Steve Jobs on DRM

Steve Jobs writes some thoughts on the state of digital music which cause me to smile quite a lot. Maybe it’s time to download iTunes afterall.

Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.  For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.  The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company.  EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Drowning Torrents

3fl run a great file mirror service for PIPE-connected ISPs in a variety of Australian states, but they still have .torrent files in their mirror. Just for kicks I tried it out… predictably (well, predictable based on my past experience of P2P) it maxed out at a bit under 200KB/s, which, uhh, sucks.

I went back to the mirror and started downloading from it directly, and all of a sudden my 1 hour long download became a six-minute special. I’m holding a shiny Ubuntu CD here in my hand that would still be downloading thanks to the brilliance that isn’t torrent-style P2P downloads.

I think I’ve had one or two lightning-fast P2P experiences in my life, but, really, they just don’t seem to be able to compete with a maxed out link on a good FTP server!

Premiere Pro 2 crash

First time I’ve managed to do that and it was something really simple. I was dragging a bezier handle too far away from a keyframe and the component that was drawing the curve crashed… wasn’t even anything complicated! Goes to show that no matter how complex an app’s task is, it can still crash on (relatively) simple errands. I found it interesting. Probably you won’t :P

Ay Eff Kay

Going away to Orient Point again for a few days. Catching a train in about 45 minutes. Spent the morning hacking WordPress into submission without SSH or FTP access on the Matthias website. It looks ugly as anything but its butt got kicked so hard and it’s now behaving lots better. Design will come later (it should always come first, in hand with IA and usability). Still we’re working towards something useful for the not-too-distant future — it’s nothing spectacular, but it does do plenty the old site didn’t, and giving people a content management tool is a great thing in terms of culture-changing how people think about what a website is and ensuring it stays up to date.

1st ever Gmail spam?

In my account at least, I think.

Note that it displays perfectly and sans any word obfuscation/misspelling as is usual for these things — though I would hasten to add that anyone that follows up aforementioned spam is unlikely to have intelligence enough to avoid something with shifty spelling.

It’s achieved by embedding arbitrary characters in the middle of a word in a span element, and then floating these to the right. It’s only a two-part division at this stage, so it’s fairly trivial to break up keywords into their component parts and match either side of spans occurring in the middle of a word — hardly common in respectable markup. Even if there were more divisions, the fact that they occur without even a space either side of the element should be a giveaway.

The other notable feature is the inversion of “web!master at example dot org (remove the exclamation mark)” concept — here, they’re using it to avoid immediate blacklisting based on a reported domain.

This will in all probability be dealt with soon by people who know far more about it than I, but I thought it an interesting enough development to be worth mention, particularly in a “explaining the absurdity of their markup” sense — this constitutes, for anyone significant who reads this, absolutely no reason for reconsidering the (limited) CSS given to campaign authors as it is best dealt with at a markup level alone.

In terms of minimal impact to legitimate email, this is the only way forward — contrary to what Microsoft might have you believe with their recent brain-deadness concerning Outlook 2007′s rendering engine. (Though we’re all still guessing at the reasoning behind this, and I’m falling closer to the anti-trust separation theory than anything related to security/spam prevention, etc.)