As a mac user, I'm embarrassed to admit that I am reinstalling Leopard on my iMac. To many problems, need a fresh start.

With all the news today from Apple, I think one of the most overlooked announcements was that TV shows are available now in HD. HD is sort of a vague term though and just really means higher resolution (more pixels) than a standard NTSC broadcast. They failed to tell us what resolution the new TV shows are actually provided in. Because the target delivery device for the HD content is the Apple TV and it has been documented to have a hard limit of 1280 x 720, we can assume that the resolution is at least less than or equal to this for the new content. The standard resolutions which are used by broadcasters are:

1080p or 1920 x 1080 (progressive)
1080i or 1920 x 1080 (interlaced, which means only have the picture is displayed at a time)
720p or 1280 x 720
480i/p or 640 x 480 in 4:3 mode or 854 x 480 in 16:9

Anything less than 720p and you really can’t call it HD, it is just “enhanced definition” TV.

Here is a handy chart showing the various resolutions in comparison (taken from Wikipedia).

I pulled some screenshots from my iMac playing back an episode of the office. Here is a comparison between the standard definition and the high definition versions of the same scene. The first shot is the standard definition, and the second is the high definition. Click the thumbnail to view the full-size image.

 

If you look in iTunes at the info for “The Office” video files, it is reporting that the resolution of the “Standard Definition” version is 853 x 480 (or 480p) and that the resolution of the “High Definition” version is 1280 x 720 (or 720p). You can see some improvement, specifically around the text on the milk carton, but I don’t really see enough to justify the extra $1.00 per episode.

I’d really have liked to see Apple step up and offer content in 1080p. If they are going to lure me away from my DirecTV service and my DVR, they need to offer me something more compelling. I already get my shows in 1080i and will be getting them soon in 1080p form DirecTV. If they had come out and started offering 1080p content I would be buying all my TV shows from iTunes. As it is I can get higher resolution content for an arguably cheaper price from DirecTV service. Until they can get the massive amount of content, all available in 1080i or greater, I think I’ll stick to my current solution.

I just upgraded my Apple TV with the new “Take Two” update. Everything works as promised, and I noticed one extra goodie in the video settings dialog. The Apple TV now natively supports 1080p video output!

Attached photographic proof!

I won’t be able to caucus for Dr. Paul today because I am a registered Libertarian. I would have had to change my voter registration way back in December to Republican in order to participate. That doesn’t stop me from supporting him. I’ve donated significant money to his campaign and I have advocated him at every opportunity within my social group. I know, just like every other Ron Paul supporter, that he has no chance of winning today. His campaign is not about winning, as great as that would be. Nobody comes out and says it like it is, but it is true. His campaign is about spreading a message, a message of liberty and the constitution. I sincerely hope that the Paul campaign comes up with some way to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states, either as an independent or a Libertarian. If that doesn’t happen I hope that Dr. Paul, as well as his supporters, can rally around whomever the Libertarian party selects as their nominee.

The Ron Paul movement has been amazing to watch as a long time Libertarian. In example, during the 2004 presidential campaign candidate Michael Badnarik received only $1,000,000 in campaign donations. This includes donations prior to the party nomination all the way up to Election Day. Ron Paul has amassed a hefty sum of $30 million+ and it is only February. The message Dr. Paul is sharing is not new, it is that of the constitution, but clearly he has struck a chord with the American people that up until now no Libertarian has. I suspect that this can be credited to two factors. The first is the coming of age of a new generation of voters. The Libertarian message is something that hits home with young voters who are tired of the status quo. Second, I think that Dr. Paul’s affiliation with the Republican party and his existing seat as a Congressman has lent a much needed credibility boost to his ideals, as well as allowed him to participate in the debates and gather some national media attention.

