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It's the latest digital media murder mystery: TiVo Series2's TiVoToGo enabled limited portability of recorded content to PCs and other devices, but the TiVo Series3 HD did not include this feature when recently released. In other words, if you want to upgrade to HD, you have to downgrade your TiVo's features.

You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to guess that this story somehow involves Hollywood, the FCC, and 'digital rights management' (DRM) restrictions. EFF has opposed these restrictions every step of the way, and, in an EFF white paper released today, we'll explain digital cable DRM's sordid history, how digital cable and satellite DRM may affect you, and what you can do to fight back.

In short, get ready for copying limits on cable and satellite content that won't stop 'Internet piracy' but will stop you from making legitimate use of lawfully acquired content. You'll be forced to only buy devices with limited features, and restricted digital outputs could break compatibility with your current HD displays and receivers, even though you may have already invested thousands of dollars in them. Innovators will have to beg permission before inventing new digital devices that help you get more from your satellite and cable content.

Unfortunately, TiVoToGo's disappearance is just the tip of the iceberg. But you can still take steps to fight back -- use EFF's Action Center to stop cable providers from making DRM even worse, and check out the other action items on our cable and satellite DRM page.

(Cross-posted at EFF's DeepLinks)

Two months ago, Sony released the new Jessica Simpson single in MP3 through Yahoo! Music. This week, Variety (via PaidContent) reports that Disney-owned Hollywood Records will release Jesse McCartney's full album in MP3. It seems that some major record label execs may finally be coming to their senses:

'We're trying to be realistic,' said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. 'Jesse's single is already online and we haven't put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we're going to see how Jesse's album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.'

Kudos to Yahoo! for making progress on this front, even if this is just a baby step in the right direction by the major record labels. DRM won't stop or even meaningfully slow 'Internet piracy.' And after years of pushing for improved compatibility with DRM formats, the record labels have witnessed more, not less, balkanization of music services and devices. If the record labels really care about making sure their customers can play music on the devices of their choice, the only solution that plays-for-sure is an open, unencrypted format like MP3.

(Cross-posted at DeepLinks)

So, Winamp just decided to stop working for me lately. Long stalls at startup, random crashes and more. I still care a lot for you Winamp, and we’ve known each other a long long time, but I think we need to start seeing other people.

I’ve actually been using Foobar2000

for a while now. [...]

Last week I couldn't contact Google. I could get to other sites but not Google. Couldn't even ping it.

My lifeline had been cut. The internet was still there and so were other search engines but the power I take for granted had gone. I actually started to panic and began thinking - how would I continue without Google? Google returned after about twenty seconds but it seemed an eternity.

Information access is an addictive habit - easy to get hooked and hard to kick.

Stop for a moment and imagine what would happen if Google went offline tomorrow.

Grotesque, but you can’t stop looking. This is a museum exhibit here in Atlanta. Friend of mine took the photos t’other day.

bodies exhibit - a photoset on Flickr

Find some way to support bloggers, or stop asking us to support you. I have been working on the problem of getting more money to bloggers for over a year now. The biggest obstacle I see to it is that progressive donors and progressive organizations are worried that if they fund bloggers, bloggers will eventually say something 'crazy,' and the organizations and donors in question will end up looking bad. Fine. If that is their rationale, I can live with that. However, don't then go and tell bloggers that they should stop criticizing Democrats and progressive orgs whenever Dems and progressive orgs do something stupid. If you think we are useful, but generally too unstable to deserve regular funding, don't expect us to be quiet when Democrats and progressive organizations do things that make us mad. Don't think you can keep us in relative poverty because you don't like some of the things we say, but also think that we should shut up when we don't like what you say or do.

I'm trying not to be cynical here, but the quid pro quo in the preceding statement should be obvious to even the most fervent Kossack: Pay up if you expect us to shut up when you screw up.

Though his description of $40,000 a year as 'relative poverty' is asking for trouble, Bowers has proven value as a liberal fundraiser. The netroots donation page on ActBlue, which he administers with Markos Moulitsas and two other bloggers, has pulled in $225,000 from 3,000 individual donors for 12 Democratic candidates. Factor in follow-up donations and four more months, and they could foreseeably make a seven-figure impact on the mid-term elections.

But Bowers, like Moulitsas, doesn't seem to recognize the risk he faces by tying his activism so closely to his capitalism. If people start to believe that his political positions can be bought, his support will sink faster than one of Jerome Armstrong's favorite stocks.
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In the article The Two Sides of a Document we discussed the importance not interfering with the creating mode during the development process. We recognized the fact that in a highly rigid process which involves many documentation to be written during the development, the creative flow is constantly interrupted. We also mentioned Mind Maps as a possible solution for keeping track of ideas and insights throughout the development process (which enables us to maintain a review process along the way), while reducing the overhead of writing a “real document”.

