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April 27, 2005

WWDC

Thanks to Marko I've got an eTicket to WWDC. See you guys there!

In other news, check out Knox, an encrypted drive utility for OS X. I've been using it for a little bit and it's been fairly stable. I like it better than the Vault feature for OS X, as I don't need all my home directory encrypted... just the pr0n.

Posted by Dan at 11:27 AM

April 23, 2005

With Teeth

After having listened to it a few times, I've come to the conclusion the new NIN album, With Teeth, really has none. If you haven't bought it yet, check it out on the streaming side before you buy it. I know I was disappointed. I do like the fact that they released the first song as a GarageBand file though. Now I can easily remix the song into something I think is better....

Posted by Dan at 12:59 PM

April 22, 2005

The Corporate Mindset

I like to think I'm a fairly analytical person, examining problems from all angles and presenting a solution that I feel will solve the issue at hand most competently. Often when doing this, I don't look into external factors like media perception, market-share, and what have you. Now allow me to explain a recent problem I encountered and the reaction it achieved.

At my office, we've spent the last few months creating a series of video clips for use during testing. All the content is royalty free as we created it, though there are several terabytes of data. We have everything ranging from low bit-rates to high bit-rates, to even uncompressed data. We have encodings in WMV, DiVX, Quicktime, Xvid, and who knows what other formats (I stopped paying attention to this detail awhile back). Each clip has multiple time lengths as well, with 8 seconds being the shortest, and 2 hours being the longest. Some are in standard def, while others are in high def.

It was recently brought to our attention that other parties may actually be interested in our work, and sharing it with them on our bandwidth limited pipe may impede this behavior. Unfortunately serving the data off of a high bandwidth pipe becomes too cost prohibitive. The next option was to mirror out the data to other locations around the world (basically creating a content distribution network based upon locality). In my mind, all of these are exactly the wrong solution.

Why? In each of these cases, under ideal conditions things will work perfectly. When the network becomes too saturated, or disconnects, the real problems begin. You cannot restart a download of a several gigabyte file using any of the standard IT supported distribution methods (i.e. FTP-passive, or HTTP) without segmenting the files to chunks. Hence I suggested putting up a BitTorrent server to distribute the data. If you're going to start chunking data anyways, why not put into place a system that will allow for distributed downloading and supports chunked data natively? More importantly all the consumers of our data will slowly become distributors of it as well. This benefits not just us, but any consumers who wish utilize our media.

After having made this suggestion aloud, the silence in the room was deafening. It seems that the IT department is completely against this idea for a couple of reasons, none of which they'd vocalize in front of me. My best guesses include:

1) It sucks up bandwidth. Yep, that it does. Although it will suck up progressively less bandwidth as more customers utilize the service. On the other hand, the bandwidth cost will still be the same if we continue to host a centralized server as we currently are planning. Basically I see the short term loss of bandwidth for the long term gain of distributed bandwidth not being a significant reason to cancel this idea.

2 MPAA/RIAA threats. With the current political climate towards P2P file sharing, it's hard to argue this one. The RIAA and MPAA have done a really good job in their recent propaganda march to paint P2P as only evil. The best counter I can conceive of is that all the media being distributed is generated by us, we own the royalties for everything. How the two evil empires can bully us around at that point, I'm not sure.

3 Security. BitTorrent has been fairly stable and strong in it's consumption of the Internet. One of the areas it's still fairly untested in is security. Not having examined the code, or even being able to understand much of it that well, I can't vouch on this one.

Any suggestions on how to convince the IT department that this wouldn't be the most evil thing in the world?

Posted by Dan at 12:58 AM

April 05, 2005

Where'd I go?

I got a little static from Dave about having disappeared from the online world. Yeah, thats pretty much what happened. After some rough times at work, I decided to cut back on my computer time and spend more of it in the real world.

A few things that I've learned over the past moments of silence:

I've gotten to be a significantly better skier this year thanks to instructing and just being able to go on a more regular basis. I still suck at powder though.

met some really cool people

I own my first gas grill. It's small and can be used on the porch.

Somehow Bob + Dia ran off to Vegas and got married and got some crazy toast from the Puz (go check out Bob's blog for details, apparently he doesn't like perma-links). Congratulations you two!

Having not written any C code in awhile, it was sad to see that simple things like typedef uint64 (*uint64_stat)(int version, int size); confused me. I should have known that one.

After days of sunny weather, expect many of cloudy cold rain. It seems to be the local way.

I'm spending too much money on things like bills. I should really stop doing that.

I will be seeing the Kentucky Derby this May. Sweet.

It is indeed possible to have fun running as long as it involves things like alcohol, lots of people, frequent bar stops, shopping carts, and costumes (click for image)

Google Maps just goes to show how little advancement has occured on the Internet since the end of the boom days. Hopefully we can fix that soon.

I need to cut down on my spending, it seems to be too high for some reason.

I can indeed squat 400lbs

Posted by Dan at 10:18 PM