March 18, 2008
Vista forgets how many monitors I have
Today was kinda funny and annoying.
End of the day, packing up to leave the office, I discovered that Vista lost one of my monitors in my dual monitor configuration.
I asked the office mates if anyone has seen that. Sure enough, they had it happen to them last week.
A quick reboot solved the problem, but I never had that problem with XP.
Posted by Peter at 08:44 PM
March 15, 2008
My Journey upgrading to Vista
I upgraded to Microsoft Vista this week on my office computer. It wasn't as bad as some in the tech media would have you believe.
All the applications I use seemed to work fine, here the list of things I use in my daily office computing:
1. MS Office Apps
2. MediaCoder
3. Putty
4. Pidgin
5. FireFox
6. VideoLan
7. Quicktime
8. Trillian
Also, the bonus is that my old desktop gets promoted to my primary Linux desktop running Ubuntu.
My only question, where is the "WOW" in the Microsoft commercials? I was unimpressed with UI improvements and I turned off the annoying asking me security thingy as I am admin on it.
Posted by Peter at 04:35 PM
July 15, 2006
Newest BitTorrent Improvements
Implemented some new changes to the DownloadRadio.org BitTorrent infrastructure that reduced seeder system memory requirements and improved client performance. Who says there is no "Free Lunch".
Posted by Peter at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2005
BitTorrent content for the video iPod, Apple turns a blind eye
It was inevitable, pirated versions of Movies and TV shows have shown up in iPod video format on PirateBay.
So one has to ask, is Apple secretly supporting content piracy as way to sell more video iPods? The deals they made with ABC, Disney, Pixar was just a sham.
The real answer is the ads that show up when you search for iPod content on the PirateBay site. Yep, iPods ads show up.
The other item to note is that Apple hasn’t really discouraged the illegal downloading of Films and TV on the iPod yet.
Posted by Peter at 07:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2005
No mention in the Fortune BT article
In an earlier post, I talked about Dan Roth from Fortune interviewing me for a forthcoming article.
Looks like I didn't make it into his piece.
Here is the story, it's well written and presents some good information. Good job Dan!
Posted by Peter at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2005
Interview with Fortune Magazine
Dan Roth from Fortune Magazine interviewed me today on background for a story that he is doing on Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent.
Hey Bram, you should hire me dude!
Posted by Peter at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2005
Opteron Processor
I have been using the Opteron chip with Debian AMD64 distro for about 3 months now.
I have to say I am very impressed with the overall performance and conversion from a 32 bit Intel to a 64 bit AMD enviroment,
Here is a peek at this bad boy.
Dual Processor
Here is whole set of photos
The Opterons throw off a fair amount of heat, but less than the 3Ghz and 4Ghz Intel flavors
These chips will give Intel a run for their money.
Posted by Peter at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2005
BT Seed 4.0 is great, Tracker issues
I am the loving the new BT 4.0.1 seeder application
Seems to connect to the tracker fast and service clients as quickly
On the tracker front, this was a bad month. Server died a few times and the "parse directory" function seem to be slow for adding new content.
In addtions, we started to see a problems with the iPodderX client. It seems that the podcasting client doesn't do a good job handling error conditions on the BT side.
Trying to work with August Trometer to see how and why the iPodderX client is stalling.
Posted by Peter at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
Newest 4.0.1 BitTorrent
I finally upgraded the DownloadRadio site seeders with BT 4.0.1
It seems very solid from the previous version.
Planning some more upgrades to the torrent network this month too
Posted by Peter at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2005
New 4.0.0 BitTorrent
I have upgraded my super seeders machines to the newest version of BitTorrent in my BT network for the DownloadRadio and DownloadMedia sites.
Bram Cohen, the author of BitTorrent, promises better performance and a license change to the BitTorrent Open Source License
I'll have to read through this to see if there are any problem with it.
Performance and stability are my main objectives as part of my BT network.
Still looking for that multi-tracker support for additional stability in the network.
Posted by Peter at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
Seattle War Drive - Seattle Times Article
Helped coordinate a War Drive of Seattle with some 100 University of Washington students
Here is the Seattle Times Article
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002183464_wifimap18.html
Posted by Peter at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2005
Podcasting Dinner Audio
Tim Bourquin has edited the audio of the dinner last month.
Update,
Someone at the dinner didn't know that it was being recorded for public broadcast and didn't want it posted to the net.
Sorry, If you want a copy for your personal archives, contact me directly.
Posted by Peter at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2005
UW Wardrive Maps
The University of Washington Wardriving project is complete and Drew from WifMaps.com produced the large scale plots of the 100 students we had wardriving Seattle.
Here is the Slashdot post.
And the WifiMaps.com post.
My contribution to this little project was to assist Phil Howard and Alice Marwick to make sure the students could do the scans without too much help. Alice made some great instructions.
Links to the Bit Torrent files that my DownloadRadio.org infrastructure is hosting.
http://www.wifimaps.com/downloads/WiFiMaps-UW-Prod-Vector.zip.torrent
http://www.wifimaps.com/downloads/WiFiMaps-UW-Prod-Raster.zip.torrent
I delivered over 1.5TB of data in less the 24 hours.