Given the incredible amount of momentum that this movement has, it will be a shame if it all goes to waste. When Dr. Paul finally pulls out of the race come Republican National Convention time, where will that leave us, the unwavering Paul supporters? I sincerely hope that the Libertarian party can seize this opportunity to bring the masses of Paul supporters into the folds. One of the challenges the Libertarians have often had is finding common ground. Libertarians by their very nature are independently minded. If you have an entire political party of folks like this, it becomes a little bit like herding cats. I strongly believe that the lack of adoption of Libertarian ideals thus far is very closely related to this core issue within the party.

Dr. Paul has an amazing power to unite us to a common goal. While I don’t agree 100% with everything Dr. Paul says, and I doubt you will find any Libertarian that does, I agree with 99% of it. Dr. Paul moves us in the right direction, and as a party, the Libertarians need his influence.

We need to do everything we can to keep the spirit of what Dr. Paul is trying to accomplish alive. We can make a difference, while maybe not yet at the national level, we can influence local politics today. I encourage you to run for your local City Council where you live on the Libertarian Platform. Join the Libertarian Party. Attend your Libertarian state convention. Vote for Libertarian candidates. Maybe even run for a state level position?

Links:

• Libertairan Party
• List of state Libertarian Parties
• Atlas Shrugged (Just read it, ok?)

Just stay active, and keep the momentum alive.

With the new version of OS X (Leopard) Apple has included some great functionality in Time Machine. Your Mac will automatically backup to an external drive every hour. It includes the ability to recover deleted files in a timeline. The one downside to the Time Machine approach is that the data isn’t remotely stored. A couple years ago my wife and I had a house fire where most of our things were destroyed. Fortunately the fire was extinguished before it spread to where our computers were so we didn’t lose any data. If it had been elsewhere in the house it could have been a serious situation for us if we lost all of our digital files.

After the fire I have followed a manual process of backing up our files on an external drive that I store in our fire safe. The problem with this is it requires me to actually do the work, which I often put-off. When Amazon S3 was introduced I immediately saw the potential to use it as an automatic remote backup source. I hadn’t invested much time in it up until now, but I just got a new computer (MacBook Air!!) and while setting it up I thought it would be a good opportunity to get my backup situation in order.

There are some great tools already in existence that can do most of the heavy lifting for you. The primary tool for doing remote directory syncs is called s3sync which is a script written in Ruby. Lucky for us OS X comes with Ruby pre-installed so there isn’t much work to get it working.

Here is my step-by-step guide to getting your machine setup to do automatic daily backups to Amazon. I developed these steps on my MacBook Air running Leopard however they should work for previous versions of OS X as well.

Step 1) First off, your going to need and Amazon Web Services account. Head over to http://aws.amazon.com/ and sign-up for an account to use S3. The prices are very cheap ($0.15/GB/Month). Once you have your account setup you will need two things to use Amazon S3. Your Amazon access key and your secret key. These are what s3sync will use to authenticate you to Amazon.

Step 2) I’ve packaged together a zip file with all the files you are going to need to get this setup along with SSL. Download the file at http://vallery.net/s3backup.zip. You can go to http://s3sync.net/ to see if a newer version if you like but you’ll need to figure some of this out on your own.

Step 3) You need to create a “bucket” in amazon to store your files. A bucket is similar to a folder, however it is globally uniquely named across all Amazon S3 users. In order to create the bucket you are going to need one of the S3 GUI applications that exist. I have included in the zip file the one I have used called “S3 Browser”. You can find the latest version at http://people.no-distance.net/ol/software/s3/. Once you launch S3 browser click on “connection” then “new connection”. You’ll need to provide the access details you got from Amazon in step 1. Once you have connected click the “Add” button which will allow you to create a new bucket. Because the name has to be globally unique I used “vallery-macbookair-backup” where vallery is my last name. Keep track of this bucket name because you need it in the next step.

Step 4) Once you have the zip file I created downloaded it should automatically extract itself into your downloads folder creating a new folder called “s3backup”. Within the s3backup folder are all the files and scripts you will need in order to get this working. There is one key file that needs to be edited in order to make this all work which is called “backup.sh”. Open the file “backup.sh” and replace the place holder access key, secret key, bucket name with the ones you obtained form Amazon and step 3.

