As any good IT man will tell you, remote desktop (aka VNC, aka Screen Sharing) is a corner stone of how we do what we do. Every system at TCG is equipped to is some manor to be remotely controlled. This has saved me countless hours of trekking back and forth between my office and the server room, and has otherwise allowed me to perfect my sedentary lifestyle.

While promoting general laziness is a side effect of the system, it has also been a real life saver on those occasions when files or settings need to be changed when great distances separate my hands and the system I wish to work on. To date the longest of these distances has been the repair of the Crossville Chronicle’s in house email server, from deep within the bush in West Africa.

The other day I needed files from a desktop system at my home while I was in my office. This situation should be all to familiar to the mobile business professional. What wasn’t familiar were the events that transpired when I tried to use my home system remotely. Upon logging in and seeing the desktop as per normal, every time I tried to type, my input was being overridden with a never evening string of “dddddddddddddddddddddd….”. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting, but still the “ddd” thwarted my attempts to type. After a moment of pondering, I figured out what was causing the error, and the issue was more biological then technical in nature.

I live in a house with cats. They are not my cats, but rather cats belonging to my wife and daughter and because I love them, I tolerate the cats. I suspect that the feelings of distrust and suspicion that I have towards these animals is mutually returned, and even my wife and daughter will freely admit that the cats are not so much pets as they are co-owners of the property.

Cats do what cats do, and one of the things they do is to sit on the most odd things. In this case of all things for a cat to sit on upon my desk, this cat had chosen to sit on my keyboard. With this cat lazying on my keyboard depressing the “d” key, my home computer was inoperable.

My choices were few. On the one hand I could wait for the cat to move off or I could drive home to retrieve the files manually. However, there was a third option that occurred to me, I could attempt to persuade with cat to move. My monitor was turned off and with it the speakers so using images or sound to extricate the cat was not possible, but I could “move” something.

I logged in again, and used software to “eject” the CD/DVD drive. Before my eyes, the moment the disk try opened, the “dddddddddddddddddddddd”s came to a stop.

This evening while working late in my lab I decided to play a movie in the back ground. This is somewhat out of character for me. I normally prefer not to have any sort of visual media playing while I work. I feel that it is distracting. However this evening my task involved presiding over a fairly autonomous data transfer, and having just come back with takeout dinner, I thought it might be nice diversion to an other wise long and boring lab session.

A couple of my techs had been quoting lines from an older movie to each other earlier in the day, and not having seen this movie in many years, I thought I might watch it. I am a Netflix subscriber, and one of the features of Netflix is the ability to “watch instantly” on a computer. I surfed over to Netflix and found the movie I wanted to watch, clicked “play now”, and as the film buffered, I unpacked my dinner. Just as I raised the first fork full of spicy chicken to my famished lips, I am presented with this most unsettling of screens:

Shocked and amazed, I followed the two on screen steps, but alas, the same error persisted. Being particularly resourceful (and momentary Sociophobic), I opted not to call the number provided, but rather Google the three key bits of information about my problem, “Macintosh” “Netflix” “Error Code 8151″.

The results from Google while insightful where ultimately unhelpful in fixing my problem. I tried various permutations of reinstalling the Microsoft SilverLight software. I tired updating various Apple kext and plist files. After 45 minutes of trying various things, I realized that my as yet untouched diner was cold, and I had extended my “long and boring lab session” by 45 minutes chasing a problem that should not even existed in the first place. My problem is that I had at some point worked with various sub-sub-sub settings on my Mac, and now the software which playes Netflix could no longer determined if my computer could be “trusted” to play digital content.

After taking the first bight of my now cold dinner, my visceral reaction was to call the 866-579-7113 number and verbally impart my frustration on whoever answered the phone to such a degree that they would go home crying at the end of the conversation, never to return to call center work again. However, my intellect overrode that ideal, because I know that whoever answered the phone would not personally be responsible for this DRM debacle. Then it occurred to me, not even Netflix itself is really responsible. I’m sure Netflix could care less about DRM, they are in the business to rent DVDs by mail, and offer digital downloads to subscribers. The more logical focus of my anger should be on the Copyright Holders who undoubtedly put this DRM requirement on Netflix as a precondition to offering the film for online viewing. (Of course following that logic I should be angry at the government for passing such arcane laws that empower Copyright Holders. Then be mad at the American people for electing the government. But I’ll stop at the Copyright Holders).

