Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

The cluster environment is settled – Rocks.  Here are a few pictures of the progress so far:

A couple of projects have taken my attention this week.  One of which is nearly complete and that entails some cleaning of our technology items.  The amount of “stuff” that’s accumulated over the years has reached a point where it needs to be thinned signifcantly.  Some is just recyclable junk that has no useful purpose left in it. Some of it, however, is reusable for students or families that don’t have computers at home.  How that will work out is yet to be determined, but it’s on the table.

The second project deals with content filtering for our schools.  We use a product that is included in our hosting.  It’s perfectly fine and does the bare minimum, but not robust enough to meet some of the demands that are on the horizon.  I’m not one for censorship, but schools and libraries are required by federal law to filter “obscene” content.   What it determines is obscene is sometimes at odds with common sense and I know that the students can find whatever they want on the Internet if they are determined.  I have had it demonstrated to me how easy it is to bypass these filters with just a few mouse clicks.

While I admire the resourcefulness of our students, I am also in a position where I must take steps to mitigate these easy, but creative, workarounds.  Whether or not I agree that this is the right thing to do with my time aside, the most obscene thing I’ve seen in the past week is just how much a robust solution costs for a school district.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think people passing these laws had some financial interest in content filtering appliances and services.

I am completely turned off by the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars upfront and then subsequently forced into annual licensing agreements.  In this time of budget shortages, teacher layoffs, and a necessity for more technology, it pains me to spend anything on censorware.

Thankfully, there exists Free/Open Source software to meet these needs.  Rather than invest tens of thousands and be on the hook for annual renewals, it makes more sense to spend a couple thousand and never have to pay a fee again.  So this has been my task these last few days, finding and tweaking a solution on a test system.  It seems promising and just in need of some tweaking and should be ready to go when we have some downtime.

On a bright side, our cluster seems to be on the way to becoming a reality.  Yesterday they got the master system up and running and today they were able to image one of the compute nodes.  It seemed like a simple process, or at least they made it look simple.  I am always impressed by these two guys and what they create.  Check out the blog they made.

I am known to those who know me as someone who doesn’t particularly care for DRM, or as DefectiveByDesign calls it, Digital Restrictions Management.  I’m not sure how the R stands for “Rights” because it seems more restrictions that rights.  I suppose I have the right to play it in the narrow confines that I am given, and as such, I should be thankful and not complaining.

I am reminded, once again, why I love the Mac and it becomes obvious why the iTunes store is such a success.  Here’s how it goes if I decide I want to purchase (or rent) media on my iPod:  I go to iTunes, purchase (or rent) it, plug in my iPod, wait, and then watch.  No finding files, usually no required software update, it just works, the vast majority of the time.  Same goes for Audible, both when I had a PC and on past Mac purchases.

But I digress.  What started my adventure tonight is that I recently discovered  that my local library offers audio books through a service called Overdrive.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, so I decided to give it a shot. I browsed through several selections and was so glad to see they were all compatible with iPods.  I selected a title that I wanted to hear, created my account, signed in and downloaded the software.  I attempted to download the audio book and was presented with an error that this particular title could not be played on my Mac.

No worries, I just want to transfer it to my iPod anyway.  Nope, there’s no way to do this.  Ok, well there’s an App, I can just download it there, right?.  Oh no, only mp3 formatted audio books, nothing that contains WMA DRM can be used on the iPod.  Well, that makes sense since WMA is a Microsoft format.  Ok, well it said I could play it on my Droid, which I think will play WMA, so I found the app and downloaded it there.  Nope, can’t download from the app there either.

Feeling a little annoyed, but determined to not let this thing beat me, I fired up my virtual Windows machine.  I downloaded the program, installed it and attempted to download my audio book.  Nope, no dice, I have to upgrade to Windows Media Player 11.  I went through that process, fired up the program again and was informed I had to upgrade Windows Media Player security plugin from with within the overdrive console.  Ok, so I did that, clicked through the dire ActiveX warning that this could be a potentially malicious piece of software and let it complete.

Now my book has finally downloaded, I’m ready to click that “transfer” button that’s taunting me.  Oops, I have to plug in the iPod.  I figured I didn’t have to sync it, I could just copy whatever file to it. Well, of course that won’t work because my iPod is formatted for Mac, and iTunes told me I had to format it for Windows.  As much fun as that sounds to completely lose all of my music for this one book, I opted to try an old iPod that doesn’t get much use.  It worked ok and the audio book has now been transferred to my iPod.  In theory, I should be able to listen to this book now.

Thankfully, I shouldn’t have to go through that process every time.  I should now be able to just download the audio file into Windows and sync it up.  So that, at least, is the silver lining.

I did notice, however, that there’s an option to burn this book to a CD.  Since I don’t have any CD-R media available, this was not an option.  However,  I see a potential flaw in their iron-clad DRM scheme here, which most anyone should be able to see if you think about it.

Maybe I should just renew my Audible account instead.