Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

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.

The highlight of my day today was getting even closer to having my Ubuntu Linux lab ready for production.  I have not been able to devote the time to it that I wanted, so I’m working on it in bits and pieces, which is why it seems it’s gone on forever.  However, I’m now about one day away from having it ready to pilot.

I worked out the problem that I was having with the wireless network connection and have had the ones that are fully operational working all of this week without a hitch.  The trick was to leaving the roaming mode enabled, and then removing the requirement to enter the a password to unlock the keyring to connect to the wireless.  This was an ugly hack, but simply leaving the password blank was fine.

Security was mitigated because the only thing that is stored on the keyring is this password.  And since the username and password are posted all over the place and everyone knows it, there’s really no point in actually making you enter it.  When dealing with kids aged 9-12, there’s really no way to implement rock solid security in a lab environment.  Anyway, I digress, security is another matter entirely and a project for another decade.

The second part of my day was spent configuring a lab for Kindergarten through second grade students. It was a rush job, but my team and I managed to get it going in just over an hour.  We still have a little tweaking to do, but it is much better than it was and fully operational.

During that fun job, we were struggling with the problem of teachers that cannot play DVD’s on their computer.  Why this has to be such a difficult process is beyond me.  In my Mac, I put the DVD in and it plays.  With a few minor tweaks, any Linux disto will do the same.  Why, in a PC, is getting a DVD to play so hard and unreliable?  And why does Windows associate Windows Media Player with DVDs when it cannot play them?  I just don’t get why this has to be so difficult to play a DVD.  I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it anyway, because I have written a grant and been funded to buy new laptops for all of the teachers, so it’s only a matter of time before I have to go through all of it again.

I love my job, even on days like today when I want to drop kick computers just to see what happens.