This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Stephen Fry on technology and its impact on culture
Posted by monster in Technology
This ia brilliant video of Stephen Fry discussing technology and how it has affected culture. A recommended 12 minutes.
ISPs to be rail roaded with anti-piracy legislation in the UK
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
Despite a lot of opposition is looks like the current government are going to force the 3 strikes and your connection is cut off approach as an attempt to cut down piracy (more details at the NME). With ISPs reporting that the process is very difficult and costly to implement I can several scenarios playing out of a lot of incorrect cut offs, service pricesses increasing and/or service quality dropping as ISPs try to claw back the investment (and reduced revenue as they can’t earn from a cut off service).
Aside from what happens with ISPs I think the process is likely to stiffle media development, consider how the Arctic Monkey’s got going - a lot of buzz generated by allowing people to download live performances, and who easy that will be to mixup with illegal material. Those who are intent on sharing will find means to defeat the ISP checks - more sophisticated file hiding etc. The fact that technology will always run faster than legislation has been missed. What the industry needs to wake up to is to make it more attractive to people to pay for music. This doesn’t mean bigger and heavier prouncements about piracy, look at the anti taping campaigns of the 70s and 80s to see what that did, or didn’t do.
Fortunately a few artists have started to try and develop their approach such as the Nine Inch Nails. The record industry shoul look to develop the ‘long tail’ by supporting more smaller artists as the proportion of copyright theft drops as you move down the tail. So rather than pooring millions into a big ad campaign for one artist, whos ‘product’ is then panned by a fickle audience (to be a little more blunt - a poor quality product trying to cash in on a fad or fashion), costing lots and resulting in labels simply blaming piracy for dumb thinking.
We’ll see what happens in July 2011. I hope to be proven wrong, but I suspect it will all endup being a repeat of RIAA mess, and we’ll see court battles about being denied people’s inealiable right to surf the web etc.
Enterprise Architectural Patterns
Posted by monster in Technology
Martin Fowler’s site has got a nice documentation set of Enterprise Architectural Patterns here and a survey of other sites that have Enterprise Patterns (here) although the catalogue isn’t hugely comprehensive, for example no reference to the IBM Red Books aren’t mentioned.
2009 - the year for SaaS
Posted by monster in Technology
Alastair at Huddle has written a rather good blog entry about the state of play in IT with respect to the economy for smaller/newer businesses that are being powered by investors.
Link: http://blog.huddle.net/2009-doom-gloom-or-the-break-through-year-for-saas-the-cloud-social-software
Facebook in the office
Posted by monster in Technology
According to a new article on the BBC News site some research has been done looking at the use of Facebook within the work environment. The research suggests that a blanket ban on the use of social networking sites such as Facebook can be counter productive. although this on the surface may be counter intuitive, the arguement is that social networking sitesfacilitate alternative communication channels that may facilitate the execution of work, such as reaching out to a wider audience for help with a problem. This is far from a new concept, as such informal channels of communication to obtain help/communicate informally was identified as important in Frederick Brooks’ Mythical Man Month, and how such channels are important, this is sometimes referred to as a water cooler effect.
The research acknowledges that the situation can be abused, but if managed can be of benefit to an organisation. In addition to this the are also the tensions that may occur as younger staff are more likely to feel more at ease using such technologies resulting in a divide within an organisation. The crucial element that the news article fails to recognise is the possibility of sensitive information slipping into public domain (either deliberately or accidentally) when public sites such as Facebook are used. Such leakages could be detrimental to the organisation.
It is in these situations where services such as Ning and Huddle or for larger organisations private social network sites could come into their own. Although separation of the sites may create a barrier for adoption, when you can use a common site for both work and personal activities its adoption is going to be easier than where there multiple different sites for different activities. Although with the Open Social efforts driven by the likes of Google may reduce this problem.
Kaiser Chiefs - Southampton Guildhall
Posted by monster in Music, Music Reviews, Technology
We managed to catch the Kaiser Chiefs on the small venue part of their European tour to promote the new Album Of With Their Heads. Initial impressions of the new songs is that good ones are very good, the others are only so-so, B side material, and leaves a me with the feeling that the album was rushed so that the pre-Christmas sales season could be exploited which is a shame.
I took some pictures at the gig with a new Samsung Soul mobile phone with what seemed to be a nice 5mb camera. Although its ability to focus in the conditions of a concert appears to be disappointing. To help with that I started using the multi-frame mode and discovered that when you do that it reduces the image resolution notably without any warning. I think I need to experiment some more with poor light conditions but at the moment I’d would say that the lower resolution Sony Ericcson K800i coped better at gigs.
