This is the coolest thing ever:

NASA J-Track 3D (You’ll need to allow popups and Java)

It tracks all the satellites currently orbiting the earth.  This month’s Scientific American offered a quick introduction to the satellite system that powers XM, Sirius and WorldSpace.  From there a quick search on Wikipedia revealed this article about geosynchronous satellites, as well as the above link to NASA.

I am just fascinated by this Java app; its amazing to see the Wikipedia article come to life visually.  For example, the haze of satellites really close to the earth are the ones orbiting in Low Earth Orbit.  If you zoom out a bit you’ll see a band of satellites, kinda like a ring of Saturn; these are the geostationary satellites.  The Wikipedia article also mentions inclined orbits, where a satellite will seem to oscillate around a fixed point in the sky.  By enabling orbital paths in the Java app (View -> Orbital Paths), you can see that the satellites just off the center of that ring do indeed oscillate across a fixed point on the earth’s surface!

Navigating to the Satellite -> Select menu will let you pick and choose any satellite on there.  Everyday names like GPS, Hubble (abbreviated HST), DirectTV, and Sirius are on there.  I’ve literally lost hours playing around with this thing!

Just a follow up to yesterday’s post.  I’m trying to wrap my head around this whole Microsoft DRM issue.

1. First there’s the Windows Media DRM, released in early 1999.
2. Then there’s Janus (WMDRM-PD), a portable version of the Windows Media DRM released in 2004.
3. PlaysForSure reaches beyond just DRM to encompass the entire music experience.  Janus and Windows Media DRM are just pieces of the entire PlaysForSure certification.  
4. Microsoft’s Zune introduces a totally new DRM system separate from Windows Media DRM.  I haven’t seen much info on this new DRM system, but its at the heart of the Zune’s restricted sharing system.  It sounds like this DRM system will be Zune-only for now.

Now earlier this week Computerworld published this article from CES that says “the release of Zune means Microsoft is turning its back on its PlaysForSure digital rights management software and all those who use music services that use that scheme“.

I think this is only half right.  PlaysForSure may well be going away.  However, the Windows Media DRM is still going strong, as evidenced by the recent announcements from Motorola and MOD Systems to use Windows Media DRM in their products.

Dropping PlaysForSure will leave a lot of vendors out in the cold, but in the long run I don’t think it’ll be missed.  PlaysForSure is a certification, not a technology.  Most of the devices labeled as PlaysForSure wouldn’t; message boards are littered with complaints of device/OS/player/syncing problems.  My Samsung Z5 makes a nice paperweight!  Companies can still use the Windows Media DRM in their music players, they just wouldn’t get a pretty blue sticker to put on their box.

Lifehacker: CDs vs. Downloads – CDs are a pain.  You’re usually buying a CD for only one song, they take up shelf space, and they are heavy when you move!  But in the end I have to agree with LifeHacker: if you’re buying music, CDs are the way to go.  DRM is a pain, even Bill Gates thinks so.

And so I was kinda surprised by two recent announcements (via Coolfer): both MOD Systems and Motorola are using Windows Media DRM in their technologies.  With the release of the Zune and its new DRM, I figured Microsoft would slowly phase-out its old DRM for the new one.  It sounds like the Zune DRM is actually the odd-man out, reserved exclusively for the Zune, while the Windows Media DRM will stick around for third-party use. 

