The Apple iPad is finally here with a custom 1GHz processor, HD ready display and multi-touch screen in a very clean uncluttered form-factor.

The Apple iPad has a decent 10-hour battery life which will make it useful for reading books, documents and watching movies. The charge-daily mantra of the iPhone is well established so the iPad could be a viable alternative to Kindle/Sony e-Ink platforms which have longer batter life but much less functionality.

The high performance wireless 802.11n networking will help with downloading performance on home networks although public hotspot performance will need to catchup. The impact of the Apple iPad on already overloaded 3G networks must be of some concern for the potential carriers of the 3G version.

If the browsing experience is as responsive as the Iphone/Touch then it will be a great browsing platform only marred by the missing Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support.

The price is in the luxury end of the market and I’m sure the memory will quickly seem very tight when loaded with videos. However, this the first generation of Apple iPad and capacity will grow with every new model. The lack of space could be offset by syncing to videos/music/documents over the intentet to remote iTunes libraries on home networks. A future feature could include selectively syncing to Apple’s subscription based Cloud services.

What is going to be really interesting is what app developers will do with this greatly expanded screen real estate and slightly faster processor.

Will I give up my netbook, iPhone and laptop – no – but I think my Sony Reader may be in jeopardy.

[Disclaimer: I recevied no inducements from Apple]

[Update: Fixed typo in cloud sentence]

A recent Mashable.com article highlights Google Wave use-cases from the labs of various software companies including, most notably from an enterprise perspective, SAP, SalesForce.com and ThoughtWorks.

http://mashable.com/2009/11/14/google-wave-use-cases/

Business process modelling, customer service management and project collaboration are interesting innovations if they make it out of the lab and into the enterprises that use SAP, SalesForce and ThoughtWorks services.

A key dependency for the more conservative enterprise is whether Google will offer Wave as a packaged solution (like the Google Search Appliance) to be hosted in the enterprise’s private cloud or will Google enhance their overall security model to protect data in the public cloud.

Google Wave continues to be an interesting emergent technology and seems to have sparked interest from those technologists looking for the killer application of “Enterprise 2.0″

Barrelfish is a research project being jointly undertaken by ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research Cambridge to develop an operating system that can scale across many processor cores.

The issue with current operating systems is that they only scale to a few high speed cores because the fundamental design over the last thirty years have focused on optimising single threads of execution over mutiple processors using common shared memory structures.

The CPU manufacturers have been focused on increasing the processor performance through clock-speed, cache-memory and pipelining enhancements. This was never going to last because getting the processor die smaller was getting more challenging to put more transistors on the chip and also getting rid of the heat generated by the semiconductors was reaching practical limits.

The solution has been to step back on clock speed and put more processor cores on the die to still improve the performance of the CPU overall which now creates a challenge for developers and operating system designers alike.

The ETH Zurich and Microsoft teams are working on challenging the design of the fundamental design of operating system which relies on too many central structures that are shared by all the cores creating coherence and consistency problems. Their model proposes using replicated state and using message based models to turn the cores into isolated islands similar to the design of GUI based systems and large scale Event Driven Architectures. The messaging architecture in the proposal in fundamentally messaging over RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

The fruits of this work on Barrelfish make take some time to develop into production ready code but this should go some way to address the problem of being able to use the many cores in future processors.

This work is being published at Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on OS Principles in October 2009.

See http://www.barrelfish.org for more details.

This is very cool software for Microsoft Windows that allows you to create, edit, and publish PDF files without the need for the expensive Adobe Acrobat which is priced for high usage professional and not for occasional user.

I’ve found the software ideal for filling out official forms and also reformatted PDF documents ready to read on my Sony Reader.

All the usual composition features are present including printing to PDF, signing, stamping, adding bates numbers for legal documents and document security. In addition the PDF-to-Word conversion is one of the best on the market for retrieving text from a PDF document in a form that is high-fidelity from the original (document security permissions permitting)

There is a download for free trial version that works for 14 days.

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0 – Free Download

SSH (Secure Shell) is a remote adminstration utility typically for UNIX systens that provides secure access to the command line.

The service is provided by the UNIX deamon SSHD which listens on TCP/IP port 22.

A popular utility for providing SSH on BlackBerry is midpssh ( http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ ) which is now maintained at http://ota.deltatech.com.mx/ and most importantly now digitally signed to allow low level features.

Recently midpssh this has stoppped working due to RIM BlackBerry Internet Service only allowing HTTP and HTTPS traffic through their proxies.