Step 5) Now that you have all the files ready to go you need to select a place to store them. The application will run as root at the system level in order to prevent file access issues, therefore I recommend storing the entire s3backup folder in your /Library folder. You should copy the entire folder using finder to /Library. There are a few other paths in “backup.sh” that will need to be updated if you choose to store the file elsewhere.

Step 6) You need to setup your Mac to automatically run the backup shell script on a regular interval. There are a couple ways to do this. Since I am Unix guy I immediately started looking at cron. I discovered however that Apple recommends you use launchd for scheduled tasks. It is fairly complex to setup a scheduled task using launchd but thankfully someone has already created a simple GUI that will let you do it. The application Lingon can be used for this. I’ve included the latest version at the time of writing this in the s3backup directory but you can always obtain the latest version from http://lingon.sourceforge.net/. Once you have launched Lingon you need provide some information. Click the “New” button to start a new agent. Choose “Users Daemons” so that the script will run as root and have access to all of the users on your Mac. Once you have created your new daemon you need to give it a name. I recommend something like com.vallery.s3backup where vallery is your name. You need to give the command line action for what to execute. Again, this assumes that you have stored the s3backup folder in /Library. Enter: “/bin/bash /Library/s3backup/backup.sh > /dev/null”. Lastly you need to give it a schedule as to when to run. I have mine setup to “At a specific date” with “Every day” selected and the time set to 4:00am. This is great if your leave your Mac on all the time. You might select a different option so that you can make sure your Mac isn’t in use when it is doing the backup. Click the “Save” button. It will require you to type in your admin password and then restart your computer.

That is it, your system should run the first backup as schedule. It will take a long time initially as the upload speed is limited to your internet connection. Once the initial upload has taken place it will only upload files that are new or have changed going forward. The script is setup to backup everything in the /Users folder. If you would like to limit what is being backed up you can change this to something else.

In the unfortunate event you actually need to get data out of the s3 store there are a number of applications that you can use to do this. Initially I have been using Panic’s Transmit however it seems to have problems with the way s3sync is storing the data. I found another great free app called “S3 Browser” which has worked well for me. You can also use the Firefox plugin S3 Fox.

First off, I’ll get the link out of the way. If you go to http://vallery.net/gmail/ you can see this application in action. Now a little bit more about it.

I discovered that over the years I haven’t exactly been great about maintaining my addressbook. I’ve lost touch of many of acquaintances that I have had casual communication with. I realized that their email addresses where trapped in the deep bowels of my Gmail account, if only there was some way to extract them. I quickly realized that using the newly released IMAP protocol I could probe every message and then extract out the email addresses from it, and in some cases even additional data like the first and last name. I started playing around with the scripting a bit and came up with what I have now. This tool goes out to the Gmail IMAP server and downloads the message header from ever email that is stored in my Gmail account (except the SPAM folder). It pulls them into a master list, along with the first and last name if available. After all of the emails have been extracted it calculates some basic statistics including frequency of occurrence, which it users to sort them on. All of this information is then exported into CSV files that are compatible with many different applications.

While doing this I discovered an additional use for this data. On many of the social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn they will allow you to import a contact list file and find everyone that has registered for the service that you already know. This turned out to be a really killer app for this functionality. The only challenge was that they limit your ability to upload contacts to about 2,000 at one go. I added some additional functionality to my extract that “chunked” the file into several files, each with 2,000 email addresses in it. This allowed me to upload my newly discovered contacts a bit at a time, which worked very well.

If you would like to extract the email addresses from your Gmail or Google Apps for Domains account head over to http://vallery.net/gmail/ and give it a whirl!

The death of the local newspaper?

