Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Adobe Opens Flash 9 Specification (Updated)

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As part of Adobe’s OpenScreen project to get Flash onto more devices they have just openly published the Flash 9 specification, with what appear to be no restrictions on their part (that I can see). The OpenScreen site seems to confirm it, listing their moves as:

  • Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
  • Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
  • Publishing the Adobe Flash® Castâ„¢ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
  • Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

This is great news, suddenly Flash becomes an open standard and the projects to create open source viewers for it suddenly should have a lot of the information that they need. It doesn’t remove all the issues though, some of the codecs that can be employed are patented and can themselves attract licensing fees, but it does appear that they are not required (unlike OOXML, which requires MP3 for audio content for example). It also means that people wanting to implement open tools to create Flash content, or export to Flash, will have their job made a lot easier too.

Hats off to Adobe – better late than never!

Update: This also includes the FLV/F4V specification too!

Found via the ever excellent LWN..

Microsoft demonstrates why DRM is a Bad Idea ™

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From Techdirt:

Playsforsure was so bad that Microsoft didn’t even use it for its own Zune digital media device. Along with that, Microsoft shut down its failed online music store, and now for the kicker, it’s telling anyone who was suckered into buying that DRM’d content that it’s about to nuke the DRM approval servers that let you transfer the music to new machines. That means you need to authorize any songs you have on whatever machine you want — and that’s the only place they’ll be able to reside forever. And, of course, any upgrade to your operating system (say from XP to Vista) and you lose access to your music as well.

So now you find out that with DRM you don’t really own the music you bought, it can get taken away from you very easily, but you won’t get your money back I bet!

Hardy broke my server (updated)

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So, I thought, I’ll test out the latest shinyness in btrfs on my old test box (an Olivetti Netstrada 7000) with 5 SCSI drives. But first, I’ll quickly upgrade to the latest development release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, to get the latest goodness of compilers, etc.

Except now my box won’t boot..

initrd extends beyond end of memory (0x0ffef173 > x01000000)

It looks like the kernel is getting the memory size wrong, but sadly even forcing it with the boot option mem=256M doesn’t do anything to fix it. Fortunately the kernel that comes with Gutsy still works on it..

Logged as bug #219868, but no response yet.

Update: This appears to be a bug from the mainline kernel, I’ve reproduced it with 2.6.25 and am in contact with the i386 boot code maintainer about it.

Norways OOXML “yes” vote was down to ONE person

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It appears through a process of elimination of the nearly 30 attendees at the Standard Norway meeting on OOXML the decision to vote yes was made unilaterally by the vice-president of Standard Norway.

When the original attendees could not reach consensus on 8 of the 12 comments (having agreed that 2 were not satisfactorily resolved and 2 were) he dismissed 23 attendees. When the remaining 7 could not agree he dismissed another 4 and when the remaining 2 could not agree…

The VP thereupon declared that there was still no consensus, so the decision would be taken by him.

He voted “yes”.

So this one bureaucrat, a man who by his own admission had no understanding of the technical issues, had chosen to ignore the advice of his Chairman, of 80% of his technical experts, and of 100% of the K185 old-timers.

Ross Anderson’s “Security Engineering”

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Back in 2006 Ross Anderson (Professor of Security Engineering at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory) announced on his blog that he had published the full contents of the first edition of his book “Security Engineering” in PDF format. The book covers a whole range of security issues from creating, managing, accrediting & breaking the mechanisms themselves through security politics and into topics like DRM.

Now the second edition of Security Engineering is about to arrive (published April 14th in the US, Amazon say stock expected in 1-4 weeks) and mine is on order already (along with a copy of Linus Torvalds Just for Fun).. 🙂

Google AdSense adverts activated

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Well, I asked for feedback on putting adverts on the previously and got all positive responses, so I’ve now activated Google AdSense text-only adverts using the excellent no-adverts-for-friends WordPress plugin.

So, if you don’t like adverts, just leave an appropriate comment somewhere and you won’t see them. Either that or use Firefox and the great Adblock Plus plugin!

If for some reason you want to see adverts after leaving a comment I’m afraid you’ll need to go and delete any cookies for www.csamuel.org from your browser first.

OpenMOKO GTA02 FreeRunner pricing announced

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The OpenMoko Project has announced the pricing for their GTA02 FreeRunner phone that is designed to run Linux:

The FreeRunner will ship from Openmoko.com at $399. For early customers
I’m looking at throwing in a few free things. More details later. […] The debug board will be available as a separate product for $99 USD.

There will be a 10 pack for bulk orders (some people locally are already soliciting for people to muck in on one):

For these people we created a 10Pack. instead of 399 per phone, we will
charge 369 per phone.

It’s not 3G (but then again, neither is the iPhone, unless the rumours about the Aussie version are right)..