jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • DRM revisited

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Another take on DRM. We come at the issue from different points of view, and end up at the same place: just wanting to make unencumbered MP3’s to work around the whole thing.

  • DRM, cracks, and my buying habits

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    The iPod, WMA, and DRM get Scobleized. The point he makes is that having many players available to you is important because once you commit to buying media locked up via DRM, you are locked in to whatever platforms support the kind of DRM your content uses. The problem with that argument is that I…

  • Clueless critique of RSS

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Wow, is this list of “Ten Reasons RSS is not ready for Primetime” clueless. He makes some fair points. But out of the ten, these are either simply false, irrelevant, or seriously debatable: 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10. I’m not going to rebut them one at a time, because I expect others to jump…

  • Vegetarians Take Note

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    Turns out plants are thinking too. So there’s only one non-sentient food product left on the planet: Right-wing Republican Ribs! Finger lickin’ good. (And if you happen to get Rush’s ribs, you’ll get a nice buzz from the residual oxycontin.) Seriously, this is neat stuff. It is further proof that cellular automata are a critical…

  • Image recognition to prevent casual forgery

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    This is so cool! That explains why there are all those silly yellow “20”‘s in the background of the new US 20 dollar bills. The political/social/freedom aspects of this story leave me totally irritated. But the technology involved is pretty nifty, and the fact that the authorities managed to get this integrated into software for…

  • Binary Clock

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Jhango is throwing a party Friday night to Saturday morning to celebrate when Unix time rolls over from 230-1 to 230. Since I can’t be there in person, I made her a binary clock that runs under Win32. It was surprisingly easy. I had it working in under 2 hours. I’ve made a few Windows…

  • CAIDA’s Network Telescope at work

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Interesting new report from CAIDA on the DOS attacks against SCO.

  • iTunes gripes

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    On the first day it was released, I installed iTunes for Windows. I figured something from Apple has a chance of dislodging WinAmp as my music player. They pay attention to important details, and except for the ongoing Quicktime debacle, make software most people seem to like. Using it to edit MP3 metadata has been…

  • The donkeys own “ass”

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    On a whim, I typed a few naughty words into Mozilla’s URL bar, just to see what would happen. I typed “ass”, and I got sent to the DNC blog. WTF?

  • Security in Bee Society

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Biology is neat, and is making huge progress towards being able to explain human nature. Check out this article on security mechanisms in bee populations. Perhaps someday we’ll know how to overcome human nature. Will we choose to do so?