2007 is shaping up to be a wonderful year for technology.  This week alone has put a smile on my face:

• Yesterday I got an invite to try out the beta of The Venice Project.  It’s television for your computer, from the guys who brought us Kazaa/Skype (and using some of the same P2P innovations).  The application itself is really sweet, but I have yet to find a channel I can continuously watch.  My favorite thing about it: when you put it in standby, it fades out to a small white dot, just like an old tube TV!
• Today I got an invite to try out Amazon’s EC2 service.  Its about time!  I’m really impressed with what Amazon has been doing for developers lately.  I’ve been playing around with Amazon’s S3 for a while now and I’m excited to build something with the combination of S3 and EC2.
• Adobe’s Apollo.  This one is coming out soon, and it has the potential to be a truly revolutionary application.  Adobe is doing a great job of building buzz through blogs, screenshots, podcasts and screencasts.
• The news the entire blogosphere is buzzing about: Apple’s new iPhone.  The demos up on Apple.com are amazing; my favorite is the way you can zoom in and out of photos using two fingers!  Is there anything this phone can’t do?  I’m definitely lining up for this!
• Just announced!  IRiver will be using Rhapsody’s new DNA system to download subscription music… over Wi-Fi!  Something like this would make Microsoft’s Zune compelling.  I’m really excited about Rhapsody, however, their ideas always seem a bit buggy in practice.  Hopefully this year they’ll refine things and get it right.  This is one step closer to the device I’ve always dreamed about: access to all music from anywhere… heck, just implant the music in my brain!  If only the iRiver could work over EVDO or something instead of just Wi-fi…
• And of course, Xanga!  We’ve got some cool stuff on the horizon, just wait and see!

What new technologies of the coming year are you excited about?

Its winter, its a Saturday, and its getting up to 70 degrees here in NYC!

And then last night i had that strange dream
Where everything was exactly how it seemed
Where concerns about the world getting warmer
The people thought they were just being rewarded
For treating others as they like to be treated
For obeying stop signs and curing diseases
For mailing letters with the address of the sender
Now we can swim any day in november

Postal Service, Sleeping In

Tickets to all five (yes five) Arcade Fire shows sold out in like 5 minutes this morning!  I’ll withhold any commentary on how overrated and overhyped Arcade Fire are because, frankly, I was one of the chumps trying to buy tickets.  Instead, I thought I’d write a few observations on the queueing system used by Tickets.com. 

In the minutes leading up to a ticket sale, a ticket vendor will be hammered with requests.  To alleviate this, Tickets.com put in a queue system that has you wait 30 seconds before making your next ticket request.  The code uses javascript to countdown 30 seconds, and then just reloads the page. 

Even with the countdown, users have to be prevented from just hitting refresh over and over again.  To combat this, Tickets.com put in a few alerts whenever the page is refreshed, the ctrl-N is clicked, or the mouse button is clicked.

Thats all pretty clever, and yet at the core of the code, the page merely refreshes itself; its not to hard to get around this.  For example, just reload the page, ignoring whatever javascript alerts come up.  All that countdown stuff is just smoke & mirrors.

As far as I can tell, Tickets.com doesn’t do any server side tracking
of requests (there’s no cookie set, there’s no session ID in the url). 
There was a “roomid” in the querystring (maybe pointing to different
queues?), but changing it didn’t do anything for me.

Now here’s where it gets ugly.  I did get occasionally get through to the ticket purchase process, multiple times in fact.  But do I have tickets?  No!  That’s because Tickets.com puts valid ticket requests through the same queue as new requests.  So even after choosing my tickets, and after hitting the captcha page, I was still kicked back into the queue!  This was very annoying!  Valid ticket requests should have been streamlined through the proccess; it would have saved a lot of frustration for many people (I think Ticketmaster does this).

If anyone’s interested in seeing the actual javascript, you can check it out here (I made a few formatting changes but the gist of it is there).  In the meantime, there’s some amusing discussion about the whole fiasco going on at BrooklynVegan.

So, did anyone get tickets?

We saw Dreamgirls yesterday; it was a lot of fun.  It wasn’t the best movie of the year, but let me tell you, there is a scene in there, where Jennifer Hudson sings And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going, that’s absolutely my favorite moment from any movie this year.  She kills that song.  The theater erupted in cheers when it was over.  And now the song has been on repeat all day.  With one song, Jennifer Hudson has made herself more relevant than any American Idol winner.