertilizer and pesticide runoff, faltering biodiversity due to species extinction, viral epidemics, bacterial immunity to antibiotics and, more recently, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

I sometimes wonder if this is a uniquely Western point of view or if fear about the end of the world is present in other cultures. Certainly Christianity, with its book of Revelations, is imbued with this fear at its center. Is the more mainstream fear of mass destruction simply an extension of Christian dogma?

Though the logic behind all of these problems is apparent, the facts are always less clear. Global warming, for instance, has always been surrounded by controversy within the scientific community. In the early days, it was largely rejected as alarmist environmentalist rhetoric, but has recently gained a lot of traction within the scientific community. Again, the logic is clear. We know that carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" have an insulating effect, allowing UV radiation to pass into the lower atmosphere, but blocking infrared radiation from escaping. We also know that human industry has caused the release of huge volumes of these gases. However, predicting how that will effect a decidedly chaotic and non-linear system like the global climate is foolish.

Unfortunately, most people and certainly most environmental zealots have little understanding of what it means to live in a chaotic world. They continue to apply simplistic, linear logic to the cause and effect relationship between man and the environment. This may give them a warm fuzzy and make them feel like they are saving the world, but their approach is fundamentally flawed. The truth is that we simply don't know how our behavior is affecting the environment.

There have been many theories arguing against the validity of global warming claims. For instance, one theory says that as the global temperature rises, melting polar ice caps, the sea levels will also rise. This would, in turn, raise the overall reflectivity of the ocean (due to increased surface area) causing less UV radiation to be absorbed and converted into infrared radiation, thus creating a natural temperature equilibrium.

Another theory suggests that as the ice caps melt, excessive amounts of fresh water introduced into the ocean would disrupt the Atlantic Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a natural heat conveyor moving warm water from the tropics to the northern hemisphere and there is extensive evidence that disruption of the Gulf Stream in the past has actually contributed to global cooling! So, a short term increase in global temperature could actually result in the triggering of an ice age.

Anyway, a recent study suggests that current increases in temperature is to be expected. It seems that the world has been in a mini ice age since around 1300 A.D. Prior to that time global temperatures where actually quite a bit higher than they are now.

According to Prof Stott, the evidence also undermines doom-laden predictions about the effect of higher global temperatures. "During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today, and history shows that it was a wonderful period of plenty for everyone."

In contrast, said Prof Stott, severe famines and economic collapse followed the onset of the Little Ice Age around 1300. He said: "When the temperature started to drop, harvests failed and England's vine industry died. It makes one wonder why there is so much fear of warmth" [Daily Telegraph][via MetaFilter].

It is certainly import for us human beings to try to understand our relationship to the world around us, but a little more prudence and a little less sensationalism would certainly help. I for one, doubt the claims of global warming adherents for many reasons not stated above. However, I don't deny the possibility either. What is important is that we find out the facts and them make appropriate decisions. 11:11:20 AM    comment []  

I've really started to get exited at the possibilities provided by tablet PC's. In particular, I am interested in the new ways that pen based input, combined with a large display and the wireless web, will allow people to work. Lounging back in a soft chair and reading my morning weblogs and online news sources is really starting to sound appealing.

I have also used an innovative piece of software called Denim [Dec 10] to collaboratively design web applications. Denim was designed from the start to be used on a pen based system and though I have only had the opportunity to use it with a mouse for input, the potential is enticing.

When I first heard of tablet PC's, I wasn't quite convinced by Microsoft's hype, partially because the idea is by no means a new one; tablet PC's have been around in various forms for a while. I am still not sure what the future of the tablet has in store for us, but I am inspired by the Toshiba Portégé 3500, which has the ability to transform itself between a regular laptop and a tablet. I think this flexibility makes this a must have feature of the next PC I purchase. 9:10:01 PM    comment []  

Larry Ellison is now predicting that Linux will soon overtake Windows on the desktop [Slashdot].

"[Microsoft has] already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance," Ellison said, speaking of the Apache Web server's displacement of Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) technology. "They had a virtual monopoly on Web servers, and then they were wiped off the face of the earth. And it's going to happen to them again on Linux." [ComputerWorld].

It couldn't happen to a nicer company. 11:04:14 AM    comment []  

After reading Chris' comments to my post yesterday [comments], I decided to find out what companding is all about.

The purpose of the companding process is to preserve the signal-to-noise ratio of the original audio. If the audio had been transmitted with its full original dynamic range, the SNR would have lowered to roughly 60 dB to 80 dB by the noise introduced by wireless transmission. However, because the dynamic range of the transmitted audio is reduced to only 50 dB, it is nearly unaffected by the transmission noise [Audio-Technica].

This is an interesting process that I was not previously familiar with. However, in addition to the companding process, which is used to supress noise introduced into the signal, there is another type of dynamic range compression used in cellular phones.

Before the companding process, the audio signal is "compressed" to equalize volume levels. The purpose of this type of compression is to keep the volume levels even. I have used this technique extensively, in streaming media, to process audio prior to encoding. I had a hard time finding anything online to explain this technique in detail but I did find a couple of rambling pieces by audio engineers complaining about the abuse of dynamic range compression in commercial CD's [Pro Audio Rx]. 10:34:37 AM    comment []  

A group in England has designed some cellphones that punish users with bad cellphone etiquette. These phones aren't intended to ever be put into production, but are an attempt to enliven the debate about how cellphones should be used in public places [ArsTechnica].

I think that the biggest problem is a lack of audible feedback from the handset itself. When you talk into a cellphone you have no idea how loud your voice is to the person on the other end of the line. This creates the perceived need to speak at high volumes.

Cellphone microphones are very sensitive to the frequencies of the human voice and they have built-in waveform compression which keeps the volume fairly constant in a wide range of conditions. What is lacking is feedback to the speaker so that they know how loud their own voice is on the other end. Adding a simple feedback circuit would make it natural for the user to speak at an appropriate level while using the phone.

Of course, convincing users not to drive with a cellphone in their hands is another problem entirely. 11:45:17 AM    comment []