I don’t think much of it anymore, but many people still keep their media (audio and video) on shiny pieces of plastic which they store in pieces of furniture near their entertainment areas. Dutifully extracting them from their cases each time they want to listen to or watch them. I was a very early adopter of digitizing my audio and then of video and now take it for granted that I can have all my media anywhere I want it.

Devices such as the iPod and services like iTunes Match and Spotify make this easier for music and for individual devices, but there is still a challenge with keeping huge amounts of media available and sharing it with different listening or viewing devices in the house.

I’ve built a system at our house that works for me. It is clearly a geek system and not for everyone, however, a number of people have asked questions about it, so I thought I would share some of the details for others to benefit. Before I get into the details, I will state from the beginning that I am a huge fan of the Apple ecosystem and while not all components of my system are Apple branded, most of them are. If this is not your style, that’s cool, but you may not find this as interesting.

Storage

The first realization one has when digitizing media is that it requires huge amounts of storage. An average CD can run from 100MB to 150MB which is not so bad anymore, but a movie can easily top 1GB. Therefore, the heart of any system is storage. Many people, myself included, started by storing their media on their computer itself. This is the simplest way to do so and the default for any media program (my choice being iTunes). However, as your collection grows and as many of us switch to either using laptops as their primary computers or switch to using SSDs, storage is limited on your computer. External hard drives can extend this lifetime for a little while, but they quickly become clumsy. Network storage becomes the answer.

In my system, I have a dedicated storage server on my network (you can read about its early creation here). This server runs Open Indiana (a descendant of Open Solaris) given that operating system’s ability to handle huge amounts of storage. It currently has approximately 11TB of storage space. This is clearly overkill for most people and more technical hassle than most people want to deal with (myself included, sometimes). But, there are plenty of low maintenance network attached storage (NAS) devices on the market that can serve the same purpose. I used to use a device from ReadyNAS (now a part of Netgear) and it did a great job with minimal fuss.

Any of these systems will let you access your music over your home network. I configure iTunes to use the server as its primary storage location, so it is transparent to me.

Software

As I mentioned above, I use iTunes to manage my media. While iTunes is not perfect, it does bring with it many benefits as part of the Apple ecosystem. Syncing my music and video to my iPhone or iPad is simple and transparent. Streaming audio and video to other devices (more below) is also simple.

While iTunes is capable of ripping CDs to be used digitally, they do not provide the same facility for getting video you already own on physical media onto your computer. There are any number of apps out there to accomplish the task, I have been very happy with Handbrake. Once I have the media files in iTunes I can properly label the movies or TV shows.

Watching and Listening

While listening to music and watching video on a computer is ok, it is hardly ideal. Being able to use a TV or stereo to listen to your collection is ideal. For music, I have an Airport Express hooked up to a great 70’s era Harmon Kardon stereo in the living room. iTunes is able to stream audio to that device from my computer and have it play through the stereo. It can be controlled from the Remote app on either an iPad or iPhone. The Airport Express hooks up to your wireless network, so it can be placed anywhere in your house. (It can also act as your only wireless base station if you need it to be.)

For video, I rely on the AppleTV. I now have both a first generation and a second generation one. The second generation ones are far superior to the originals. The new units allow you to stream any media from iTunes to an attached TV. It can also stream video from Netflix to expand your viewing options beyond the media you own.

Given the connection to iTunes, media can be transferred or streamed to any Apple iOS device.

Limitations

I am very happy with what I have set up. but there are limitations. iTunes is designed to be used by a single user on a single computer. While I store the media on a server that other computers in the house have access to, only 1 copy of iTunes can manage it. This poses some challenges for us as both Tiffany and I have our own computers and portable devices. We haven’t come up with a great solution yet.

All of my setup is designed to be used within the house. The only way to move media outside the house is by transferring it one of our devices (iPod, iPhone, or iPad). This is great if you know what you want when you go on a trip for example, but not so great if you are traveling or at work and all of a sudden want o listen to music you didn’t bring with you. again, I don;t have a great solution. I can get to my home network and transfer files, but it is always clumsy. I looked forward to iTunes Match being able to help with music, but I exceed their 25,000 song limit. Hopefully that will be increased eventually.

Miscellaneous

As I said earlier, media is big. If you plan on moving lots of it around your network, a fast network is critical. While we have wireless at home and that works great for playing media, all of the machines that might need to copy files around are wired for greater speed.

