Robert X. Cringely says that what Microsoft is doing with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in Vista is help the media companies reselling us stuff we already have. He talks about how the media companies have been successful at this once already: when we bought CDs to replace our vinyl records, and when we bought DVDs to replace our video tapes.

True.

Then he goes on to saying that all the new Vista DRM technology will form the basis for selling us the same stuff once more, but this time protected from piracy.

I would add the following: The original “re-sell” happened to work because we saw value in going from analog to digital. No more worrying about scratches on the records and deteriorating magnetic tapes. We got better sound and picture quality to boot. Deep down though, I think, we wanted to make sure that we got content that would survive “forever” and be ours “forever”. Well, the transition to digital accomplished that.

So what can possibly drive this next wave of reselling us the same stuff? High-definition digital video (I think Robert Scoble said something like this a while back too). It’s the last chance the studios have to resell us the same stuff once more. And this time they want to get it right: no piracy, hence all the DRM technology.

I can’t wait for the mass market to wake up and find out how buggy, error-prone and restrictive the whole high-definition-with-DRM thing will be. It may not happen until it’s too late. I’m almost hoping that things will be so bad that everyone will just say “I don’t need to own those stinkin’ movies or the expensive equipment to play them. I’ll just invite some friends over and we’ll make music together or tell stories”.

Nothing beats the high-definition of your imagination.

And maybe we should worry less about “owning” hollywood-generated content. Maybe we should focus more on generating our own.

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Categories: Opinion, Personal
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Inspired by the manifestos at gapingvoid.com, here’s my Voluntary Simplicity manifesto:

——————

The free market economy of boundless growth is unsustainable, since we live on a planet with finite resources.

Future generations have just as much a right to enjoy life as the current generation.

Future generations have just as much a right to enjoy a life of the same quality as the current generation.

Conspicuous consumption, as demonstrated by American consumers, will destroy our natural resources if adopted by countries such as India and China. A lot of people in India and China are already aspiring to the lifestyle of American consumers.

The only way to change things in the world is by changing personal behavior.

Once you’ve changed your personal behavior for the better, get others to follow.

The only chance you have for getting someone to do what you want, is to demonstrate that you do it yourself.

Voluntary Simplicity is about living more purposefully with a minimum of needless distractions.

People who practice Voluntary Simplicity realize that more material possessions do not equal increased happiness in life. Often, the opposite is true. More material possessions can actually diminish happiness in life.

Voluntary Simplicity does not dictate how or how much you simplify your life. Only you can decide when you’ve reached the point of “enough” in your life.

Voluntary Simplicity is not about depriving yourself, living in poverty or lowering your standard of living. It is about living more consciously, focusing more on “inner life” than “outward appearance”.

By practicing Voluntary Simplicity you can become a role model for a new lifestyle that will enable future generations to enjoy life.

By practicing Voluntary Simplicity and spreading the word you can help change America’s conspicuous consumption philosophy. You can help people in other countries see that there is another way to live besides consumerism.

——————

To find out more about Voluntary Simplicity, check out the links in the sidebar on the right, and also take a look at these links:

• Excerpts from the book “Voluntary Simplicity” by Duane Elgin (http://www.awakeningearth.org/books_bvs_excerpts.asp)
• Soulful Living (http://www.soulfulliving.com/voluntarysimplicity.htm)
• The Northwest Earth Institute (http://www.nwei.org/)
• Simple Living America (http://www.simplelivingamerica.org)
• The Simple Living Network (http://www.simpleliving.net)
• Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska (http://www.simplelivingtv.net)
• Simple Living Resource Guide (http://www.gallagherpress.com/pierce/index.htm)

Categories: Environment, Personal, Sustainability
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Saw this on TechCrunch and thought I’d play along. Looks like I’m Spiderman:

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 60% Hulk 50% Robin 47% Superman 45% Supergirl 45% Catwoman 40% Iron Man 40% Batman 35% Green Lantern 35% The Flash 30% Wonder Woman 25%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz…

Categories: Personal
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Today I got around to adding some links to my blog. If you look at the initial set you may be wondering why I mostly have the categories “Simplifying Life” and “Sensible Money Management” populated for now. What I’ve written about so far has been related to software and technology. So what gives?

