Hooray! 
SpamAssassin has been voted DataMation Anti-Spam Product of the Year for 2006, earning three times as many votes as the next contender.
This is the second year in a row, which is fantastic — and our margin is increasing each year. ;)
Tags: anti, contender, datamation, hooray, margin, product, row, spam, spamassassin, year
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing links to an article at TechCrunch that lists Better and Cheaper Online File Storage as a product that needs to be made. However, Ben Laurie does the sums on online storage as a useful backup medium, and found them not exactly compelling (e.g. 100GB of data will take 75 days to upload over an 128Kbps link).
I tend to agree. An online host isn’t great as a backup host, since, in my experience, there are two types of backups required:
The first kind of fileset is amenable to an online backup-storage service, at first glance. However — in my opinion you’re better off going the whole hog for these files, and using the distributed, versioned backup method of putting it in a good networked revision control system, and checking it out everywhere, so you can also make changes and check in from any host; otherwise, you face the perils of syncing up a single backup from multiple “writers”, without conflicts. So far, none of the online file storage services offer SVN as an access method, so a shell account at a colo server still seems more useful on that count.
The second kind of fileset, as Ben notes, will take donkey’s years to upload and sync as a backup mechanism; and the economics are hardly compelling for the service provider.
I think I prefer Brad Templeton’s idea to deal with large-data backups –
I propose a software RAID-5, done over a LAN with 3 to 5 drives scattered over several machines on the LAN.
Slow as hell, of course, having to read and write your data out over the LAN even at 100mbits. Gigabit would obviously be better. But what is it we have that’s taking up all this disk space ? it?s video, music and photos. Things which, if just being played back, don?t need to be accessed very fast. If you’re not editing video or music, in particular, you can handle having it on a very slow device. (Photos are a bigger issue, as they do sometimes need fast access when building thumbnails etc.)
This could even be done among neighbours over 802.11g, with suitable encryption. In theory.
As a commenter notes, Linux has support for this already, in the form of software RAID and the network block device.
So: take an external IDE enclosure, add a GumStix board running Linux with software RAID, LVM, and nbd, and add wifi. Then add DAV, SMB and NFS export of the disk, and some decent UI code to organise the volumes into a single exported RAID volume (hopefully automatically!), and it’d be a pretty compelling product, in my opinion!
(hey Craig! I said GumStix! ;)
Tags: backups, disks, gumstix, hardware, linux, lvm, nbd, product, raid
This is pathetic. As noted in the link-blog a couple of days ago (as well as everywhere else), TiVo’s new DRM features have been spotted ‘in the wild’, protecting the valuable Intellectual Property that is Family Guy and Simpsons reruns.
The icing on the cake is that TiVo have come up with a hilarious hand-wavy explanation — apparently it was line noise. Marc Hedlund of O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow are having none of it, and rightly so; as a bonus, Cory asked a group of DRM experts, who ‘burst into positive howls of disbelief’ that line noise could corrupt the DRM bits and the corresponding checksums to match.
From my angle, though, there’s another noteworthy factor:
“During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals. We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives.” (– Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo)
Interesting use of the term ‘false positive’ there. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned bug if you ask me ;)
Anyway, I’m glad I went for the home-built option. It was pretty obvious that TiVo are in the cross-hairs, and their product is only going to get worse as the DRM industry push harder…
Tags: cory, couple, drm, family, intellectual, line, noise, product, property, tivo
Open Source: so I was just looking at OSCON 2005’s website, and I noticed that it listed Kim Polese, of SpikeSource, as a presenter.
I don’t really pay any attention to what’s happening in Java these days, but it appears that SpikeSource launched last year to provide ‘enterprise support services for open-source software’ with a Java/enterprise slant.
Funnily enough, my last encounter with a Kim-Polese-headed company did indeed have a big effect on me, open-source-wise.
That company was Marimba, and they made an excellent Java GUI builder called Bongo. In those days (nearly ten years ago!), I was working on a product for Iona as a developer, in Java and C++, and we needed to provide a GUI on a number of Java tools. I chose to use Bongo, as it had a great feature set and looked reliable.
Wow, was I wrong! The software was reliable — sadly, the same couldn’t be said about the vendor. What I hadn’t considered was the possibility that the company might decide to discontinue the product, and not offer any migration help to its customers — and that’s exactly what happened, Sometime around 1998, Marimba decided that Bongo wasn’t quite as important as their Castanet ‘push’ product, and dropped it. Despite calls from the Bongo-using community to release the code so that the community could maintain it and avoid code-rot, they never did, and as a result apps using Bongo had to be laboriously rewritten to remove the Bongo dependencies.
I learned an important lesson about writing software — if at all possible, build your products on open source, instead of relying on a fickle commercial software vendor. It’s a lot harder to have the rug pulled out from under you, that way.
Update: Well, it seems it was quite far off the mark about Marimba. Someone who worked at Marimba at the time read the blog entry, and got in touch via email:
I was an employee of Marimba in the early days, and was around when we developed Bongo, and still later, when we discontinued it, and still later, when Bongo *was* released to the open-source community (jm: appears to be around the start of 1999 I think). It was hosted on a site called freebongo.org and continued to be enhanced with new features and a lot of new and cool widgets. It was ultimately discontinued a few years later due to lack of interest.