I spent half a day last week trying something new. I have a very good relationship with the Cohen Career Center at William and Mary and have been on their Advisory Board for a year or so now. But this was my first time working directly with students by conducting mock interviews. This is a great opportunity for the students to get some idea of what being interviewed is like but more importantly get feedback beyond either an offer letter or a black hole of nothingness. Learning by binary response is quite hard.

I had one interaction that stuck with me. One student when I asked them why they had chosen their major that they had looked at the earning potential of careers. I am sure this is a very common thing to do and I understand the temptation. It is an easy metric to compare, it translates very well into the American “stuff” culture, and it is much easier to compare than “happiness.”

What I have realized over the last 4 years is that being happy in your career is a far more important than purely money. (And before someone says it, yes, I know there is a baseline level of income for safety and security that must be met.) I tried to share with this student that he should choose the career path that he feels passionate about, that will bring him personal fulfillment, that will surround him with great people; making that choice will bring happiness in the long term.

I can say that with certainty because that is what I have been able to do recently. After almost 4 years, I have left my job at Swisslog and have taken a job at 3M Cogent Systems. 3M Cogent is the descendant by acquisition of 3GI, so in a sense I am coming home to my roots. (3GI being my first employer after college.)

It is an understatement to say I am very excited by the move. I have a great team of engineers and even in the initial week I think we have gelled well and will do great things. As I get more into things, I hope I will feel inspired to share observations and lessons I have learned.

Good morning. All of you should be asleep tight now as it is 4am on the east coast. After a very long journey involving 2 planes, 2 trains, a bus, a “gondola”, and a 1.8km walk, I arrived at Stump’s Alpenrose yesterday afternoon. I slept moderately well on the plane, so I wasn’t in too bad of shape and was able to make it through an early dinner and actually go to sleep at a decent time of 9:30pm local time.

The meetings this morning don’t start until noon, so after a standard European breakfast that sadly lacked pretzel rolls (laugenbrotchen) which I can eat at any time of the day. I decided to do another little video entry (see gondola link above for first).

Enjoy

[iframe width=”640” height=”510” src=”/images/6DiS12z2Kg0?rel=0” frameborder=”0” allowfullscreen]

Recent days have showed with clarity that my brain has limited stack space. I have been noticing that I am executing the mental equivalent of Linux’s Out of Memory killer. (You didn’t think you would get a post without geek references, did you?) Basically I find that I am culling things that I just don’t have enough mental energy to deal with at the moment.

The curious thing is that the disposition, good or bad, is irrelevant to hitting that mental limit. There are great things happening in my life right now (like getting married!) as well as less than positive things being worked on. I initially thought that somehow adding more good things going on would counteract the bad things, like matter and anti-matter, but it seems that the effects are purely additive. It is just more things to have to process.

So, my goal in the next few weeks is to try to resolve items so that I don’t feel like I have to ignore things which are important.

Question: If you have effectively immortal galactic dynasties is it possible to have stable control by the eldest? Is infighting inevitable?

Literary analysis has never been my strong point (just ask my AP English teacher), but as I was reading my book over lunch yesterday it sparked a thought I was having fun exploring. Judas Unchained is the second half of a story by Peter F. Hamilton (Pandora’s Star being the first) which at the highest level deals with the conflict of two very different galactic cultures as they meet. This is a very normal plot for science fiction but Hamilton is skilled in creating very deep and wide plotlines that he juggles and intertwines almost to the point of chaos but eventually pulls together. The topic that spurred my question originated in the prequel to this series, Misspent Youth, which, sadly is kind of a shallow book, but introduces the reader to the beginnings of what medical rejuvenation can do to a person. By the time the reader gets to Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, medical rejuvenation is an integral part of society.

In Hamilton’s world, rejuvenation is what it sounds like. As a person reaches an age where they feel the onset of age, they have the ability to be returned back to their 20 year old self. The process takes 9 months during which they are effectively in a coma, removed from society. Optionally memory can be cleaned up, excised, or backed up while they under. This can be done indefinitely; effective immortality. Death is even taken care of as long as you have a recent backup.

The society has formed around two major pillars; the multi-planet government, which I won’t touch on, and the long-lived major family Dynasties which I will. The concept of a familial dynasty is a natural part of human society (think Kennedy, Bush, Windsor, etc.) but practical rejuvenation adds a whole new twist. Death adds a limiting factor to any dynasty for while the family name may continue, the patriarchs and matriarchs are changing as generations age and die. But what happens when you remove that limit?