I consider myself fairly well informed. I read a number of different publications to stay up to date with current events, the latest technology, or even just a bit of celebrity gossip. I’m a busy guy, I have a lot going on and I don’t have a bunch of time to just sit around reading different websites. I, like many others, rely heavily on RSS in order to get the most of my online leisure time. I use the fantastic Google Reader application to aggregate the feeds that interest me into a single easy to sort through interface. I’m subscribed to several national and international news feeds like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. I’ve got feeds for a couple of the social news websites like Digg and Reddit. I’ve got a few feeds for Google News searches on topics that interest me. Lastly, I’ve got a few blogs and other miscellaneous feeds. I can quickly scan the headlines and read an article if it is of actual interest to me. All of this gets me fairly well informed on what is going on in the nation, and in the world. That is the problem….

You see, a lot goes on that is relevant to me, and that I would be very interested in knowing, but I’m completely clueless about it. The world around me, around where I live, isn’t well represented online. I want to be able to access my local news just like I access the rest of my news. I want to be informed about what is going on without spending unnecessary time on it.

I live just outside a moderately sized city in Northern Colorado called Longmont. We have a local newspaper called The Daily Times Call that covers local current events. The newspaper represents Longmont as well as several of the smaller communities around Longmont like the one I live in called Firestone. According to the wikipedia article on Longmont, as of 2005 it has about 76k residents and 26k households. If you include the surrounding communities my best guess would be that the newspaper could potentially reach as many as 40k homes. I have no clue how many subscribers have, but it would certainly be a small subset of that. The Times Call has always been a good newspaper. I’ve been a subscriber on and off over the years. I even delivered papers for them when I was much younger. My problem with the Times Call is that my options are fairly limited on actually getting the news from them. Today, it really breaks down to either of the following:

1) Subscribe to the dead tree version of the newspaper. There are lots of reasons why this isn’t ideal for me, and I would guess a lot of folks like me. The print version is a huge waste of paper. It takes a significantly longer time to sort through the articles. Using an RSS reader I can glance over 250 stories and read the ones of interest before I could even get through the first section of the print version. The print version is largely ad supported which just adds more heft to its size. Most importantly however is that the print version isn’t always available when I want to read the news. I frequently read the news at work, at home, or on my mobile device. It is really just a matter of whenever I can grab a free minute.

2) Read the news on their website. The downsides of this are that their page has a relatively poor user interface. It is loaded down heavily with advertisements. The biggest downside is that I have to remember to go check it. Google Reader is routine for me, it’s my source of news and information. To get the local news from the Times Call website, it requires an extra step of loading up a separate page trying to make heads or tales of the articles they have on their site.

Over the years I’ve done both methods. I gave up on the dead tree version a couple years ago in preference to their website. Up until just earlier this year they didn’t even publish most of their local stories on their website. The only thing up there would be the top couple of lead articles. These problems aren’t unique to the Times Call either. I’m sure there are some exceptions out there, but when I did a casual survey of several other local newspapers throughout Colorado I found a similar experience.

If I could dream up a solution to these problems it would be content created by individual journalists, paid journalists, and amateur bloggers alike. The content would be well organized and tagged not only for category or type but also for geography. A social network, or digg/reddit like approach would be used to identify popular stories for the masses but that content wouldn’t drown out the local information that might not have as much of a mass appeal.

Until my news and information utopia exists I need to come up with a real interim solution. I’ve contacted the Times Call on several occasions asking, begging, for RSS on their website. My emails seem to have fallen on deaf ears as I have never received a response. I assume that they are tied to an old and outdated business model and are afraid to move into the modern age. They keep tight control over the methods in which their content is viewed so they can pump the pages full of ads. I respect that, I understand that is currently their way of making the web profitable. I also understand that this isn’t the business model of the future. Content like theirs is only valuable if they have an audience to read it. Increasingly so, folks are turning to other methods to become informed. Technologies like RSS are disruptive, game changing. They empower users to be in control, not the publishers. The Times Call is the best there is for covering news about Longmont, Colorado but the last place I would turn for news about the war in Iraq. They don’t have the resources to provide quality coverage of national and international topics of interest. Each news source has it’s place and as those niches are carved out each publication will have it’s own following.

