WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:

• While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall...
• Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
• "People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting," says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up...

There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.

I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?

BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.

Ten for February 22^nd

1. Crooked Fingers - Dignity & Shame  I think Crooked Fingers is the only band with multiple releases where I own every single one of their albums. Well, except for this one - I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. Mark preordered and got an autographed copy. They play KEXP today. Stream the disc on the Merge site.
   
   
2. Enon - Lost Marbles and Exploded Evidence  Touch and Go's got a classy new website. They've got an MP3.
   
   
3. Jeff Hanson  Out on Kill Rock Stars. They've got an MP3.
   
   
4. Ida - Heart Like A River  Is Ida a Providence band? That's been confusing me lately. Their new disc is out on Polyvinyl. They've got an MP3.
   
   
5. Iron And Wine - Woman King  Check out Joe's review on 75 or Less. There's an MP3.
   
   
6. I ♥ Huckabees  
   
   
7. Karate - In The Fishtank  I had no idea this was being released. A nice suprise.
   
   
8. Mogwai - Government Commisions  Their live BBC material from the past few years.
   
   
9. Robbers On High Street - Tree City  
   
   
10. M. Ward - Transistor Radio  I've only heard a few tracks from the radio, but they were CRAZY good. Once again, you can stream the disc on Merge's site.

Five for February 15^th

• Camper Van Beethoven - Discotheque: Live Chicago  I'm not really sure why I chose this disc to link. Most of their stuff is available for download via archive.org.
  
  
• Dread Leppelin - Chickens And Ribs  I know the joke should be old by now, but it still cracks me up. It features a guest appearance by Billy Zoom.
  
  
• Mahi Mahi - Remove Your Body  This came out a few weeks ago and I forgot to mention it. I always bitch about the music scene in Providence, but when someone releases an album, I forget to write about it on the site. Sorry about that.
  
  
• They Might Be Giants - Here Come The ABCs  Speaking of children's music, have you seen the Pancake Mountain site? I've probably already linked it, but the Fiery Furnaces "Mouse House, Moose Hoose" clip is too crazy to not mention several times.
  
  
• Wedding Present - Take Fountain  I wanted this album to be absolutely amazing, but I'm having trouble getting into it. I'm gonna give it a few more tries - I can sense that there's some great material hidden in there.

• SharpE:
  
  
  
  • SharpE Beta Release - 0.7.0.1.
    
  
  
• Litestep:
  
  
  
  • xPaintClass 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
    
  • Losi Theme Contest at ls-themes.org.
    
  
  
• BB4Win:
  
  
  
  • BBInterface 0.9.89.
    
  • bbFoomp 1.5, bbFoomp 1.6.
    
  
  
• Geoshell:
  
  
  
  • Future Development Goals forum thread.
    
  
  

• Inkscape 0.44.
  
• VLC Media Player 0.8.5.
  
• ScummVM 0.9.0.
  
• Opera 9.
  
• Crystal Cursor 0.2alpha.
  

4 comments
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Project Distributor: Introduction to our distributed web service model
So Darren and I have put in about a month now on the Project Distributor website. We are starting to reach that critical point where the site is pretty cool, we have plenty of users, we are thinking about running out of the allowable bandwidth for the demo site, and all sorts of other things that tend to happen all at once. Now, there are some problems you can design yourself out of, and others that you really have to throw some money at. Our latest enhancements can be summed up in a short list.

• Buy a domain name and start hosting in two places. Project Distributor.com should be up fairly soon to accompany MarkItUp.ASPXConnection.com
• Have people host their own versions of the application. And that means a big source release is in the future. At this juncture risk fragmentation.
• Design away fragmentation with a series of ingenious features that will make everyone want to use the application at hand.

I'm here to talk about the last two, since Darren already bought some additional hosting for us. The concept will be to release a fairly stable version of the application so that groups can host tools, code snippets and other source/binary releases for their teams to share. The application is very lightweight and easy to set-up, so it won't require a bunch of hand holding and configuration to get up and running initially. From our standpoint we solve a number of issues at this juncture. The most obvious problem is what we classify the Lutz Roeder use case. .NET Reflector is the key type of application we'd love to get hosted because it makes it a bit easier to find, not that Google does a bad job, we'd just like to get a bunch of tools in one place, with some features for feedback, new releases, and some cool client tools for publishing.

