Ben's Bits

Many engineers, scientists and engineering students are familiar with the MATLAB product which is used for complex mathematics and mathematical modeling. I recently came across two open source (and free) alternatives. Octave was originally written as a companion to a chemistry textbook being written by professors from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas and has grown from there. Octave is available for a wide variety of systems from OS/2 to Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

Another option is SciLab. SciLab is about the same age as Octave but is clearly managed by a consortium and seems especially popular in European countires. Similarly, it is available for many systems such as Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

I recently came across an anonymous Slashdot posting which claims you can multi-boot an Intel based Macintosh without the Apple provided Bootcamp software. The original posting is poorly written so I've paraphrased it here, note that more information is also available on this page.

Bootcamp does a few things for you:

• It provides a GUI for the DiskUtil online partition resizer though the GUI is limited and supports fewer partition types than the command line based DiskUtil which can be used without Bootcamp in OS X 10.4.6.
• It contains a graphical bootloader for selecting OS X or Windows upon boot, but other bootloaders are available.
• It contains a diskimage with Windows drivers for the Apple hardware, but these drivers can be extracted without installing the Bootcamp software.

Because the Intel Macintosh platform uses EFI instead of a BIOS you need firmware on your Macintosh which supports BIOS emulation. All of the recent Macintosh firmwares do and simply updating your firmware to the latest version will add this capability.

The most critical compnent of a multi-boot Intel Macintosh system is the bootloader. Luckily an open source third party bootloader, which is much more configurable than the one provided in Bootcamp, is available. The rEFIt project provides a graphical boot menu and maintenance toolkit allowing you to create triple-boot scenarios such as OS X, Windows and Linux.

I'm quite impressed by rEFIt and would actually be interested in seeing this work and potentially using it on other EFI based systems.

Those familiar with rapid prototyping (essentially 3D printers for computers) know that both machines and supplies can be extremely expensive. Now a group known as Fab@Home has published instructions and software for building your own rapid prototyping machine. The machine they propose is certainly not as durable or precise as the commercial offerings, but at a fraction of the cost it may serve your needs just fine. If all you're looking to do is a bit fo experimentation or introducing students to what a rapid prototyper can do a less expensive system such as this might be all you need. NewScientistTech also has a story on the Fab@Home project.

I recently ran across this video of Stephan Colbert explaining the Cingular/AT&T name change. He goes though a complete explantion of the lineage of Cingular back to the original AT&T and ends up how today's AT&T looks a lot like the AT&T of the early 1980s...

I was recently reading this CoolTools article in NetworkWorld where Keith Shaw was explaining some of the gadgets he found at CES. One of the things that caught my eye was his explantion of the Streaming Networks iRecord Personal Media Recorder.

What caught my eye was his explanation that this device would allow you to "connect a DVD player...and press the record button...[to] instantly record the video's content onto your video iPod." Appaerently you can do the same thing with a PSP or any USB storage device. This is interesting to me because most DVD players, at least those sold in the US, output an analog copy protection system (Macrovision) when playing back digital content protected by a digital copy protection system (CSS). While such analog protection is easily removed by devices designed to do so and can be ignored by digital recording software most digital recording software and hardware manufacturers have been pressured (perhaps with legal threats, I don't know) into detecting such copy protection on analog inputs and refusing to record. Either there was some misinformation in the NetworkWorld article or the iRecord was ignoring this protection.

I needed to look into this further so I checked out the Streaming Networks page for the iRecord. This page also blatently talks about recording DVDs though the analog inputs on the device. After some further poking around on the site all I could come up with was an FAQ entry explaining this is legal to do (good thing Fair Use still works to avoid analog copy protection, too bad the same can't be said of digital transcoding thanks to the DMCA...)

The next stop was a CNet review which stated emphatically that "it can record protected DVDs" this seems to put the issue to bed. My only question now is how they avoided having to enforce the Macrovision protection when everyone else does. One potential answers lies in an older cached copy of the CNet review which states "In accordance to the terms, you won't be able to get this [Macrovision protected] video off of your USB device (iPod, PSP) as you can with other recorded content." This no longer appears in the current version of the article. Perhaps the information was incorrect and the Macrovision protection is ignored, but perhaps this just isn't being talked about.