2003-10-24 · 08:53

Discovery on the hunt for HD

This is pretty cool: Discovery is holding seminars to explain to their content producers what they’re looking for in HD programming. The best news: there are plans for an HD season of the “Extreme Engineering” series.

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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater

2003-10-24 · 06:56

Marsh restoration in Iraq

So, if engineers can revitalize the wetlands destroyed by Saddam Hussein in his long campaign against the Kurds, maybe the same approach would work in Louisiana.

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Filed under Musings

2003-10-24 · 06:35

Cool application of Rights Management Server

You probably already know about the Windows Rights Management Server. It allows users to apply controls to their documents and messages; for example, you can tag an email as “do not forward”, and Outlook won’t allow it to be forwarded or copied. This capability is being called Information Rights Management, or IRM. IRM isn’t ironclad– after all, someone who wants to leak information can always find a way– but being able to specify that documents expire, or that they can only be accessed by certain people, is a powerful tool for the documents’ owners. (For more on IRM in Office 2003, see this.) One of the coolest IRM features is that by writing your own XrML templates, you can cusotmize which rights users can grant and how they apply. Sling a little XrML, and next thing you know your users can tag messages with things like “do not forward for 7 days” or “only full time employees can read this”.
The problem is that getting people to use this technology may be difficult. IRM can offer a good way to ensure that sensitive material isn’t accidentally forwarded, disclosed, or kept beyond its lifetime, but only if people use it. Enter Omniva, which makes a nifty server-side product that takes Exchange messages (including those sent with OWA and OMA) and adds XrML to them on the store side to make them IRM-protected. You define a policy once (e.g. “members of the Legal OU should have all mail encrypted, and it should expire after 180 days”) and Omniva does the rest.
For more details on Omniva’s product, see this. They have two white papers (one on the product and one on general retention issues). Check it out.

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Filed under General Stuff

2003-10-22 · 16:01

MS expands “shared source” initiative

This is so cool: “Microsoft expands ‘shared source’ effort”. That means that some MVPs will now have partial access to some parts of the Windows source code. What a learning experience! I’m stoked; I just hope Exchange MVPs qualify.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2003-10-22 · 14:22

o all who shall see these presents, GREETINGS

Arlene got a special treat today: a jury summons. The questionnaire asks all sorts of interesting things (have you ever had a bodily injury claim filed against you? who’s your lawyer? are you friends with any law enforcement officers?). My favorite was the exemption checklist; apparently in Wood County you can be exempted if you’re in poor health (but only if you’re also over 70) or if you’re a cloistered member of a religious organization. Since she doesn’t qualify, we’ll wait to see if she gets the “yellow card” that notifies her that she’s been selected for an actual trial.

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Filed under Friends & Family

2003-10-22 · 09:44

Empires of Light (Jonnes)

I’ve always liked reading biographies of discoverers, a trait I think I inherited from my father. When I saw Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World mentioned in the WSJ, I quickly added it to my book queue. I was not disappointed. Jonnes has written a highly readable account of the early development of the electrical industry in America. Two of the principal players are immediately familiar: Edison, the folksy, somewhat egotistical inventor legendary for the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, and moving pictures (he still holds the individual record for most US patents issued) and Tesla, the weird Serbian who gave us Tesla coils and the now-indispensible AC induction motor. George Westinghouse, the third key figure, isn’t nearly as well-known, even though he arguably did more to get electricity deployed than the other two. Westinghouse was a savvy businessman, and I enjoyed the descriptions of his work with his employees– he sounds like a good boss.
Jonnes doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on explaining electrical technology, but she does a good job of focusing on the revolutionary aspect of electricity and the business battles between the key players (including the famous ploy by Edison and his supporters to put Westinghouse out of the electrical business by emphasizing the dangerous nature of AC systems.)
Jonnes excels at dropping in little details. For example, in the early 1900s, more than 95% of residents of Muncie, Indiana had electricity in their homes, even though at the same time more than two thirds of them still had outhouses. That’s the mark of a revolution. This book is highly readable, and highly recommended.
Update: Amazon recommended Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair. I’ll have to add that to my queue.