It was hosted and primarily maintained in the open-source community by one of the original Bongo engineers. Here’s a link from the Java Gazette from the days when it was called Free Bongo.
So don’t go blaming Marimba. We did listen to our users and release the code!
Fair enough — and they deserve a lot more credit than I’d initially assumed. I guess I must have missed this later development after leaving Iona. Apologies, ex-Marimbans!
Tags: bongo, company, enterprise, gui, java, marimba, open, product, software, spikesource, vendor
Software: How Funcom Squashed Bugs With Bugzilla (GamaSutra, free reg required).
There’s some differences between the commercial and free-software development styles; writing games is probably one of the most extreme of the commercial development environments, with extremely aggressive schedules and a single, long-term product development arc building up to one really big release.
A really good way to use bugzilla is to track development — essentially, using it to track work instead of bugs. In other words, when work is planned, a bug is created to track that work’s progress and provide a forum for discussion of the work’s design, implementation details, etc.
This article gives a great overview of the additions Funcom have made to Bugzilla to do this, including time estimates, MS Project integration.
Tags: arc, bugs, bugzilla, development, extreme, funcom, gamasutra, product, software, squashed, work
Politics: Eli Lilly wants it both ways. First off pro-free-market:
Not many U.S. companies would put ‘maintenance of free market’ at the top of their worry list, but the pharmaceutical industry has genuine reasons for concern.
But then, anti-free-market!:
Starting immediately, if a Canadian wholesaler tries to order more Lilly product than Lilly’s estimate of what is appropriate for Canadian use, ‘they will not be able to have it,’ Smith said.
Tags: concern, eli, industry, lilly, list, maintenance, market, politics, product, top, wholesaler
The first suit, against Avalend and Intermark Media, alleges infringement of the Habeas trademark, including infringing use of the Habeas trademark in email in order to help ensure its delivery. The second lawsuit, against Heller, Stuchinski, Clickbank and Keynetics, includes a breach of contract claim against Heller, based on the signing of a Habeas license and then using the Habeas trademark in email which did not comply with the Habeas license. The companies advertised in Heller’s email are named as co-defendants.
Sweet. Sounds like the first two are alleged to have out-and-out forged the mark without a license, and the latter three are alleged to have gained a license and breached it. Habeas’ business model relies on successful enforcement, and actively being a threat against spammers who attempt to abuse their mark. I hope this goes well for them.
BTW, for folks who cannot countenance the idea of paying for a mark to send bulk mail: Habeas’ model is just like that of Underwriters Laboratories, which performs (physical) product safety testing, and provides a mark to certify that a product has passed those tests — and can therefore be judged ’safer’ than products that do not have the mark. In Habeas’ case, instead of a product’s safety, they vouch for a mail’s non-spamminess.
It’s not a ‘mail protection racket’ — it’s a way for you to send a mail saying ‘this trustworthy agency has vouched that this is not spam’. And if I trust Habeas, it allows me to extend that trust to you, even if I’ve never heard of you before.
Tags: avalend, email, habeas, heller, intermark, license, mail, mark, product, trademark
Wired: The Civil War Inside Sony.
By rights, Sony should own the portable player business. The company’s first hit product, back in the ’50s, was the transistor radio, the tinny-sounding invention that took rock and roll out of the house and away from the parents and allowed the whole Elvis thing to happen. A quarter-century later, the Walkman enabled the kids of the ’70s to take their tapes and tune out the world. But the 21st-century Walkman doesn’t bother with tapes or CDs or minidiscs; it stores hundreds of hours of music on its own hard drive. And it sports an Apple logo. ….
Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious ‘check-in/check-out’ procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony’s copy-protection mechanisms don’t allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another - not an issue with the iPod. ‘We do not have any plans for such a product,’ says Kimura, the smile fading. ‘But we are studying it.’ ….
What’s changed since the original Walkman debuted is that Sony became the only conglomerate to be in both consumer electronics and entertainment. As a result, it’s conflicted: Sony’s electronics side needs to let customers move files around effortlessly, but its entertainment side wants to build in restraints, because it sees every customer as a potential thief.
Tags: civil, drive, entertainment, ipod, music, product, sony, the, walkman, wired
Taking a look at the referrers, I came across Mark O’Neill’s weblog, which lists taint.org on the blogroll; Mark’s the CTO of Vordel. They have a product called VordelSecure, which seems to be a SOAP firewall proxy, in the same way the Wonderwall product I wrote for Iona was a proxy for CORBA:
When a firewall examines a SOAP request received over HTTP, it might conclude that this is valid HTTP traffic and let it pass. Firewalls tend to be all-or-nothing when it comes to SOAP. A SOAP-level firewall should be capable of:
Identifying if the incoming SOAP request is targeted at a Web service which is intended to be available
Identifying if the content of the SOAP message is valid. This is analogous to what happens at the Network Layer, where IP packet contents are examined. However, at the Application Layer it requires data that the Web service expects.
Cool!
I hear Wonderwall is still around, but rewritten from the ground up. Sorry about that to whoever had to rewrite it ;)
Tags: firewall, http, identifying, layer, product, proxy, request, service, soap, web
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
