« January 26, 2004 | Main | February 02, 2004 »
January 27, 2004
P2P Swarming
This Thursday Dan Zappala from the University of Oregon will be speaking at the BYU CS Dept. Colloquium (11am, 1170 TMCB) on his research on Swarming: Scalable Content Delivery for the Masses (PDF). I wish I was going to be there since this is an area that interests me, but I'm going to be in the mountains, in the snow with 350, 14-18 year old kids.
08:18 PM | Recommend This | Print This
IT Strategies for DRM
I need a little help. Suppose you'd been asked to address the CTO organization of a major (over 125,000 employees) company on digital rights management. What would you tell them? There's the usual, technical talk stuff:
- What is DRM, why are we talking about it?
- The current state of DRM from a technical standpoint
- Issues and challenges for IT organizations
- Challenges or consequences of public policy issues surrounding DRM
- How and what should we do as best practice with respect to DRM
- Challenges and opportunities for information management
But that hardly seems to capture the boiling controversy surrounding this subject. If you're working in a large IT organization, what is it you need to know about DRM? How does it affect your work and how you support the business? A passionate speech about the evils of the RIAA and MPAA isn't really what these people need to hear. They need to hear what strategy they should pursue as an IT organization and why. Give me your ideas. I'll post a summary later and let you know what I come up with.
11:24 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Martian Storage Management
The problem affecting the Spirit rover on Mars is one that would be familiar to any earth-bound CIO: storage management.
The space required in the rover's Ram memory to manage the data files stored in its flash memory was more than anticipated due to the build-up of files, Ms Trosper told a news conference. "We have lots and lots of files on the spacecraft," she said. "We've been all the way through cruise [the journey through space], we've been using flash for that whole time. We have some cruise files on the file system.From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Files 'overloaded' Mars probe
Referenced Tue Jan 27 2004 09:29:50 GMT-0700
The good news, of course is that its a problem that can apparently be fixed. Anyone with a full hard drive knows the drill: sift through the files and find those that can be deleted. The bad news is that it had to happen in the first place.
It often seems to me that operating systems stopped evolving in significant ways back in the 80s. Operating systems exist to manage system resources. Yet, they often do a poor job of managing one of the most important system resources: the file system. A small example: every system administrator knows that one of the first things you do on a new system is to set up cronjobs to manage log files. Why don't operating systems come configured out of the box to manage this problem?
Another example is backup. Setting up a good back-up system is one of the fundamental tasks of the IT shop and the enterprise continues to pay too much for such solutions in terms of hardware and software, certainly, most more expensively, in terms of people and lost work.
At any rate, you can bet that storage management will be a bigger check-list on future interplanetary probe projects. Meanwhile back on Mars, mission controllers are purging unused files from Opportunity's FlashROM before it has similar problems and preparing to upload some test software to confirm that files are what's causing the problem.
09:48 AM | Recommend This | Print This
egrips
A company called egrips sent me a sample of their product, a non-slide surface you stick on your cell phone or PDA. They come in various sizes and styles to fit various phone and PDA models. They also come in some outrageous colors and designs. Most of them are a little too outrageous for a middle-aged, conservative guy like me, so I was glad they sent black. I frequently set my phone on the center console in my truck, so these will come in handy. All in all, not a big thing, but I'm happy to not have my phone flying around while I drive. One thing I did think was funny was the words: patent pending. Can you really patent the idea of putting sticky stuff on a surface so an object doesn't slide around? Seems this must have been thought of sometime when rocks were new.
08:47 AM | Recommend This | Print This
The Power of the Penguin
Netcraft is an online tool that lets you determine what Web server/OS combination a Web site is running. Doc Searls used it to compile a list of the Web server/OS combinations of the Presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Republicans are taking a beating because the Bush/Cheney campaign runs IIS on Windows 2000. How embarrassing! :-) Well, just to show that not all Republicans run Windows, here's the Netcraft data for www.windley.com.
On a more serious note, Netcraft is a good little tool to have hanging on your toolbelt. There's all kinds of interesting data there. For example, you can see the history of www.windley.com and see that sometime between August and December, I moved www.windley.com from a FreeBSD server hosted at Verio to a Linux box hosted at FiberNet. You can also clearly see, for example, that Utah.gov used to be hosted on the State's network and now its not.