The Times Call, and local newspapers like it all across the country, need to do what they do best. Provide great coverage about what is going on in our communities. They need to provide that coverage in ways that are accessible to everyone. From folks like my Dad, who I don’t think I could even explain to him what an RSS feed is let alone get him to use one. To folks like me, and many of my peers and friends who want to make the most of our busy lives but still be informed about the communities we live in. If the local newspapers don’t adopt a different business model for the web, they will continue to see their subscriber base shrink. I’m happy to pay online subscription fees for access to quality content. I know nobody works for free and someone has to pay the bills. Let me pay the Times Call $10 a month for access to their RSS feed, hopefully advertisement free. If that doesn’t work, just publish the article title and a synopsis and force the user to access your website to read an article they are interested in. At least this way I know what is on your site and if I want to read it I’ll be subjected to all of your advertisements.

Since neither of these solutions have happened so far, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. I created an application that harvests the article contents from the Times Call website and then redistributes it in RSS format. It took me all of a couple hours to put this together and test it. It is working great and myself along with several of my friends are now using it. While this doesn’t help most people out there, if you happen to live in and around Longmont and want to access the Times Call in RSS format you can get the feed at http://vallery.net/timescall.xml.

Happy reading!

I work a lot with different types of web services. I find when I’m building an application that has to post data off to a remote service that it can be difficult to debug where the problems are. I can’t always see an exact copy of the HTTP request that I am sending, and therefore how the remote service sees my call. I created a simple little app that when called will return exactly what it was sent. You can pass in variables in a POST or GET, and it will just spit them right back at you along with whatever HTTP headers were sent by your client.

If you point your browser over to http://vallery.net/postback/index.php you can see it in action. It will report back to you exactly how your browser is identifying itself, including any cookies you might have received from my word press blog!

Now the next time you are writing an application and you want to debug your outbound posts, just send them over to the above URL and it will respond with exactly what it received.

Pretty cool!

I’ve been doing some thinking the last few days about DRM and I can’t seem to come to a conclusion on how I should feel about it. Generally with any issue I can look at it with my moral lens of libertarian ideas, and it becomes very clear what is right and wrong. In this case, I’m lost, so I wanted to toss this question out there and see if anyone has any opinions one way or the other.

First a synopsis of DRM. DRM is a method used to control how digital content is used. It uses different types of encryption technologies to prevent users of digital media (DVDs, CDs, HD-DVDs, video games, downloaded music, etc) from accessing the content without a “key” that is approved by an issuing authority. To put it in real terms, the encryption prevents you from making a copy for your friend (pirating). In no way am I in favor of violating intellectual property laws or advocating piracy. Copyright laws are important in a libertarian society I think. I’m looking at this in terms of “legal” usage of the content. In addition to preventing me from pirating the content, DRM also prevents me from watching the movie on a Linux based computer where no “licensed” DVD playback software exists, making a backup of the disc in case my original gets destroyed, or even copying a DVD movie onto my video iPod so I can watch it there. All of these things in my opinion are 100% valid, and in my mind, legal uses of the original DVD, however according to the DMCA they are illegal because they require the circumvention of DRM.

If I don’t like DRM then don’t buy content that is protected with DRM, right? The problem with that argument is that it isn’t possible. The standards body that created the DVD format and the HD-DVD format was the MPAA. The MPAA is controlled by movie studios and so a core component of the format is the DeCSS DRM encryption (Or AACS in HD-DVD movies). Put simply, no movie can play on any player without the encryption being in place. Thus, even small independent movie distributors are forced to include the encryption on their disks or else they will not play in the vast majority of players that are installed in the homes of their consumers. Also, there is a specific clause in the DMCA under title 1 that requires all analog video recorders to have support for a specific form of copy prevention commonly known as Macrovision built in. Macrovision is used in combination with the DeCSS encryption sponsored by the MPAA. The organizations behind it (MPAA/RIAA) and the DMCA have effectively made it impossible to get DRM free content, so voting with my dollar is out of the question, short of not consuming digital media at all.