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Filed under Reviews

2003-10-22 · 06:34

Pay me now or pay me later

Scoble made yesterday a one-post day in honor of the Office 2003 launch. That means his daily output today will probably be astonishing.

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Filed under Musings

2003-10-22 · 06:24

How you know you’re doing a good job

I haven’t blogged much because I’ve been busy. Between a rush project we’re doing to build some security labs and a longer, ongoing project to write a large document about enterprise messaging deployment, I haven’t had much time to do anything else. Part of the payoff came yesterday, though, when the Microsoft lead for the messaging project asked me to call her after a conference call we were finishing. Why? Two reasons: a) she wanted us to bill her immediately (instead of later), and b) she wanted to make us aware of two other groups within Microsoft that she thought we could get more work from. That’s the sign that we’re doing something right– when a customer is willing to make an internal referral like that, we must be on the right track.

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Filed under Musings

2003-10-17 · 05:44

Identity theft gone wrong

Tip for potential identity thieves: be careful whose identity you steal, or you may be worse off than you were before.

1 Comment

Filed under Security

2003-10-16 · 14:26

Longhorn or astronauts?

Bill Gates is reported to have said that the Longhorn project will cost more than the entire Apollo program. That’s scary. (Hat tip: Christian). It makes me fervently wish for the kind of program described in Benford’s The Mars Race: a privately backed prize fund for a manned mission to Mars. The X Prize is a great start, and its eventual success will hopefully spur the creation of bigger prizes for bigger explorations.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2003-10-16 · 11:24

First MagnaTune purchase

Magnatune (motto: “We’re Not Evil”) is a new record label and music distribution system. Lots of other people have already blogged about them, but I’ve just gotten around to trying them.
One of their best features is that they offer streams of all of their music– classical, rock, electronic, etc.– so you can try before you buy. I just bought my first album from them, EPROMs from Belief Systems. For $8, it’s a great value, and the artist gets $4, which is, oh, about 25x what they would expect to receive from a major-label CD purchase. Rock on!

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Filed under Musings

2003-10-16 · 10:24

A new remote, and two books on TiVo hacking

After being seriously tempted by the Kameleon, I ultimately rejected it because there’s no way to add buttons, and its macro programmability is limited. Instead, I (somewhat reluctantly) bought a Home Theater Master MX-500, which is butt ugly but remarkably easy to program. So far, I have it doing everything I want to except for the one-button macros; once that’s programmed, someone (like, oh, Betty) can just press the “DVD” button to turn on and switch around the appropriate components. Mmmm, macros…
In other news, Amazon has a promo: if you order Krikorian’s TiVo Hacks and Keegan’s Hacking the TiVo together, you get both books for about $38. Since I love books, I bought both of ’em. All I need now is enough time to actually perform the surgery.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2003-10-16 · 10:16

Spiritual baseball

So last night I was explaining to Arlene that I was planning on watching the Sox-Yankees game tonight. “Why?” she said. “I hate the Yankees,” I replied, “and, besides, as a Mormon it’s my job.” She was a little nonplussed, so I quoted Mosiah 18:9 to her. Now, hopefully my comforting won’t be necessary as the Sox send the hated infidels back to NYC, but just in case…

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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment

2003-10-15 · 14:15

Happy Patch Day: MS03-046

Microsoft is moving toward issuing sets of patches once a month instead of in a steady, Chinese-water-torture stream. Accordingly, now there’s a big ol’ set of patches up on Windows Update. For all you Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5 folks, there are two of particular interest: MS03-046 covers a vulnerability that can lead to arbitrary code execution on Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 boxes, while MS03-047 covers a potential cross-site scripting vuln in OWA 5.5. Happy patching!

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Filed under General Stuff

2003-10-14 · 09:32

Comment spam, begone

Thanks to John, I am now running MTBlacklist, a plugin that blocks comment spam. Lots of other people have been looking for solutions to this problem, and although this may only be a temporary fix, it’s a welcome one. Thanks, Jay!

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Filed under General Tech Stuff