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The DRM - Digital Rights Management - regime is destined to fail. The now closed MSN Music is a good indicator of just that. And, Microsoft deliberatly rips their customers bought-and-payed-for property out of their hands. That is effectivly what is happening now; the MSN Music tracs which you paid for, will continue to work unitl you need to re-install your OS or by a new computer. And, we do re-install, or upgrade quite frequently, don’t we?

The MSN Music service is dead, and the server hosting Microsofts DRM keys is shut down. No way you can get a new DRM key for your new computer or your re-installed OS… unless you crack the DRM key and thereby criminalize yourself.

If you have an opinion or feel strange about someone else ripping your property of your hands, please go see the Defective by Design web-site. You might as well even join the campaign. . . !

Netscape is dead. It was know to the public late 2007 that Netscape as we know it as about to shut down, and the date for the official shutdown was set to February 1.st 2008.

If you have been around for a while, you might remember the time when Netscape was synonymous with the graphical web, the HTTP/HTML part of the web. Actually, if you have been around since 1993 (thats when I got to know the Internet), there was the Gopher web, and the FTP sites that dominated the Web, in addition to HTTP/HTML based web. Anyhow, Netscape WAS the internet at that time. And Netscape was the primary driver towards the graphical, contents rich HTTP/HTML web. But not anymore.

My personal analysis of what has happened to Netscape is:

• Lack of innovation
• Not being able to attract the best people

Significant innovation on the web browser arena has taken place in the open source Firefox, and in companies like Opera and Microsoft with the major Internet Explorer. These companies & organizations managed to sustain innovation, attract skilled people and dominate the market in their slightly different ways.

No matter how much of a tech-giant someone can be; without significant innovation and truly innovative and smart people, giants fall over and eventually dies. In this case, a rather silent and unnoticed death. But still. Netscape is dead.

A picture I took last year has been included in the Schmap World Wide Travel Guide. The picture was taken in the Veritas Park @ Høvik in Oslo. I put it up on Flickr, where Schmap apparently found it. It was also published on my weekley photo blog, urbanmonster.org.

Schmap politely asked me about using it a while ago, an now it is no finally published. I took the picture in September 2007, with a cellphone camera while waiting for a taxi-cab after a business meeting. It was a beautiful day, one of the last summer days that year.

Happy New Year!

I survived the entrance of a new year wit out too much of a hangover, and spent parts of New Year´s day upgrading my web-server. I have my henning-jansen.com domain hosted with Joyent (former TextDrive) somewhere in the US, and I use the WordPress package for my blog. It´s been a while since I upgraded the software,.. and today I finally did it. The latest release is 2.3.2. After making a backup of the database and some of the essential php files, the upgrade itself was over in seconds.

Wordpress have served me for close to two years now, with no hassle at all. Ok, I have a conservative and pretty boring site, but still…

By the way; do some of you ever see my portfolio-page on henning-jansen.com/portfolio.

Smiley, the sideways joke-marker is 25 years old today. The first thread Smiley appeared in is right here and was posted September 19 1982. I was 11 at that time, happily unaware of the whole thing,.. Anyhow, smiley’s has had significant impact on the way we communicate. Subtle, still significant.

Apple and EMI has decided to provide DRM-free music! This exiting news was released one day after Google’s promise of free broadband, and it made me look up the calender twice before I could believe it.

Apple’s iTunes and EMI are both major players in the modern music industry,.. will we now see a regime shift in the way music is consumed and distributed?

Anyway, defectiveByDesign.org is taking on the battle for Digital Freedom. If you are a responsible consumer, paying the artists for what they create, and at the same time wants to have full control over your digital content, please support their campaign.

My old urbanmonster.org domain is up & running again. I installed the pixelpost photo-blogging engine on it, and I am now preparing for an active and creative PAW2007 (Picture a Week) project. Pixelpost is a simple and elegant piece of LAMP software. It installs in no time at all.

September 13th is the 256th day in a non-leap year. Happy Programmers Day to all of you! (… if this doesn’t make any sense to you at all, don’t bother asking. Simply keep on surfin’ …).