Year: 2003

Frank just read in a German magazine that Windows itself might be in violation of the DMCA.  This is classic.  Earlier this month a college student pointed out that you could defeate (er, circumvent) the copy protection built in to some CDs by SunComm by pressing the shift key.  That’s right, lots and lots of DRM out the door just by pressing the shift key when you insert the CD.

It follows that Windows is a tool that circumvents copy protection technology.  It is then in violation of the DMCA because it is a copy protection circumvention device.  How classic is that?

DPReview, Imaging Resource and others have info on Sony’s credit card style five megapixel $550ish digital camera.  It uses the same style of in-camera optics that make the Minolta Dimage X series of cameras so cool.

I like the fact that they put a Zeiss lens on that puppy.  Good specs all around, but I’m worried about the possibility of vignetting like the Dimage X/Xi/Xt’s tend to do.  We shall see.

Imaging Resource has the info on the new Sony DSC-U40, Sony’s latest itty bitty sleek camera.  I think that Sony is missing the point a little bit here.  They started the U series with the U10, which is pretty much a 1.3 megapixel version of my 2 megapixel U20.  Then they came out with the U30 which is a little bigger with a mirror so you can take stylish self portraits.  The U60 is a weird all weather model.

It looks like the U40 is a good bit more compact (my U20 is still a subcompact camera and it is almost a year old now), as it runs on Memory Stick Duo.  I didn’t see any size specs in the press release, but you can bet that it’s a good bit smaller.  Street price should end up around $200.  These are all good things, except that it’s still a 2 megapixel camera.

2 megapixels is fine, and it’s probably a good sweet spot in super duper compact cameras, but I’d really love to see something in the U20/U40 size range that was maybe even just a little more high rez (is 3.34 too much to ask?) and costs a little bit more.  Given that the U series started with 1.3 and pretty quickly moved up to 2.0, the next logical step would be 3+ megapixel, and soon.

I hope that Sony continues to innovate in this awesome product line.  Sadly my DSC-U20 doesn’t get as much use nowadays, as my cel phone has a low quality but really convenient camera.  Continuing pressures from the cameraphone market will definately dictate lots of competition and lower margins in the $200ish price range.

Bottom Line: As long as the DSC-U40 lives up to its heritage, it will definitely be a good buy at $200.  If you’re looking for a zoom, look elsewhere.  This camera just has a relatively wide angle 33mm lens, and that’s okay.  If it’s anything like the DSC-U20’s lens, you’ll deal with it.

I was looking for some downtime tonight, but there really isn’t much on television.  I wasn’t really in the mood for any of the DVDs that are kicking around.  I don’t have anything of note in VHS format in front of me.

What did I do?

I pointed my browser to my favorite repository of TV show torrent files and started downloading a CSI episode from the first season.  Then the phone rang.  About five minutes or so later I wandered back to the computer.  The file was 76% done with just a few minutes later.  In the amount of time that it took me to write this, the file has finished downloading.  Now I’m burning it to a VCD so that I can pop it in the DVD player.

I can guarantee you that a year or two ago the bandwidth and the tech (Thanks, Bram!) would not have been ready for something like this.  Now it Just Works.  Pardon me while I hop offline for a bit and watch my tv show (01×07 for those keeping score).

Kill Bill

I saw Kill Bill Volume 1 over the weekend.  I enjoyed it in a queasy blood and body count kind of way.  At the end of Volume 1, I cursed Tarantino for splitting it in two.  It’s understandable, but I still want to see the other half NOW!

According to fanboy site comingsoon.net, Kill Bill Vol. 2 will be out February 20, 2004.  At least I don’t have to wait too long.

I was curious how the movie did, so I hopped over to Yahoo Movies to check the box office stats.  $12 million on the second week is respectable, but kind of dissappointing.  In two weeks its managed to pick up over $43 million, which again is not horrible, but I expected more out of such a good movie (IMHO of course).  I guess the gore/death/blood factor was pretty high up there.  I wonder what had to be cut in order to squeeze in to an ‘R’ rating.  I can’t wait to see the four disc unrated directors cut collections edition on DVD.

Lost in Translation

While I was at Yahoo Movies, I decided to check in on another movie that I quite enjoyed a few weeks ago: Lost in Translation.  It’s one of those movies that isn’t destined to be a big money maker.  I’ll bet somebody looses some money on the project, but it was an excellent Sundance/Cannes style flick.

