More free music from Epitonic … and cool Diesel ads!
Sometimes I just can’t figure out why people have to steal music. There are more and more legal sources of music, and I can now download more free music than I have time to listen to!

Quite a number of years ago, I came across BeSonic“the free MP3 download portal” … and I’ll go there every now and then and queue up a couple of hundred songs to download. Today I found another similar site!

One of the bands that I really like is The Grassy Knoll. Today I did a search on Google to see if they might have a new CD out … and I found Epitonic“your source for cutting edge music”. The title of their web site says “Hi Quality Free and Legal MP3 Music” and that is what I found. No only did I get three new cuts of The Grassy Knoll (and found out about their new CD) I grabbed about a hundred other songs. As an added benefit, I even got to see some of the new Diesel ads being done by AirLock … very cool stuff.

So now I have two sources of more music that I could every want. So why steal music from people who don’t want to give it away?

Evolving perspectives of ‘science’ and ‘technology’
There are a couple of very powerful sentences in this article that I like. Both of them relate to how we perceive the universe, and how we believe the universe “works”.

Theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler has coined the phrase it from bit to convey the idea that the entire universe is the result of a series of yes-or-no choices that take place at the level of quantum mechanics.

I agree with these thoughts and believe that humans underestimate our ability to ’cause’ the universe. Consider the possibility that humans have the ability to cause quantum decoherence more than we believe. This is an area that borders on what we call “faith” …

“Scientific theories are more properly viewed not as discoveries but as human constructions. It’s already happening in physics: Philosopher of science Andrew Pickering suggests that the quark, which in its unbound state has not – and some say cannot – be observed, should be regarded as a scientific invention rather than an actual particle.”

This is another spin on the same theme. Consider the possibility that we create stories about the world that we perceive … and that these stories are then ‘true’ due to the fact that we live that they are true. This is often a very difficult concept for people to accept. It places considerable responsibility on the individual and the community. It would mean that we are where we are because of who we are being, and what we believe.

Most people are more comfortable being a ‘victim of the world’, instead of owning what they have created. We are starting to learn that maybe there is proof that Wheeler is accurate in his models …

The Computer at Nature’s Core. Think technology is just applied science? You’re wrong. It’s the other way around. A commentary by David F. Channell from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

Breakthroughs continue in hydrogen energy research
One of the potential fuels of the future is hydrogen. As this article mentions, it is still far too expensive to create pure hydrogen from electrolysis. In the plant world, hydrogen is stripped from water molecules on a regular basis … and how they do this has long been a secret. Until now … as we are gaining an understanding on how it is done!

Plants Give Up Their Secret of Splitting Water [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

More automated video security
I have always enjoyed working with video. There are numerous ways that it can be used for entertainment, and also for applications like security. This is a very impressive suite of applications for video security.

As PCs and their web-cams are becoming more cost effective, software suites like this can now be used as extremely ‘intelligent’ solutions for monitoring a home or business. This software has the ability to detect motion on any of its cameras, and then begin to record to generate notifications. What was really impressive was that it even supports multiple zones to monitor within a single camera image. The screenshots give a more detailed explanation of the features.

As I get some time … I might give this a try. I have some ideas on what I can do with something like this …

ZoneMinder 1.17.2. A Web-based video camera security, motion capture, and analysis suite. [freshmeat.net]

Making spam more difficult or costly to generate
I do like this track of thinking … how to create the various hurdles that have to be jumped … how to make spam more difficult or costly to generate.

Microsoft project aims to make spammers pay for spam. The goal is to use technology to make it expensive for spammers who send out millions of unwanted e-mail messages, according to a Microsoft researcher. [Computerworld News]

Wired about US jobs going to India
Yes … this is a well written article. When I grew up, I was lucky enough to live in Pittsburgh, PA. I grew up as the US steel industry was hitting some very hard times … and steel jobs were going off shore. I remember the arguements and anger … I remember how people suggested that it could be stopped … and *should* be.

Eventually people accepted the inevitable …

Jobs to India — A Broad Look [Slashdot]

802.11 is here to stay …
I really like this perspective on 802.11 wireless networks. I have to agree with most all of his points.

There was one other quote in here that blew me away …

“And while many technologists would tell you that the x86 architecture is anything but elegant and certainly far from optimal, Intel recently shipped its billionth x86 processor.”

One billion of anything is a lot!

Why 802.11 is underhyped. Venture capitalist J. William Gurley sees parallels in the history of how the x86 architecture and Ethernet unfolded to dominate their respective markets. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

Oblix? Buying Confluent?
Knowing both of these companies, and people working at them, I was initially confused by the announcement of this acquisition. Why would Oblix purchase Confluent?

Oblix is the maker of software to manage user identites within large distributed software systems. Confluent provides a web-services security management solution. It seemed to me that there must be some common thread … and then I found this article:

U.S. Postal Service taps Oblix for identity management
It’s designed to allow the Postal Service to manage millions of user identities
Briefs by Linda Rosencrance

FEBRUARY 04, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) – The U.S. Postal Service has selected Oblix Inc.’s NetPoint to give online customers secure and password-protected Web access via single sign-on to software tools and resources.

Once fully deployed, NetPoint will offer business customers and consumers a simple and collaborative interface through Web services, Cupertino, Calif.-based Oblix said in a statement.

Ok … now it makes sense. Oblix lands a large government contract … is adopting web services standards in their product … and immediately requires security for this solution!

Nice project to land … congrats to Oblix *and* Confluent!

Oblix buys into Web services management. The maker of identity management software plans to acquire Web services management start-up Confluent Software, accelerating consolidation in the marketplace, CNET News.com has learned. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

Planet-Lab … planetary-scale applications platform
While looking around at some interesting monitoring software (Ganglia link below) I came across an Intel Research sponsored project that I hadn’t seen before … PlanetLab. The home page of their web site states:

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. PlanetLab nodes support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.

This is a very impressive project, and I downloaded a lot of their documentation and courseware to read through. I can only imagine what is going to occur as we all contribute our computers into communities of machines like this!

The link below is the distributed monitoring system that I was checking out …

Ganglia 2.5.6 (Monitoring core). A scalable distributed monitoring system. [freshmeat.net]