Now, Lutz would put his application up and he'd whack our bandwidth. He is the prime example of someone that should be hosting their own tools, but possibly using our interface. He doesn't have to, we haven't even asked him yet in fact, but if he decides to do so, then all the better for the web application moving forward. Users such as Lutz probably want a certain level of control over their own sites as well in terms of branding and controlling access. This will only come from hosting the application yourself (and maybe some other features we'll see later).

From a security standpoint many teams will also want to host their own servers. In this manner they get control over the hardware their sources and binaries are stored on. They can accept tools up to any maximum (instead of our imposed limits) and provide unlimited download bandwidth if they choose. Or they can take advantage of our gating mechanisms to make sure their server doesn't get overloaded with downloads and open their tools up to the public.

The only major problem from this source release is that the initial problem we were trying to solve, promoting the visibility of tools, starts to erode. You see, the more sites that host their own tools the harder it is to find the right site with the right tools. We are trying to solve this in a number of ways. The first is allowing users of a site to store bookmarks to other projects and external resources. This is only a temporary fix, because it still doesn't allow a mass search and categorization infrastructure required to truly promote the visibility of the tools being hosted. We have to come up with a solution that brings all of the sites, but we don't want to create just another portal or gateway site. That is boring. Now you have the background, so how will we solve the fragmentation issue?

Designing away Fragmentation
I won't lie to you, I've implemented this model several times, but have never had a project that was capable of really showing off the feature set we are about to talk about. The concept is to unify all of the sites, by allowing them to easily manage views of data from all of the sites combined. Each site owns their own content, maintains their own users, but in turn peers with other sites to obtain additional content.

Web services provide a dual feature set in this model. At the current level they allow us to generate really great client-side tools for managing, well, your tools! We have a drop-client target right now so you can drag and drop new releases to existing projects in just a few seconds. Some new tools for working with build systems to promote the source code up to the server are in the works. We natively integrate with your RSS reader and will have our own alert services in the drop client just in case you don't have one. There aren't any search or local caching features, but those are also planned for the drop client so you can background download new releases, just like Windows Update.

That doesn't solve fragmentation though, that just makes me realize how much work I have left to do. The second feature of web services lies in the ability for each site to aggregate data from the many other sites that are out there hosting the application. Remember, everything we make available at the service layer can also now be remoted. The more caching we put into the data layer, the more performant the entire process will be, and we can even tune the caching depending on whether the data layer is merging off-site contents or database contents.

Peer Sites
I'm sure there is another name out there somewhere, but for the past 2 years I've called these peer sites. Each instance of the project distributor will have a number of options allowing for adding peers that will be aggregated and added to the local collection while users traverse the site. The first step is to get the peer sites running in a read-only mode. And set up some really great options so the entire process can be controlled. This solves a number of use case scenarios for us including the following.

• Fragmentation can be mitigated through proper configuration. If everyone aggregates 5 or 6 sites into their peers, then we have a huge network now of interconnected peers and users can pick and choose which one they use for purposes of searching the tool network.
• Peer connections are unidirectional or bidirectional. Access is configurable. Teams can include tools from external sites while keeping their own tools completely private. They can exist behind a DMZ or a private network.
• Users can host their own personal tool sites in the same manner as the team sites. They can configure statically which projects to make available even. In this way you can build a collection of personal tools that you love, and have the latest information automatically update on your machine for your perusal.

Peer sites solve plenty of visibility issues, but that is pretty much all they solve for now. We still want to enable all of the features available to the client tools. After all, the web service methods and proxy infrastructure is in place to do so much more.

Master Sites
Well, we want to solve another problem. That is where you edit your data. A master site is where the users, groups, projects, etc... are all hosted, but thankfully, you'll be able to log in through any site (assuming it is peered with your master site) and then edit your own projects and such. This is a remote principal context and is actually one of the cooler features associated with the peering functionality of project distributor. We'll be fully secure in our login and credentials region, but unfortunately we'll still be transferring data in open text in the short term. Maybe we'll fix that with enough push back.

Clone Sites
A clone site is where we empower a site to act on behalf of a master site. For me, my local project distributor is currently cloned to the main project distributor site. What does this mean? Right now it means I get all of the data from PD, and that users who trust my site can log-in to their project distributor accounts and cross edit data. Pretty nice if you ask me. It basically means you can fully host a project distributor installation and never, ever have to install a database server. Users can just act on behalf of a remote server.