It was then I had an Epiphany – the sudden realization of a fundamental truth. That truth was at that moment, it was easier to download that movie from a file sharing site (Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc) than it was to try and fix this issue so as to watch the movie legitimately. Even further in my Epiphany, I realized that this moment I had every moral right to acquire a copy of this film in any manor I chose. (So long as my acquisition did not deprive someone else of the ability to watch the movie.)

Here is my rational.

1. In the 1980s I paid (well my parents paid, i was only a kid) to see this film in a theater.

2. I have purchased two copies of this movie over the years, once in VHS, then in DVD.

3. I have a Netflix account, with which I pay to have access to ANY AND ALL films in their digital download catalog.

4. I made a good faith effort to abide by the frame work to obtain this film via a method approved by the copyright holder.

so therefor…

5. Having personally perviously paid for a license for a Analog copy (VHS), a Digital Copy (DVD), and Digital Download Availability (Netflix), and in light of the failure of that Digital Download Availability, I am not morally, or ethically, bound to abide by artificial restrictions put into place by the Copyright Holder to protect their digital rights.

Simply put, the protection of the copyright holder’s rights is not applicable, because I otherwise have the “right” to have and view the content. So if the copyright holder’s rights are not applicable, then I can obtain and view the content in the manor of my choosing.

After thought…

This train of thought that lead me to realizing that I had a moral right to get that movie anyway I wanted might simultaneously seem complicated to the layperson, and overly simplistic/naive to a copyright attorney. I think there in lies the problem. You see, copyright law is an immensely complicated affair. Copyright law touches each of us in profound ways everyday. We normally think of copyright law when it comes to “big” things like movies, tv, or books. But it is all pervasive in our society, from the labels on soap cans, to the background music at the grocery store, even to the logo’s imprinted on the tags of our clothing. When you have such a integral part of our existence governed by incomprehensible laws, the people will simply ignore those laws in favor of a more reasonable path. No amount of law suites, congressional lobbying, or advertising campaigns can stop or change that.

The lesson to the MPAA and anyone else who supports the current Copyright model is this: 1. If you fail to make your content available, 2. Available in a manor which works any/all the time, and 3. Available at a price which is competitive in the market, others WILL make your content available. MPAA, your competition makes YOUR content available, universal, and free. Good luck fighting that… my torrent just finished and I’m going to watch a movie.

Once upon a time, I had a career in IT in the Travel Industry. Durning this phase of my life, I did quite a bit of traveling for both work and pleasure and refined my skills at navigating airports, train stations, and cultures which sometimes had very little in common with my own. From this period of my life, I developed a love for getting to know other people in other places, and seeing how they view themselves and their society.

One way to learn about a people and their culture is to look at their money. Currency is one of those elements in a society that strongly bonds it together. Paper bills and coins not only serve as elements of value exchange, but are also small monuments to what people think are important about the country they live in.

Over the years I have made habit of keeping a few small bills and coins from all the places I have visited. Most of these end up in envelopes in my desk labeled as to the place and date they came from. I’m not a “coin collector” per-say, I have no knowledge as to their deeper meaning or value. (Though with the falling US dollar value, I say my collection is worth more now than it was 2 years ago.)

Every so often I open one of these envelopes and reminisces about the time and place when those bills first entered my wallet. A day or two day, I happened to open up the envelope from a trip I made to Grand Cayman. It happened to be from my last trip there in 2003.

Of course, The Cayman Islands are part of the British Overseas Territory System, but they print and issue their own money. What struck me when I picked up this bill was the “fine print” in the lower right hand corner.

It is the International Copyright Symbol, followed by “Cayman Islands Monetary Authority”.

I just had to laugh, what a wonderful abuse and misunderstanding of copyright law that a government feels the need to “copyright” their money. I wonder if you counterfeit Cayman Island Currency, are you charged with Paganism as well?

Just to share a light moment of my day…

Spam is a big headache of mine. I’m using Google Apps for my email, but some tidbits of it still filter through. So my iPhone beeped, and I look down to see this:

Somehow, it just seems to fit.