The solution is to change the SSH listener port on the SSH server to listen to Port 443 (HTTPS) instead of Port 22.

This can be done by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_conf and changing the line

Listen 22

to

Listen 443

Then restarting the SSHD service.

service sshd restart

To check to see if the sshd deamon is now listening on port 443 run the following command:

netstat -anp | grep ssh

If the sshd deamon is not listening on port 443 then it could be that the Apache web web server also running with that listener socket for HTTPS. To resolve this change the file /etc/httpd/httpd.conf/ssl.conf will have to be modified to change the listener port from 443 to something else such as 444.

Listen 444

To access secure services on the web server after this change requires the URL to be:

https://domain:444

The restart Apache and SSHD


service Apache restart
service sshd restart


Now you should be able to use midpssh to login from your BlackBerry to your SSH server using port 443 instead of 22 by using

domainname:443

If you need to access another server than only works on port 22 then login into your server then ssh from your server to the target server.

Automattic has just started the Beta program for the BlackBerry client for WordPress at http://blackberry.wordpress.org. This application is similar to the Apple iPhone client for WordPress released last year with local drafts and photo upload capabilities.

The Beta program is still working on bugs found in the field but so far the application is fairly functional for general posting.

Google Wave is making quite a splash. Initial information from Google is that Wave is an extensible real time collaboration platform leveraging technology behind Gmail, Google Docs and Picassa enabling groups of people to share messages, photos and other media together. The hype is that Wave is the next evolution of email and chat but I see this as more of a complementary solution to existing methods of communication. This will be great for open source and public documents.

I expect most corporates will block this technology for fear of information leakage and losing control of their intellectual property deploying commercial alternatives internally. I also anticipate Microsoft will catch up with a future version of Microsoft SharePoint.

Nevertheless it is an interesting and innovative development and I am sure will perform best under Google own browser – Google Chrome

BuddyPress, the social networking plug-in to multiuser wordpress (Wordpress-MU) has been released from beta to general availability.

I now use BuddyPress on my home CentOS Linux server to provide a internal social network and blogging facility for the family.

I am still trying out different calendar plug-ins to provide a central calendar for the family.

SlySoft publish “AnyDVD” and “AnyDVD HD” for accessing and copying DVDs and Blu-Ray disks by defeating the copy protection mechanisms.

SlySoft is based in Antigua thus avoids penalties under the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) 1998, the CDPA (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act) 1988 and other similar legislation in other parts of the world.

SlySoft are currently ahead of the arms race between protection circumvention and content protection.

DVD ripping has been possible for many years after the CSS (Content Scrambling System) encryption keys were compromised and DeCSS was created.  The digital rights management industry has learned that “security by obscurity” is not security at all. Most users of CSS cracking software claim it is used to defeat region encoding that stops DVDs being played outside their target market.

Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) were designed with better encryption, AACS (Advanced Access Content System) from the outset but this still was compromised. The technology also includes HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) which prevents digital recording equipment from recording the content by requiring the player and the television create a secure channel for the media.

Blu-ray players feature extensible protection so the scrambling system can be upgraded so new titles can be better protected against copying. This feature could be the reason that the studios preferred Blu-ray over HD-DVD.

The latest copy protection mechanism for Blu-ray is BD+ which 18 months ago was hailed as protection that will take 10 years to break. It features a virtual machine that authorized players use to run scripts to access the content. This virtual machine deliberately makes reverse engineering difficult by changing the way instructions are executed depending on the context.

Proving that nothing is unbreakable, SlySoft has cracked the latest BD+ scrambling system and can copy all existing titles as noted in this press release: http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=24602

Macrovision, who develop the BD+ scrambling system, will no doubt respond in due course with better technology to defeat SlySoft.

The lesson here is that continuous development is required to protect digital rights.

But overall, is digital rights management worth all the inconvenience to the customer?

I use Windows and Linux interchagably so I like to choose open source toolsets that run on both platforms (I also find that Linux apps are generally also available on Mac OS X so that’s cool).

Miro is now my favourite video player (Xine has been deprecated in my A-List).

It supports all the video formats I use (Flash Video, AVI, H.264, Windows Media, Quicktime and MPEG), searches YouTube and Google Video, and allows downloads.

The only downside is the arms race between Miro and YouTube for enabling and disabling the download facility respectively but that is OK if you keep your version of Miro up to date.

You can get Miro here: Get Miro