Configuration
This isn't a super reusable model like some of those you read about in the popular software architecture books, and it probably accounts for why master/peer/clone sites don't exist very often. The considerations for every option are heavily customized to the problem being solved, and I'm sure we'll be making modifications or updating the configuration context for a while. Right now you can independently configure your primary server type, whether master or clone, whether or not users can use you for a pass-through authentication and edit server, whether or not web services are enabled so peers can enable unidirectional only communications, setting up asymmetric security credentials. Man, you name it and it is in there

For the peer section we have full and selective modes. A full peer pulls all of the data on the remote peer locally for display (in a delay caching manner, just like you'd expect, unless you set up a scheduled pull which is also possible). I expect most people to configure full peers because they really are really easy to set up and maintain. A selective peer is where you specify the groups/projects that you want to display. This is best for a user setting up their own personal toolbox who wants to select a couple of items from many different peers.

We have an extensively exhaustive configuration module already and we'll be continuously adding more to it. The concept is to easily modify your toolbox to your own designs without having to touch the code. If we haven't given you enough options to satisfy your need then we'll have to make something up, because I'm just about running out ;-)

These are the basics of the model ideas I have for project distributor. That doesn't mean Darren doesn't have other great ideas happening as well. He has some pretty extensive UI enhancements, but I'll let him talk about those. We even have another product idea that is kind of a bolt-on for project distributor, but that is probably a couple of months out putting it into next year. Unfortunately we have too many ideas for our own good right now. Better than not having any ideas I guess. I'll try to drop some code with some of the ideas above, that way you can get a look at how the entire system is implemented. I have some diagrams as well, but I'm far too tired right now to add the img tags to the HTML view.

How to rip and compress DVDs in Mac OS X

A couple of months ago, I got a Mac Mini* and immediately (of course) hooked it up to my TV so I could use it as a media center. (That’s probably a good topic for a separate post.)

Since then, I’ve ripped my DVD collection onto the Mac so any movie I own is only a few clicks away. Here’s how you can do the same thing:

1. Insert a DVD in your Mac’s DVD drive

These directions are optimized for feature films, not TV shows or other things you might find on a DVD. However, with a little creativity you should be able to adapt these instructions to serve your purposes.

2. Use MacTheRipper to do a “Main Feature Extraction” to your Mac

I use MacTheRipper first because it allows me to archive a raw VIDEO_TS folder that I can re-compress later if I want. For more detail about doing a simple DVD-to-disk rip, see the first half of Mark Pilgrim’s excellent how-to video.

Here’s what my MacTheRipper settings look like:

3. Use HandBrake to compress the movie

This part is critical because there aren’t many programs (including Front Row) that know what to do with a raw VIDEO_TS folder. But nearly any video player (again, including Front Row) can handle an MP4 file, so that is what we will convert this movie into.

In HandBrake, I use the XviD encoder with a target size of 1000MB (about 1GB). This produces a very watchable picture at a reasonable file-size.

Here’s what my Handbrake settings look like (click to enlarge):

Put the video file in your Movies folder, and enjoy!

You can obviously keep your movies wherever you want, but I keep mine in the Movies folder (under my home directory) so Front Row can access them.

Give it a try!

Feel free to try this yourself, and let me know if you have questions!

* * *

* The Mini was a gift from my generous Grandpa, who you may recognize from his occasional comments on this site.

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Mark Steyn, Hugh Hewitt & me
Oh my!:

"HH: So Mark Steyn, do you think the American political electorate is watching this, and understanding again what we talk about a lot. There's a serious party in the United States. It might not be always right. It isn't always right. It makes mistakes. But there's also a fundamentally feckless and silly party, and it's the Democratic Party, and it's the political left.

MS: Yeah, well, you know, a Canadian blogger, Kathy Shaidle, who I like tremendously, her website. She said you know, Alan Colmes has said he's agnostic on the matter of whether 9/11 was an inside job. Now let's take him at his word.

If these people, high up in the Democratic Party, seriously thought the president of the United States had committed, deliberately killed thousands of Americans...you know, Kathy said if that happen in her country, in Canada, she wouldn't want to live in that country anymore. She'd get her passport, she'd get her stuff together, and she'd get out of there.

And the fact that you can sort of say Bush killed thousands of Americans, and then sit out on your cafe in San Francisco, sipping your venti latte, as if that's just something normal... I mean, this is pathetic. There's a disease in the Democratic Party that they've got to cure, because it's not good for the political system."


***
Well, and my big thrill for today was gonna be cleaning the oven and watching Wasp Woman on the Drive-In Channel. Thanks to James and Deborah for alerting me about the media.
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Vitrium Develops Secure DRM System for PDF Documents
Vitrium Systems has developed a secure online distribution system for PDFs that allows the publisher to control who accesses the document and reports back on who read it.

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