Hamilton portrays the inevitable growth of the dynasty with the same leadership as the true strength of the organization. Led by a council of the eldest members of the dynasty, it leaves the younger generation free to participate (or not) supported by the great wealth of these families.

I’m not so sure. Being born into a dynasty where your place on the “still alive” family tree can never move up seems like it would result in two main behaviors depending on your personality. If you are not terribly ambitious, riding on the coattails of the dynasty seems to be the obvious choice (and one certainly taken by any number of people even in current day dynastic families). The ambitious personality is where things get tricky for me. If you can be assured the eventually the leaders in your family will die off, patience is a route one can take to power. But without that assurance, where does it lead? Politics? Infighting? Murder? And to make matters worse, if “normal” killing isn’t permanent, what effort do you really have to go through to get rid of someone?

It seems to me that the concept of a family dynasty with rejuvenation is just not sustainable. You either have stagnation as the younger generations have no incentive to apply themselves or chaos due to infighting and political maneuvering.

What do you think?

The advent of the Internet and specifically social media applications (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) has brought to the forefront what I am sure is a long tradition of tension between employers and employees when it comes to how much information about your workplace should be shared with the public and who has control over that information.

Before the advent of the Internet, the scope of the average person’s ability to disseminate information about their workplace was rather limited. Friends and family were often privy to information that an employees might want to keep close. But the existing trust network that existed between those people was generally enough to comfort a company. Only rarely would someone venture outside that network to the media or other large distribution mechanism. And while “leaks” certainly occurred, they were usually for higher profile events through traditional media outlets, not mundane everyday looks into corporate life.

The Internet and social media has changed all that. It is now near effortless for anyone to broadcast every detail of their life, including events at their workplace. A tiny sign of that is that only within the recent past has here been a need to create a term such as “oversharing.”

In an unfortunate, but understandable reaction, some companies have reacted badly to this newfound ability of their employees and made attempts to prohibit this behavior. Neal Stephenson in his classic novel, Snow Crash, uses this as a plot premise. Technology is created to try to control the thoughts of their employees at all times to protect the corporate interests. (The results? Not so good for humanity.) While fanciful in it’s implementation, I get the sense that many companies worry that it is getting too easy for employees to share information they consider proprietary and would love to have a form of “intellectual DRM” at their disposal.

In an attempt to control this information, companies often take a reactionary approach and blame the technology. Technology is used to try to impose controls and policies to block the usage of such technology. In the workplace this can take the form of blocking access to social media, monitoring of internet usage, and even taking disciplinary action against their employees. Outside of the workplace, companies have developed tools to monitor the online activities of their employees And provide information back to their supervisors. (I will ignore the fact that it is virtually impossible to block these services given the advent of smart phones and devices which are always connected to the Internet.)

This is completely the wrong approach. Technology is not the problem. Technology is only a tool which allows people to share. What they share is important, not the fact that they share information about their workplace. The type of information people share is a direct reflection of their attitude about their workplace. If an employee is happy about their job and their work, the sharing of that information is a benefit to a company. The social media world can help share that in a way that PR never will. However, if a company has created a negative atmosphere for it’s employees, that will be shared. Imposing draconian policies on employee’s right to share will fail in two ways: it will not prevent the information from getting out and will only make the information they share worse when they do.

Technology is not the problem, nor is it the solution. Creating an environment of trust and respect in the workplace will enable a company to leverage the new technologies benefit. You can see this in the new generation of companies that promote the use of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook to share information and promote the company brand.

If you are one of these companies, resist the urge to take a reactionary approach to technology. Learn to embrace it and use it to your benefit. Your company and your employees will be better for it.

Bruce Schneier: The security mirage

Thanks to Tiffany for sharing this with me. A great talk by a really brilliant guy. The TED talks are always a great collection of really bright people talking (I have linked to them before: Why, how, what). You should look at the full list and find some, you will learn something. Bruce Schneier is definitely a must read and watch for anyone who works in any way with security, information or otherwise.