Well, I since I work as a software developer, I’m somewhat naturally drawn towards high tech toys and software development topics. I’m a nut for tech toys, though I’m usually too cheap to buy them - working for a high tech company has its fringe benefits in that department. It’s easier for me to write about things from that sphere, since I know at least a little about it. So that’s where I started.

But one of my other big interests in life is limiting my impact on the environment and help make sure that our planet remains a viable habitat for my kids, their kids and so forth. I believe in picking up my own trash and making sure it goes into the proper waste stream. I believe in trying to limit the amount of trash I generate, so the waste stream becomes as small as possible. I believe that keeping my business as local as possible is important for reducing my impact on the environment. I believe that the only way to make a difference in the world is through personal action, meaning I have to do something. If I don’t do it, who will? And if I don’t do it, how can I get other people to join me?

I’m sure you can see that these things don’t mesh very well: a fascination with software, computers and high tech toys paired with an interest in reducing my impact on the planet. Let me just say that I struggle with this paradox a lot. I’m going to explore the notions of “voluntary simplicity” in addition to my ramblings about software and tech toys. Maybe you’ll enjoy it, maybe you won’t. Whichever way, I’ve now enabled “unregistered” commenting. So please comment away. I invite you to a conversation.

Categories: Personal
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I splurged on an iRobot Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner this Christmas. It’s quite a neat thing to watch working. But I’d like some improvements made to it:

• A light that shows when the Roomba hits a virtual wall, so I can place the wall in just the right spot and at just the right angle to block the robot’s path. My house is full of door-less openings that would make the machine run out of juice if not stopped by virtual walls.
• A “wall following first” mode, so I could be sure it has done the edges of the room before embarking on it’s normal “random” cleaning pattern.
• Detection of area rugs. So far the Roomba gets stuck on our rag rugs and the Christmas tree skirt. Putting up virtual walls for these would be almost impossible.
• Seeing the model of the room that the robot builds up somehow. Also, how much of that model it thinks it has covered and how often.

Other than that I’m pretty happy with this high tech “toy” worker so far.

Categories: Opinion, Personal
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This is something I’ve wanted to post for a long time, but have so far been too ”chicken” to do. Now I think the time has come, though. It’s time for my first “opinion” post. Here goes:

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” a while back. I remember seeing a show on television many years ago that tackled the same topic. I don’t remember much about it, except for the illustration it ended with: It said that the amount of warming going on in the atmosphere was equivalent to the heat of one atomic bomb going off every 30 seconds. So they showed footage of just that every 30 seconds for about two or three minutes. Now, I was quite young when I saw this show, and I realize with time gone by that the images were manipulative, but it stuck with me.

As a result I’ve always had a very adverse relationship with cars. Not only do they pollute the atmosphere with particles and noxious gases, they also contribute greatly to global warming. Around the time I left high school I vowed that I would not buy a car until I at least was 30. Well, I never kept that vow, since I got married and had my first child at 26. Still, the car we bought was small and we used it as little as possible, going shopping using a bicycle trailer, using buses as much as possible and so on. Even today, I refuse to buy more than one car. Yes, that means you have to plan your trips more, and it makes it hard to do things independently, but I just can’t bring myself to getting another one.

After seeing An Inconvenient Truth, I was compelled to do more. We’ve already replaced all the lightbulbs in our house with compact fluorescent ones, where possible and practical. We use the air conditioner as little as we can and keep the house relatively cool in the winter. I was going to sign up for being trained on Al Gore’s presentation, but it turned out to be too much of a commitment to be practical for me. So I decided to go “carbon neutral” instead. I visited http://www.nativeenergy.com/ and put my data into their carbon calculator. It spit out a number of carbon emissions I needed to offset, and I did so by supporting projects that nativeenergy.com works on. Here’s my certificate:

I don’t think there is any doubt that global warming is happening, and since there are no other intelligent beings on the planet that can do something about it, I think we humans need to act. Even if it is just to make the planet habitable for our children. I’m sure life in general will survive, even if we do nothing. I just don’t want my kids to have to live in a world as envisioned in An Inconvenient Truth.

