[@083]
DRM & DCMA

Phil Windley has written a very interesting article on DRM & DCMA. I couldn't agree more. DCMA (and DRM) is not about protecting intellectual property rights. It is really about protecting business models.

The worse part is that we're letting it happen. Everybody is raving about the iTunes store model, etc. It is truly amazing how much rights/freedom we are willing to sacrifice in the name of convenience.

[@067]
Sphere

I'm trying out Sphere, a new blog search engine. The search results are pretty good, but the page design is totally ineffective.

See for yourself:

All of the attention is focused towards the least important elements of the page, the search-bar and sidebars.

Even the orange profile images are distracting from the actual results.

And don't even get me started on the use of bold text…

Learn from Google; Keep it simple, stupid.

The Pulse

Erik's Pulse has been published.

[@525]
New Locations I've changed the structure of www.thauvin.net, everything relating to me is now located under erik.thauvin.net. Erik's Weblog, Linkblog and Wiki are now located at:

• http://erik.thauvin.net/blog/
• http://erik.thauvin.net/linkblog/
• http://erik.thauvin.net/wiki/

Vik's homepage is now at: http://vicki.thauvin.net/ I've also moved all of the #mobitopia related pages to www.mobitopia.org. The old URLs are automatically redirected. The transition should be pretty seamless for most.

[@406]

[@831]
Happy Halloween!

[@768]
AlarmsPro

The Anchorage Daily News is running a story in their money section featuring one of the ventures I'm currently involved with, AlarmsPro.

What the article doesn't mention is that the system is entirely written in Java.

The UI components were build using:

• Straight Swing
• The Thinlet Toolkit
• IDEA's GUI Designer

The underlying monitoring system is making use of the following open source APIs:

• Commons Logging, CLI and Net
• J2SSH
• JavaMail
• joeSNMP
• Log4j

[@155]
The Pulse

Erik's Pulse has been published.

[@528]
Cingular IM & Mail

Cingular introduced a couple of free J2ME clients for Instant Messaging and Mail. I've been playing with them on my RAZR for a bit now. They totally rock.

The IM client is developed by Thumbspeed and supports AOL, Yahoo! and MSN. This thing is a beauty. By far the best J2ME app I've seen in a long, long time. The only drawback is that it is SMS-based.

[@799]

Anup Kejriwal emailed me the following: "I just wanted to clarify that the client is actually fully GPRS based and not SMS based. CIR messages come over the SMS channel when the client is not running." — Cool!

The Mail client is developed by OZ Communications and supports Yahoo!, MSN/Hotmail and AOL Mail. A nice app too, but the lack of settings for a custom mail server renders it kinda useless to me.

Right now the list of supported handsets is pretty slim, but it should expand soon.

Tip of the hat to Cingular. For once they picked the right partners.

[@892]

[@537]
Cat Emergency
We just came back from taking our cat, Clem, to the local emergency vet. We've been monitoring/dealing with an urinary track problem for a couple weeks now. He seemed to be doing better in the last few days but last night started to have problem peeing. It all quickly worsen as the evening progressed and we were left with little very alternative than to take him in around 1:30am. The vet had to put him under to insert a catheter in order to "unplug" him. The blood-work and x-rays all looked good, which is promising. He's staying at the clinic for the rest of night, at least until we are able to reach his regular vet. The Pulse Erik's Pulse has been published.