I try to avoid just reposting things, so I will add a little personal, geek envy story. Several (ok, more than several) years ago, I went on a trip to San Francisco for the company I worked for. I was lucky that there were two events going on at the same time. The first was Macworld San Francisco and it was the year the iPhone was announced. (see this picture from when I was there). But the next was a great opportunity to attend an EFF party at an art gallery in downtown. I was talking with a woman about something relating to her Vintage clothing website, I think. Out of the corner of my eye while we talked I saw someone and I knew that I knew who it was, but I couldn’t place them. I was probably rather rude to the woman I was speaking to as I kept glancing over to try to figure it out. At a certain point it hit me, HOLY SHIT, THAT’S BRUCE SCHNEIER. Now, I was a wimp and didn’t go talk to him, but it was cool none the less. At the same party, I also saw Violet Blue (NSFW link), whom I saw more recently at SXSW. All in all a cool party.

Ok, that’s my story, now go watch the video and learn something.

Link to recently tweeted articles [1. test footnote]

Recently I got asked by the director of the Cohen Career Center at William and Mary to become a member of their Employer Advisory Board. I feel truly honored to be asked by my alma mater to advise the department which has such a huge responsibility to help students take the great lessons they have learned at the College and find a career that they find satisfying. Sadly, I was not able to attend the inaugural meeting a few months back, but I spent the day last Friday at our second meeting and I found it a great experience.

We had breakout sessions with faculty and staff from various departments and my group was focusing on science and technology. To step back for a second, one goal of this board is to help the College as a whole and the Career Center specifically get the message out to employers of the specific benefits of hiring students from William and Mary as opposed to other, well qualified students from other institutions. In my view, the argument is an easy one; a liberal arts education makes a more well rounded individual. Beyond the initial, strict qualifications for a job, I want a new hire who will have the intellectual depth that a narrow education doesn’t give. Someone who is capable of having a great conversation with me, my staff, and customers is extremely valuable to me as a businessman.

I firmly believe that William and Mary provides that level of graduates to the world. But, how do we make sure the world knows this and knows the benefits?

Our conversation came around to the fact that the information is available in mailings and online, but it is just too hard to get to. You can look at the statistics of job placements for graduates or the research interests of the various professors, but right now, it is too hard to find quickly. If I am an employer, I don’t have 30 minutes to research William and Mary, I have 3, maybe. If we can’t show you a compelling set of information that quickly, your next 27 minutes will be spent elsewhere.

So, that is the area I hope that I can help. I want to help the College make it simple for someone who has a resume in front of them from a newly minted William and Mary grad to find out why that individual has a better chance of succeeding for that company. I think this will be a fun project and I will try to remember to share as we make progress.

I will leave you with one project I think is great; Liberal Arts @ Work. This project has profiles of what grads have done with their liberal arts degrees and how they were instrumental in finding their passions.

I know I’m making the right design decisions when adding functionality gets easier. I know I’m not when it feels like I have to force it.

@bounceswoosh

This tweet from my friend Monique got me thinking about that gut feeling you have when something just “feels right.” The physical metaphor that we instinctually use is an interesting choice. We don’t describe the situation as “looking right” or “sounding right” (which actually implies uncertainty), but specifically bring to mind a physical sensation. When one is working in the mechanical world, this is easy; threading a nut onto a bolt goes smoothly and easily when you have it right, but is hard to do when you have it cross-threaded. You come to learn that if you are having to force it, something is wrong, you should take a step back, and try again.

But what about ideas? Why do we still fall back on this physical metaphor? And, more importantly, how can we plan our intellectual endeavors such that they feel right and hope that our intuition is correct and we are, in fact, doing things right.

I have no magic answers, I wish I did. For me, I think the way that I work is by trying to take the purely abstract thoughts and turning it into something on which my “gut” can operate. When working on software design, I see two ways to do this and both of them involve translating these purely brain based ideas into something physical.

The first and simplest is just to explain your design or idea to someone else. The other person doesn’t have to know anything about the topic (or even be a person, for that matter). The very act of speaking your ideas aloud forces you to translate them into words and then listen to them.

The next method is to go visual. Draw a picture or diagram of your design. If it is simple to draw, it is probably simple to implement. If you end up with tons of overlapping shapes or intersecting lines, you probably are going to have a problem.

Nothing earth-shattering, I’m afraid, but maybe help for you.

BTW, my apologies for being lax in posting last month. Of the 31 days in March, I was away from home for 22 of them. And while this included the excitement of SXSW, it did not lend itself to writing much.