Posted by Peter at 06:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2005
Podcaster Dinner
Tim Bourquin and his brother Emile (The Podcast Brothers) brought together a diverse group of podcasters for a dinner in Seattle at the Icon Grill. Doug Kaye, Eric Rice, Phil Torrone, Jake Ludington, Alex Williams, Rob Greenlee, Michael Geoghegan, myself and Chris Pirillo. I had a great time talking shop and making some new acquaintances. Pirillo put up a video and Rice posted some pictures from the podcast dinner.
Posted by Peter at 08:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2005
On the job hunt
I am still on the job search.
Looking for something in the area of multimedia.
Specifically, a leadership position as the field of multimedia delivery to set top devices, electronic programming guides, and P2P delivery of content. Preferably a start up that is well funded. Or at least less than 1000 employees. The stale corporate mind creeps in over a 1000 heads.
Just finished a set of 7 interviews and two trips to California with a company. I didn't get the job. They gave a laughably lame(so we don't get sued)excuse for not hiring me.
But hey, I got two free trips to Cali out of the deal.
The new tech and management resumes I just rewrote are getting me new leads.
Posted by Peter at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 05, 2005
WebTalk Radio show
Did a segment on Rob and Dana Greelee's WebTalk Radio show today.
Rob and Dana were interested in having me expand on my thoughts on DRM from my new years post.
We were pretty high energy on the show.
They also did an interview with the creators of the Googlezon flash presentation. If you haven't seen this your should.
Posted by Peter at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 01, 2005
Happy New Year
Here is to a wonderous new year!
Been thinking about predictions for technology and media in 2005.
Here goes:
1. Podcasting and VidCasting is going to take off this year.
Adam Curry of MTV fame started the podcasting idea but it will be embraced and co-opted by the mainstream media.
The new revolution will be the widescale adoption of RSS/BitTorrent feeds for audio and video content.
While this isn't a new idea of using RSS/BT, BroadbandReports.com
talked about it in March 2004, Podcasting is the thing that jumpstarted the movement, adoption and development of tools/applications to facilitate a RSS/BT transaction. Also, Harvard Law, explained the RSS/BT concept really well.
Enter "Vidcasting" the delivery of short and feature length video programs via RSS and BitTorrent
Couple this with a Tivo like device and bang! Instant content on demand community.
The demise of Suprnova and the pending litigation of LokiTorrent brings up my second prediction.
2. DRM will die a slow and painful death
Don't get me wrong, I think the rights holders need to be paid but the price points are outragous for digital music and movies.
The reasonable price for a music download is more like .25-49 cents per song. But that wouldn't leave any profit for the music label. Right but then they have been screwing the artist since Cole Porter and Scott Joplin has been writing music and before.
Movies are worse, DVD rental prices are at about $2.99. The cost to digitally delivery a feature length movie is about .25 cents. So the reasonable price should be about $1.00-$1.99 per movie.
So why is DRM gonna die?
Napster created an entire culture of Generation Z & Y folks that got used to not paying for content. Even though they knew it was wrong, the thinking was that this stuff was inflated in price anyway, so taking some of it for free was just leveling the scales. And besides, we all knew the record and film studios were gouging us at the retail outlets. Digital is always orders of magnitude less expensive than the analog experience.
Another reason DRM isn't gonna fly is what it costs per DRM transation. It cost content owner about .25 cents for each DRM token to be sent to the player to unlock the content. This is based on a DRM service providers pricing of 10,000 DRM transactions per month.
The final reason, Microsoft DRM. Microsoft has done a resonable job of converting a percentage of some of the film companies to embrace their DRM. In fact, I participated in a meeting with the top 4 adult entertainment companies with Microsoft in 2002 at the Internext Conference. MS did everything in their power to make sure it was as painless as possible to convert to a DRM model. So long as nobody found out that MS was helping out the porn business. Today, 75% or more of the adult entertainment online content is using MS DRM.
But the major studios are afraid of MS, so they started MovieLink with the idea an alternative to using MS technologies. But in the end started using MS DRM.
Sony Pictures hates MS. They would sooner chew off their left arm than use a MS product.
But business realities are that unless someone spends a billion or so in software development to develop something else, we stuck with the MS DRM.
Here is another business reality, unless the price points for content are low enough and the barriers to using DRM are flexible enough to the consumer. The alternative is to just download this stuff off the net for free and take the risk.
More predictions tomorrow.
Posted by Peter at 03:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 09, 2004
Upgraded to MoveableType
I decided to dump the GreyMatter Blog software and make the move to MoveableType
GM has been kinda clunky for a while and it was time to make the move.
I am on the learning curve so, if you have some suggestions, I am open to hear them. If you have used MT then let me know the tricks.
Things I am looking for with MT:
1. Groovy way in integrate my photo gallery and multimedia.
2. Add new menu feature(I am sure it's in the MT software or on the site, I just need to look.)
Posted by Peter at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)