The DMCA is also the primary tool used to combat violators of DRM technology. In practice it is fairly trivial to circumvent the encryptions put in place. There are tools readily available that will decrypt a DVD and copy it onto my iPod, or allow me to make a copy of the DVD disk for archival backup purposes, and yes tools that would allow someone to pirate the content. These tools are all technically illegal under the DMCA, but easily obtained. The MPAA/RIAA will send cease and desist letters to anyone making them available, but the internet is an international anarchy, so no matter how hard they try they can’t control what gets posted online.

A quote from Timothy B. Lee, in a paper he wrote for the Cato institute

“The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders — and the technology companies that distribute their content — the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.”

So I think I’ve built a sufficient case to say that the DMCA is anti-libertarian, and borderline unconstitutional. The DMCA uses a government sponsored monopoly to force encryption on the digital media we consume, and makes it illegal for us to use tools that would free us of their constraints. The core of my question however is about DRM, not the DMCA. Assuming for a minute we lived in a society where there was no oppressive DMCA, what then would be the position on DRM?

I have a number of arguments in my head both in favor of DRM and against DRM from a libertarian perspective. At the 30,000 foot level the question is simple. If I buy something that contains DRM, a DVD for example, and take it home, does the manufacturer of that DVD have the right to dictate to me how I use it? Post purchase, do they maintain any rights beyond copyright?

I’ve been looking at this from a couple of different angles. The first way that has made it easier for me to conceptualize is not thinking about “digital” media, but instead thinking of analog media, like a book. We are still talking about copyrighted, intellectual property. Instead of coming in a digital world where controls are possible, it comes in a physical world. If I take my book and decide that I don’t like a certain chapter because I don’t think it is appropriate material for my child to read, is it illegal for me to remove these pages from the book? This is analogous to me removing DRM off of digital media in order to modify it. Now in actuality the likelihood of me stripping DRM off of a movie and editing a scene that I didn’t like is very slim, should I not be allowed to do so if I wanted? Another good example of this thinking is sheet music, again intellectual property without DRM. What if I wanted to perform only a certain section of the composition. I am allowed to copy the sections that are relevant to create a derivative work, only for personal use. Because in the physical world the “protection” that DRM allows was not possible in intellectual property, nobody ever bothered to think of their implications. Intellectual property was treated just as any other physical property, with the expectation of attributing copyright to it.

Now, here is the crux of my dilemma. Clearly DRM (outside the DMCA) is something that private enterprise has decided that they think is important, and therefore have implemented. Assuming no draconian laws like the DMCA, the government has no place in controlling how content is licensed and consumed. If the MPAA/RIAA have enough power to force standards on the industry, then it is not the governments place to interfere. As much as I hate DRM, I think I’m leaning towards the side of the MPAA/RIAA on this one. However, if I violate their terms, and circumvent the DRM there is no criminal punishment to me by the government. I’m only violating the agreement between myself and the content publisher. For DRM to ever be successful it will require the MPAA/RIAA to come up with DRM methods that are “unbreakable”, which I don’t see happening anytime soon.

The industry should be allowed to do whatever it wants. They just can’t use the guns of the government to enforce their choices on us.

What are your thoughts? Am I wrong? Tell me about it in the comments.

For further reading: The full policy analysis from the Cato Institute [PDF]

I’m doing my part in adding yet another place where you can find the AACS HD-DVD processing key. I’m a firm believer in fair use, and the DRM scheme implemented by AACS clearly limits my abilities to use content that was legally purchased. I buy all my music on iTunes, I buy all my movies from various legal sources, and I get my TV from either iTunes or DirecTV. I’m in no way a pirate, and the use of the below key does not constitute piracy. While it might be used for illegal purposes, so can a gun, or so can pretty much any device. Don’t punish the individuals who posses the “weapon”, punish the individuals who commit the crime.

AACS processing key (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0)