Photoset at filckr here.
Tracking multiple email accounts
Posted by monster in Technology
In this day and age, email addresses are like bank accounts - we’ve got more than one, and we need to keep an eye on them with varying degrees of regularity. As a sideline of webmaster and Hotmail (Live mail) email client getting heavier on resource needs all the time. Having a small tool to monitor my many email addresses without resorting to using my work Outlook being muddied by non work stuff and visa versa for my home mail client.
To help with this I’ve started using a brilliant little application called POP Peeper, it can watch webmail like Hotmail, GMail account as well as good old fashioned POP3, SMTP etc. Its easy to setup and then let it sit out of the way on the toolbar and flag up when something arrives in the mail box. You can then look at the email in this little lightweight tool.
SeeWhy for jBPM video demo
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
SeeWhy for jBPM now has three videos that have been put together that illustrate SeeWhy what it is, and what can be done. Although the videos are aimed at jBPM they’re just as applicable to any BPM solution, not just jBPM. The videos also give some sense as to what SeeWhy has the potential to be able to do.
The videos are freely available from Google, and higher res versions that can be downloaded from the SeeWhy website. With the higher resolution versions you can see in detail what is being done.
Part 1 - Introduction to SeeWhy for jBPM
Part 2 - Business Activity Monitoring
Part 3 - Event Driven Business Intelligence
Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
With the increasingly aggressive position being taken by organisations such as the RIAA, BPI, MPAA, the British Games Organisation it is not surprising that a new advancement in peer to peer technology has occured to make the P2P data transfer anonymous. This article on O’Reilly describes a new bread of P2P that makes the traffic anonymous - ONLamp.com — Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE.
The effect of P2P clients such as this getting traction is that it will become increasingly harder for industry bodies to understand how to at least try and contain losses to piracy (real or perceived) and utilise the technologies to propel marketing and promotional activities - so shooting themselves in the foot.
Cutting edge rocker blazes trail in digital age
Posted by monster 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.
Remote PC Support Tools Mini-Guide
Posted by monster 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.
The Times front page - Computer games industry threat to downloaders
Posted by monster 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.
How portable is Java?
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
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
RA DIOHEA_D - HOU SE OF_C ARDS
Posted by monster 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…
Warning letters to ‘file-sharers’
Posted by monster 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.
Legal British P2P by end of year
Posted by monster 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.
Service Orientated Architecture in the Real World
Posted by monster 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:
- Basic SOA tenets
- Service Lifecycle
- Workflow
- Data Management and how article styles may impact upon the data
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.
Microsoft have change of heat on MSN Music
Posted by monster 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.
Illegal downloads - the solution
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
Fergal Sharkey (yes the Fergal Sharkey of the Undertones and singer of Teenage Kicks) has blogged on the Guardian website about recent research to try and identify how the illegal music download issue maybe resolved, The article can be seen ay Illegal downloads - guardian.co.uk.
Antipiracy company uses denial of service attack on legitimate media company.
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
According to Digital Music News, MediaDefender an anti-piracy company has used an illegal means to try an shutdown what is a legitimate online media selling service Revision3. Revision3 legally uses bit torrent technologies and as a result of a security hole had servers tricked into acting as a tracker for some illegal content, setup up by MediaDefender by exploiting a security hole according to Revision3. When Revision3 spotted the abuse and shutout MediaDefender it appears to have triggered a denial of service attack (achieved by saturating a web server with too many requests for content). So Revision3’s actions which were correctly taken to prevent their servers from being exploited and used for illegal copying (also the the job of MediaDefender) resulted in the service attack. Reviosn3 has a good description of what the DOS attack is like.
Given MediaDefender’s failure to atleast talk with Revision3 let alone use correct legal channels, has been referred the matter to the FBI as it breaks 12 different statutes including Computer Fraud and Misuse act. Revision3’s news article on the whole event is fascinating insight into how blasé MediaDefender about its actions. Since the attack, MediaDefender have said they’ve updated their policies to first check to see if the server they’re looking at is associated to a legitimate business. Hey, shouldn’t you have been doing that anyway? As Revision3 had said, what if someone had exploited an loophole in security for an emergency service to host a bit torrent tracker which had then been attacked by MediaDefender?
Interestingly most of the information describing what has gone on has come from Revision3, and MediaDefender’s website is particularly quiet on these events.
