I recently ran across this most excellent site on the acoustical crimes of the 'content mafia community': http://www.turnmeup.org/

You will find here a lot of infomation on why louder is not better (contrary to popular belief) and what has already been sacrified in the arms race to produce even louder music. My favorite from there is this video:

Enjoy.

tag: Audio, MP3

Eve was kind enough to link to my earlier article on our CardSpace Deep Dive. In that post she mentions our whiteboard notes, that I took at picture of, after all:

Cards based on X.509 authentication are almost working ... there is still a small issue with identifying the right certs based on the thumbprint. Overall, a fairly good result, I'd say

tag: Interoperability, Identity, CardSpace

Hubert and Marc have been working on a very interesting subject: using RESTful service for identity. Please take a quick look at Hubert's blog - he is working on a series of articles on this subject.

tag: Identity, REST

Not about SCUBA this time: we are right now visting in Redmond so we can test our implementation of a Windows CardSpace compatible IdP against Microsoft's implementation. Eventually, we will (hopefully) make this code available to the OpenSSO community through an OpenSSO Extension.

At the core of the integration, we (Paul, Jiandong,Mrudul, and I) have integrated the Metro/WSIT WS-Trust STS into OpenFM and created a simple cardfactory to produce CRD files (a big thank you to Chuck from here for letting us use some of his Openinfocard code). While we are not quite done as of yet, we have made some very significant progress towards full interoperability while supporting the username/password token, as well as X.509 client authentication.

Overall, this project has already helped quite a bit to improve interoperability between the underlying technologies (i.e. WSIT and the subset of WCF that is being used by CardSpace) and I expect that we will be pretty much done with the core code base in the RSA 2008 time frame.

Many thanks from here go to Mike Jones, Nigel Watling and the entire Microsoft CardSpace team.

tag: CardSpace, OpenSSO, Interoperability, Identity

It sometimes takes a little longer, but it seems that even the Rolling Stones Magazin has finally realized that not all MP3 is good. Duh! But most unfortunately, the terrible habit of extreme volume compression to make songs sound 'better' (i.e. louder) has been creeping into the business for a long time (think of all the Red Hot Chilli Peppers albums that could have been really good, but were compressed to death).

MP3 and other lossy formats amplify this problem, since they are often consumed through extremely lo-fi speakers and headphones. To compensate for the inadequate reproduction equipment, producers are now not only waging a loudness war on our ears, but also are starting to produce pop music in a way that avoids the obvious shortcomings of compressed music, by de-emphasizing high frequencies etc.

Please do not get me wrong: a decently implemented lossy format (like the LAME MP3 encoder) can provide a lot of musicality with very significant space savings for small devices. But most properly recorded and produced music will simply sound a lot better on a decent audio system, with a CD/PCM audio at 44.1 kHz/16 bit (or better: DVD-Audio or SACD at even higher rates) as the source and a good DAC.

It can only be hoped that the current MP3 hype will eventually run out and compressed lossy format will find their appropriate niche for small mobile devices.

tag: Audio, MP3, High Fidelity

I am slowly extending my base of used operating systems: after Windows and Solaris, I am now playing a bit with Ubuntu. This is quite exciting for me, since after about 8 years of the early days of Linux (I started with SLS, kernel 0.99.7) I started to focus more on Solaris and Windows after joining Sun. A lot has happened since, and I am quite pleased with the end-user experience that a modern distribution like Ubuntu offers in these days.

One issue I had (like Lauren) was that hibernation of Ubuntu 7.10 was not exactly working out of the box:

Sending the system (a Toshiba Tecra M2 with a GeForce FX Go5200) to hibernate was very straightforward. But resurrecting it after a hibernation resulted in a dark screen^[1]. I tried a couple of tricks I found (like using the extremely useful toshset(1) utility, part of the Gutsy Gibbon distribution), but to no avail.

Finally, I stumbled over a setting to be applied to the X configuration (see also here). It requires disabling the chipset AGP drivers (e.g. intel_agp) and enabling the restricted NVidia driver to provide AGP support by setting a separate option in the xorg.conf file.

Now, hibernation and wake-up work with one little caveat: after waking up the system, you must close the lid for  about 5 seconds, in order to have the backlight turn on.

tag: Linux, Ubuntu, Hibernation, Toshiba, Tecra

[1] Note that I am using the NVidia proprietary drivers.

Here is a small update on available .NET FastInfoset (X.891) libraries:

• Noemax FastInfoset.NET - I have been talking to them from very early on.
  
• Liquid XML Compression - a relatively new (at least to me) implementation that supports .NET 2.0 and the Compact Framework.
  

There is a trial available from both vendors.

If there is still interest in the community, I would be happy to revisit my FIFI code and release it publicly. Please send me a message if this was important to you.

tag: FastInfoset, .NET

... since I joined Sun. Actually 10 years almost to the date, so Bill presented my 10 year recognition certificate to me today.

It has been a very interesting 10 years: I started out as a pre-sales systems engineer in Frankfurt, Germany, moved to the U.S. in 2000 to work with the Sun Legal team (mostly) and then joined the Business Alliances group in 2005.

From this point a big "Thank you" to everyone who I worked with on this journey.

tag: Sun

Another one done. IIW 2007b is over, and - overall - it was quite productive for me.

The biggest takeaway for me is that Concordia and OSIS have made - in my mind - a major step towards harmonization and better coordination. This was reflected in the results of the OSIS steering committee meeting on Wednesday and the following two sessions on Concordia. I am glad that all participants recognized the value of both organizations. As Mike Jones put it, it helps that there is significant overlap in the members.

Other progress was made as well by both groups - the OSIS interop planning session was very fruitful, especially since the planning committee prepared an excellent laundry list document consolidating all test that are in the planning for RSA. I heard great things about the Monday Concordia meeting (which I was unfortunately unable to attend), but also the Use Case session on Wednesday with Paul and Mike was extremely productive.

Finally, the OpenID folks are to be mentioned for making a breakthrough with their 2.0 release, including their IPR regime. I took the Liberty (sic!) to capture the moment that David et al. have been waiting for more than a year:

Overall, the atmosphere seemed a lot mellower, but I can not really follow Dave's conclusions - especially concerning his comments about Concordia and OSIS.

tag: iiw2007b, osis, project concordia

Not only that a lot of people have been complaining about my funky ports, but by Internet provider also decided to start blocking the 8080 port. That's somewhat of a problem, since without this port my blog will not work. Sigh!

I therefore decided to bite the bullet and start using a professional ASP.NET hoster. So please update your links and feed readers to my new blog address:

HTML: http://blog.beuchelt.org/
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebServicesContraptions

Thank you for your understanding.

tag: blogging

UPDATE: My ISP allows inbound connections on 8080 again, so now I was able to put a redirection in ... Hope that helps. The only thing bugging me right now is that Technorati does not allow me to claim this blog on the new address ... sigh.

So, the long family vacation has been on for over 2 weeks, and it really feels good to unwind a little. We started on Big Island, went on to Kauai (where I got - after 28 years of planning on doing this - my diving certification with KAS^[1]), and are now on O'ahu. The differences between these islands never cease to amaze me. Here are a few pictures that we have put up so far:


Snow and Telescopes on Mauna Kea


The evening view from our balcony on Hawai'i


Me after hiking to the top of the dormant Pu'u Huluhulu


Sunset on Kaua'i on Turkey Day


Waimea River Canyon

[1] My experience with KAS was really superb. I had Damion McGinley as my instructor - he was fun and relaxed, but still made me go through alll the drills over and over again. One of the best things was that he knew the area and the aquatic wildlife quite well, so I got to see many critters and turtles.