Object Oriented Analysis and Design is one of the most creative activities in the development process. Thus, we might benefit from reducing the overhead of using conventional tools when performing this activity.

Since Mind Mapping is a great technique for open thinking (it doesn’t tie you to a rigid solution or way of thinking) and it promotes both creativity and flexibility, it is a great tool for an activity such as OOAD. This technique is very lightweight. It imposes almost no overhead. This means you can easily capture ideas, manipulate them and refactor the way you perceive the system without having to do a lot of work. This by itself is an enormous advantage, since it enables you to flow. It does not hold you back in the thinking process. You do not have to stop thinking while changing your model.

Flow and flexibility are crucial in the initial stages of creating the design. At these stages, you frequently change aspects of your design. You might even change the way you grasp the entire system. If you are forced to spend time on technicalities (such as changing a UML model) you stop yourself from thinking. Every new idea you have might introduce quite some overhead on these technical details.

A suggested implementation of OOAD using Mind Mapping was recently published at SharpDevelopment.com. This article is the first one in a series of articles exploring Mind Mapping as a tool for various software development activities. The article demonstrate how this technique could be using for OOAD. It also contains a real-world example of analysis done using Mind Mapping.

• Greg Payne spotted a sign on the highway in Norwalk, Connecticut: “Superman Returns Toys.” He asked himself, “Why, was he dissatisfied with them?”

• Amazon.co.uk’s review of the Steve Coogan movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story included this, to the surprise of Paul Hassett: “Nor is the versatile filmmaker a stranger to the post-modern romp, like 24 Hour Party People. In that peon to Manchester’s music scene, Steve Coogan was Factory honcho Tony Wilson.”

• “I always knew that moving up in a corporation was hard work,” Reg Brehaut e-mailed, “but now it has been documented: an editorial in Computerworld (Vol 22, No. 12) refers to their current Salary Survey results, in which ‘Every wrung of the corporate ladder is represented.’”

• Susan Gable found a comment in the Mashpee Enterprise, a newspaper based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that may arouse an image you’d prefer to avoid at the breakfast table: “Coyotes will gladly go for food left in unsecured garbage cans and household pets.”

• Our old friend the misplaced modifier has turned up again, this time in the Netscape News Anchor Commentary last Monday about that building that collapsed in Manhattan: “There was one person inside the building at the time of the explosion, a doctor of Emergency Medicine. After spending about 90 minutes trapped in the rubble, firefighters pulled the doctor to safety.” You’ve got to admire those firefighters; even being buried doesn’t stop ‘em.

• And finally, a couple of headlines that might be errors or could be quiet jokes by bored sub-editors. Michael Keating found this one on the normally extremely sober news@nature.com site: “Bruno the bear: released to the Italian Alps, meets grizzly end in Germany.” And a headline from last Monday’s Guardian: “Rare flower found on site is a plant, says developer.” [A word of explanation is perhaps needed here: a California developer claims a rare protected plant called the Sebastopol meadowfoam found on a site he is about to develop was transplanted there by opponents in order to stop him. The dispute has become known as Foamgate.]

No more Cat's, please

The next release of OS X will debut next month (August 2006). It may be called Leopard, though it's obvious that there aren't many good cat names left and Apple is going to have to move to a different species soon or suffer the embarrassment of a "Tabby" release.

• A more flexible and responsive publishing schedule
  Aren't you tired of sounding the 'deadline drumbeat'? Or staying late on deadline day because *everything* comes in last minute? Or making exceptions for people because of their position in the church? Your website can be updated any time - no deadlines required. Last minute news item? No problem. Finally, a communications medium that can dance to the beat of the content, rather than the other way around.
• Readers on alternate devices
  I was at a holiday get-together with some other folks from my church this past week. The discussion turned to some content on the church website, and one guy said 'Oh I gotta go read that'. He pulled out his wireless-enabled cell phone and within 15 seconds or so was reading the content - all possible because it was web content and not something captured in a PDF. And take note, this was no 18 year old geek. This was a police sergeant, a married father of 3 with one kid out of high school.
• Readers on slow connections
  As part of another church engagement last week I talked with a number of the church members. A high percentage were still using dialup connections, and mentioned that they had issues trying to load PDF content. Regardless of how you feel about PDF's, the truth is they are another layer of technology, another application that has to load, and why? So the user can see text and images - just like in the browser. What if that PDF content was the critical piece, the 'last straw' for a visitor in making a decision to visit the church. Or - to cross the line and come to Christ? Why take the risk?
• More readers using assitive devices
  Yes, PDF's can be made accessible (readable by people using assistive devices on their computer such as a screen reader, but frankly it takes more work so they are less likely to be. Web content is much more likely to be readable by these devices.
• Better searchability
  Yes, Google can index PDF files - but what if you don't use Google?
• Visitors
  Yeah, OK - maybe this is mostly me, but when I see the church website used mainly as a PDF repository I know this a church that's behind the times and just doesn't 'get' the web. And if they don't get the web, they're unlikely to see me darken their door. What if it's not just me?