I know this is off topic for me, but I travel a lot, and this sort of thing bothers me. This is just one more reason I hate to fly. Here we have a TSA employee stealing $200,000 worth of stuff from people.

I’ve always felt a bit of fear when I fly since 9/11, not that someone is going to crash my plane into a building, but that some TSA lackey is going to steal my laptop that I had to put through checked baggage. I guess my fear was justified.

Now as a security professional, I know that 90% of all security is an illusion. I guess that is my real concern about the TSA, we pay our tax dollars to low wage employees to go though our stuff, violate our fourth amendment rights, all to maintain the lie that it somehow is going to keep us safe.

..and I take back the part about Water Boarding. You can never use someone else bad acts to justify your own bad acts.

All Work and No Play Makes Mack a Dull Boy…

I admit it, I’m a child of the 80s. My love of technology came from those jumbled days, and I spent many happy hours playing with what was then cutting edge tech.

Of course the cutting edge of tech to a kid in the 1980s was Nintendo, Sega, Commador, and Apple. I had a Sega Master System (SMS), my brother had a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). So allot of my childhood was spent in his room.

Now that I’m grown, I still plays games as a form of personal entertainment. I can remember being told as a kid, that playing Mario 16 hours a day would rot my brain, but I guess they were wrong.. oh well, I still love you Mom. Of Course, my current game playing is not the 2/3 of my day it was when I was 11.

Gaming today is a rich involved experience, and a multi-billion industry. However, while I have played and loved current games, my heart is still warmed by 8bit Mario and Zelda. So come with me to the world of Emulation…

Emulation is a fairly strait forward concept. Not all computers or computing systems run on the same hardware architecture. So if you have a bit of software from one hardware architecture that you want to run on a another type of hardware architecture you basically have to options. One, you can rewrite that software and this can be time consuming. Two, you get an “emulator” that mimics hardware architecture A on hardware architecture B’s platform. This way you can take software written for hardware architecture A, place it in the Emulator on hardware architecture B, and the software thinks it’s running on hardware architecture A.

The downside to Emulation is that it takes a good deal of system resource to run. So for a hardware architecture A Emulator to run will on hardware architecture B, hardware architecture B has to be significantly faster than hardware architecture A. Confused? Don;t worry, it will be clear in a second.

Now the NES from 1985 was a hardware architecture platform. Computers today are another type of hardware architecture which is a thousand times faster than the NES. So rather than rewiring software (i.e. Games) produced for the NES to run on todays computer hardware, it’s much easier to run those Games through an Emulator. So today on your PC or Mac is it quite possible (and very easy) to play games from a wide variety of old Console Game Systems, AND Coin Operated Arcade Machines.

Now Emulators are a wide and diverse thing. So while just about every Game Console can be emulated on a PC, likewise many old gaming hardware architectures can be emulated on current hardware architectures such the PSP, Xbox, Playstaion 2, and my current favorite, the Nintendo DS.

The Nintendo DS is quite a remarkable device. For about $100 you can get a two screen, touch screen, duel ARM processor, mini-computer with WIFI. The device is also VERY hackable. For an additional $40 you can get a Ninjapass game cart which takes a simple, widely available, Mico-SD card. On this Mico-SD card you can load software which allows you to do MANY things.

One of these things that you can do is load backup copies of your favorite DS games onto a the SD card. So, rather than carry around 10 or 15 game carts, you can “backup” all your games to a single SD card, and still have TONS of space left on the SD card.

Another thing you can do with this setup is run “Homebrew” software. These are programs writen by indeviuduales, for the DS. Think of it as freeware, or open-source, for the DS, just like there is freeware and open-source software for PCs and Macs.

Some of these homebrew programs are Emulators that allow games from older systems to be played on the DS. So right now on my DS I have my entire collection of NES games, SMS Games, some games from my old Super NES games, Gameboy, and even some old favorites like Zork.

In the end, my DS is a nice distraction when I’m stuck on a plane or waiting around. The fact that for a brief moment I can recapture some of my childhood is also kind of nice.  If anyone in interested in doing the same, contact me, and I help you get started.