Categories: Personal
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I guess it had to happen sooner or later. The PC I built about 10 years ago finally turned flaky and had to be replaced. It started out as my desktop machine originally. I can’t remember what I had running on it, but probably Windows 95 or Windows 98. It had a Pentium S processor (not Pentium II, not Pentium III) running at 120 MHz…

After a few years of service, I got a new machine and decided to put the old one to work as an Internet gateway server hooked up to my cable modem. I used an OS which was known at the time as “E-Smith”, a derivative of RedHat Linux, cut down to essentials and hardened to make a secure access point to the Internet. E-Smith has since been renamed “SME Server“, and my system was running the 5.5 release for about 5 years nonstop (okay, with an occasional reboot). It had 64 MB of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive to start out with. On that, it faithfully provided firewall, email, web, ftp, samba and ssh services.

I added a 20 GB drive at some point to have more room for music files, thinking I would use the machine as a central repository for a network jukebox. It never really took with the rest of the family, though, so that pretty much went unused.

Recently I started having problem with the box locking up and not providing Internet access any more. I looked into the logs and saw some attempts at hacking passwords. At that point I decided it was time to upgrade to version 7 of SME Server (for better security), and at the same time retire the old hardware.

I had a spare box prepared for just this purpose, got it out of the garage and upgraded the software to version 7 (I had prepared it a long time ago with version 6). Then I swapped out the boxes, did a little work and was up and running again. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that smooth, since I messed around with my wireless router and various other things at the same time.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the retired server “in memoriam”.

UPDATE: Since upgrading to version 7 of SME Server, my spam email count on the domain that server hosts has gone way down. This version has built-in spam filtering at the server level. I just hope normal emails go through. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve had a normal email come through yet. I’ll have to double-check that.

Categories: Personal
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I recently read “Peopleware” by DeMarco and Lister, a book I highly recommend to anyone wanting to understand how to manage people who write software for a living.

They mention several times that most software writers don’t work in “HighTech” jobs. The ones who really do the “HighTech” stuff are the people who write the compilers and development frameworks or come up with other new technologies. I tend to agree.

I’ve long joked to my manager about giving up writing software and asking if he knows anyone who will take me on as a “carpenter’s apprentice”. This happens especially when I get stuck on hard-to-solve problems or when I find more bugs than I care to report in Microsoft’s platforms. And of course when the people who contract for us on software turn in one more drop in which old bugs re-surface.

But I realize more and more how what I do is actually more software “carpentry” than it is “HighTech” work. Seriously. I mean, it takes effort to learn about the latest technologies, such as WPF/Avalon, sure. You have to wrap your mind around how some other people want you to write programs. And you have to do it quickly, so your project can get done on time. But in the end it really comes down to being able to handle a set of tools that someone else makes. Handle them expertly, yes, but they’re someone else’s tools.

So that’s what I’m going to consider myself from now on. A software craftsman. Perhaps even an expert or master craftsman (depending on who I compare myself to or how I’m feeling when I consider it). But just a craftsman.

And I take a certain pride in the work I do. Like all real craftsmen do.

Categories: Personal, Software development
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This is a momentous occasion and reason to celebrate!

I paid off my student loans with a balloon payment today. It was the last loan in my life so far. I don’t have a mortgage (rent the place we live in), the car (our one and only car) is paid off, and the only other thing you could describe as debt is what I run up on the credit card, but I pay that off every month.

It’s a truly liberating day! Now on to FI.

Categories: Personal
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http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

Here’s a guy who gets it regarding office space for software developers. But you kind of figured that, didn’t you? I mean, it’s Joel Spolsky.

I used to work for a startup that had an open office space for eXtreme programming (specifically pair programming), and I just loved working in that environment. It was easy to walk over to someone else’s desk, yet at the same time quiet enough to get work done. And there was space, ah wonderful space.

Big corporations don’t seem to get it. We’re about to move into another building where I work, and it looks like we’ll have less space than where we are now. I remember III talking about how personal space for software developers is the number one productivity enhancer miles ahead of anything else.

Sigh.

Categories: Opinion, Personal
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