Lost in Translation showed up at number 11 in the box office this weekend, six weeks after release.  It pulled in just under $2 million and has grossed just under $21 million so far.  What is impressive about the weekend gross is that it was shown in only 771 theatres, yielding approximately $2470 per theatre.  The #10 movie this week (The Rundown) hit about $2.8 million in 2099 theatres.  That’s only $1325 per theatre.  The release below (Secondhald Lions) yields about $1170 per theatre.

So Lost in Translation isn’t doing great, but it’s definitely filling up the few theatres that it is in pretty well.  I’m glad.

Local Area Security 0.4 was released over the weekend.  L.A.S is based on Knoppix with a focus on security tools.  It looks like a bunch of new tools were added to this release.

• TyStudio “is a GPL’ed set of tools for extracting, editing, and converting of tivo tystreams to standard video/audio formats. This is done without re-encoding, so its a rather fast process. TyStudio is also entirely standards based; Every component of tystudio can be substituted with your favorite third party software (except tydemux of course).”  Does this work with Series 2 tivos?
• Must check out Scalado’s stuff later.
• Nelson on scaling sprites.  Wow, that’s way cool!
• Copyfight: DMCA vs. Academic Research. “In other words, what the Internet enables in scientific research, the DMCA taketh away.”
• Simon Willison gets the word out on the Python Web SIG.
• Dan Gillmor points to Audacity as mentioned by KevinMarks.
• Jakob Nielsen announces the 10 best intranets of 2003.  If you’d like to get into the details, you can also read the 175 page design annual (with 97 juicy screenshots!)
• Russ picked up a Saturn Vue.  He had hopped on IRC from the dealership yesterday.  Ahh, technology.  Good luck driving a stick in San Francisco! 🙂
• PyPI announces the release of Karrigell 1.3 beta.  It is a web app framework (in Python of course) that also includes Gadfly for its SQL backend.
• I moblogged a soldier going home and a LED sign from the cool parking system currently in beta at BWI airport.
• Must start reading Hacknot.
• MT-Blacklist takes care of that pesky comment spam in Movable Type.

The Inquirer has two interesting articles from the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose.  The first is a good roundup.  No major announcements from Intel or AMD, but it covers Transmeta’s Efficeon, IBM’s Power5, and the Fujitsu SPARC64 VI.

They also show a picture of an 8 way power5 MCM with a total of 144MB of cache.  That’s a monster!

Clearing the tabs at the end of the day:

• Newsfeeds.com is for those who download lots of Usenet stuff.  I get a Giganews account with my Comcast account, but sometimes you need to leech (er download) more than a gig each month.
• What kind of snake is that?
• Ian Bicking dislikes the unittest module.
• Gizmodo notes new GPS-enabled phones from Moto for Nextel.
• BBC: the knife find is kinda scary.
• What do you mean Klingon is not unicode?
• Keith Ray: how to go faster.
• Must subscribe to Steve Olechowski’s blog.
• Shawn Honnick grew up in Kensington.  Must subscribe to his feed too.
• According to Rob Flickenger (blue hair) iTunes uses _daap._tcp. to announce itself in Rendezvous-speak.
• The Feature: “American Teens: Stupid or Spoiled?”
• I did a good bit of moblogging today.
• iTunes takes up a good bit of resources.  I’m not complaining, and I don’t really notice it on my laptop.  iTunes works fine on my laptop, but it refuses to allow me to add MP3 files or play from the CD-ROM on a desktop machine that I have it installed on.  It’s pretty much unusable on that machine.
• Jim says Zinf works well and is lightweight.

osViews remembers Multics, which went to the big scratch disk in the sky last year.

I did most of my picture taking at foo camp with my mobile phone.  Most of the pictures are on my moblog.  I did take a few pictures here and there with my Sony DSC-U20.  You can find them at my foo camp gallery.

Some personal favorites: My campsite, gadgets galore, Russ’ hand in my picture, and Halo at 37,000 feet.

I had some extra time to kill before class, so I decided to drop by a Borders on the way. After firing up my aggregator, I found some interesting links:

• CNet covers the offspring of the Opteron.
• CNet also covers the addition of fee-based customer support to the latest rev of Mozilla. There’s nothing wrong with that IMHO.
• Greg Klebus ponders the viability of using a Wiki for technical documentation on a software project.
• Jason Alexander explores the concept of “Mono Aware.”
• BSDatwork notes that OpenBSD 3.4 has begun to ship.
• CNet: Some T-Mobile Sidekicks have faulty hinges.
• Jason Kottke looks at the Segway as a personality tester.
• Slashdot wonders if Bluetooth is dead. I think not. It cites an EETimes article announcing its death. Whutevah!

I apologize in advance if this entry is malformed (from an HTML perspective). I’m putting it together by hand and don’t have a whizzy HTMLArea to double check it.