• Redllar updated fungusHotkey and released a new fungusApp: fungusCPU alpha 0.1.0.
  
• Andymon released a new xPaintClass xModules beta package and posted some more information about the new modules here.
  
• Menufela is a haxie that hides your Mac OS X menubar.
  
• Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all pre-configured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it.
  

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Just posted a new set of photos from the Tanglewood grounds from the last few days of rehearsal for Gurrelieder. Hopefully it will stop raining soon and tomorrow’s will be a bit brighter.

Many of these photos were taken in the formal gardens on the Tanglewood grounds, which are well hidden near the theatre building and seem a bit forgotten (though the hedges are cleanly clipped, they’ve grown to the point of beginning to obscure some pathways).

Incidentally, the photo to the right may help provide some context for why Maestro Levine had difficulty being heard over the rain. Imagine him sitting just inside the building near the open side, with a 120-voice men’s chorus facing him; then imagine a torrential downpour on the outside.

The cruise started in Amsterdam, Holland and sailed to Copenhagen, Denmark for the first stop. The main attraction there was Tivoli Gardens, a very nice amusement park with numerous gardens and restaurants. The next stop would be Stockholm, and the Century headed for the high seas and cruised at roughly 23 miles per hour -- pretty fast for an 815 foot, 70,606 ton ship with 2,500 people on it. The approach to Stockholm was scenic as we passed many small islands to get to the port. In Stockholm, the "old town" is the place to be, where cobblestone pedestrian streets are lined with shops and cafes. Just before departure I hiked up to the city's highpoint and found a micro geocache hidden behind a stone in a rock wall.

After cruising into Helsinki we enjoyed walking in the city center and having lunch at a nice cafe. The next morning we arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia for a two-day stay, beginning with a very early departure for Moscow (see "Flight To The Kremlin").

St. Petersburg is sometimes called the Venice of the North or the Paris of the East and it was the primary destination of the trip. There were many excursions available. Many people toured a palace that was the summer residence of Catherine the Great, a czarina who ruled Russia for about 50 years. There was also a subway ride to a large market, followed by an afternoon tea at a museum restaurant. I did not take advantage of that but I did take a subway ride in Moscow that I neglected to mention in the prior story. The subway stations -- 500 feet below ground -- were immaculate . One of them had 72 beautiful statues along the station walls. A bit different than New York!

The most popular destination in St. Petersburg is The Hermitage, the best landmark in the city and one of the early IBM "e-businesses". There is no substitute for being there in person but the next best thing is to take a virtual tour. The physical tour encompasses a complex of 5 buildings that includes a palace, a very large art museum and galleries of jeweled artifacts that showed the opulence during the reigns of czars and czarinas. Another tour included the grounds of the Imperial Palace built by Peter the Great who ruled in the early 1700s. The palace is noted for the 156 elaborate fountains on the 2,000 acres of gardens.

The next to the last stop of the cruise was at Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, formerly part of the USSR. Tallinn It is located on Estonia's north coast to the Baltic Sea, fifty miles south of Helsinki. In addition to being a really nice medieval city of a half-million people, Tallinn has spawned an information technology industry in recent years including Skype. After leaving the cobblestoned city center where a brass band had played a nice concert, I took a detour on the way back to the ship and found two geocaches, one near the port and one in the woods.

The final stop was a familiar one -- Oslo, where I go every ninety days or so for meetings at Opera Software, where I am a director. This time was not a business trip, however, and although we only had six hours in port, we were able to visit Vigeland Park and see the 212 sculptures that depict many human life stages in bronze and granite. The rain subsided and we were able to have a cup of coffee with a Norwegian friend before heading back to the ship and sailing back to Amsterdam and then on to New York.

Other patrickWeb travel-related stories
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Students not interested in school-sanctioned music downloads: In 2003, colleges began signing exclusive deals with online music services to great fanfare. Nearly three years later, the schools are realizing what we've known all along.(Via Ars Technica.)

Here's the money quote in the original WSJ article:

There is also little consensus among administrators about how successful the services have been in eliminating piracy. Although some say complaints from the recording industry have dropped sharply, no one can tell if that's because fewer students are engaging in illegal file-sharing or if the industry simply doesn't want to go after schools that are spending money to combat the problem. "The RIAA's push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we'll protect you from our lawsuits," says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project's director.

The RIAA denies the charge. "We do sue students and send takedown notices to universities that have legal services all the time," says Mr. Sherman. Universities have a particular responsibility to teach students the value of intellectual property, he adds, because they are "probably the No. 1 creator of intellectual property." And he disputes the idea that the subscription services have fallen out of favor. The number of campuses that subscribe will increase "pretty significantly" in the fall, he says.