Matt Woodward's Blog

Now, however, we have an online video technology that anyone is free to use, study, improve, and distribute without needing permission or paying fees. This technology is called Ogg Theora (or just 'Theora'). Some parts of Theora are patented, but the owners of those patents have granted a permanent, irrevocable, royalty-free patent license to everyone. Theora carefully avoids any patents held by traditional patent holders: to get around the ridiculous patent of image storing mentioned above, Theora stores video image information from bottom to top instead of top to bottom!


Recognizing that Theora is a crucial ingredient for the freedom of our internet, Mozilla, Opera and Google have announced support of Theora video for future or current releases of their browsers. This means that millions of users will be able to watch Theora videos using their browser, without the need for extra software. The work of the free software community, with support from Mozilla, Wikipedia and others…

I've been doing a ton of research and experimentation since my last post on this subject, and I came to a bunch of decisions that are a bit far afield from where I started. Ultimately I think I'll wind up with a very cool setup even if it doesn't meet the original Home Theater PC goals. Ultimately I want something that works well and is easy to use. If I were the only one watching TV in the house I'd probably tolerate a ton of rough edges with something like MythTV and potentially XBMC, but since I'm not the only one who watches TV, full-time TV tech support wasn't something I wanted to get into. As I looked at everything involved with a MythTV setup and started thinking about things like channel mappings, remote controls, potential noise issues, not to mention the overall cost involved with a multi-room setup, I started thinking it wasn't a wise road to go down. As a bit of an aside before I get to the punchline, I did get an eyeTV 250 Plus for my Mac Mini…

I'm working on a project that uses a pre-existing Java library to handle payment processing. This is great because it's a heck of a lot of stuff I don't have to write myself, but when payments fail I need to get a code that's contained in an exception object that's thrown in the Java code. This is a problem since given the way the Java code is written, the normal message and detail keys of the CFCATCH struct don't contain the code I need. To get the code I need to call a getCode() method on the Java exception object itself. Open BlueDragon doesn't implement GetException() yet, which in theory lets you get the actual exception object thrown by Java (provided you specify the specific Java object type being thrown), but I figured since the Java class name is contained in the JAVAEXCEPTION key of the CFCATCH struct, it wouldn't be too hard to tell Open BlueDragon to put the actual Java object in that key instead of the class name. It took a bit of hunting b…

I'm in the process of converting a bunch of standalone Mach-II apps in to modules inside of a new, monolithic application. It's been a surprisingly smooth process, thanks to the tools that the Mach-II framework gives us to work with. Most of the bumps along the way have been related to bad software design practices in some of the oldest apps that I've created, and continuing, after many years building Web applications, to do dumb things like hardcoding URLs and other strings which will change when converting the app to a module (or moving the app to a different server).

via iterateme.com
Awesome tips from Brian on Mach-II modules and good practices for building Mach-II apps in general. Thanks for sharing Brian!

"Adobe Systems' Flash and Acrobat Reader products will become the preferred targets for criminal hackers (PDF) in 2010, surpassing Microsoft Office applications, a security vendor predicted this week. 'Cybercriminals have long picked on Microsoft products due to their popularity. In 2010, we anticipate Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot,' security vendor McAfee said in its '2010 Threat Predictions' report.

via it.slashdot.org
Um, congratulations? :-)

My TiVo Series 3 finally died. Over the past several weeks it went from being a bit sluggish, to not showing the Now Playing list at all, to occasionally rebooting itself, to finally being in an endless reboot cycle when it's powered on. I attempted to save it with a new hard drive and power supply from weaKnees.com, but neither did the trick. The new hard drive didn't get it out of its endless reboot cycle, and with the new power supply it won't power up at all. According to weaKnees the Series 3 TiVos fail quite a bit in comparison to other models, and they've seen cases where a known good power supply is simply rejected by the TiVo. So after throwing $300 in repairs at my Series 3 with no results it's time to give up. I could replace my dead Series 3 with a new TiVo, but as I outlined in a previous post, the world has changed pretty dramatically since TiVo first hit the scene, and for my purposes I'm just not sure TiVo has evolved enough to justify spending …

via fsf.org
Great, great video from Lawrence Lessig about the importance of the free software movement to society and culture as a whole. Lessig also wrote the forward to Richard Stallman's book "Free Software, Free Society" and it's one of the many things that helped me see the big picture where free software is concerned.

Grails 1.2 final was released today, and there's tons of great new features as well as numerous under-the-hood improvements that make it a very compelling release. Since I'm relatively new to Grails I'm still wrapping my head around some of the new stuff, but here are some of the more interesting changes in 1.2 from my perspective:
Performance Improvements
Faster is always better of course, so the first thing that caught my eye was the performance improvements in GSP/SiteMesh and the tag library return types (default is now StreamCharBuffer, but tags can return object values too).Environments in Bootstrapper
Not that this was a showstopper in previous versions of grails, but having to use a kludge or do a quick check of the state of your database to see whether or not you should crank out test data seemed a bit wrong since environment awareness is available elsewhere in Grails apps. Now that it's in the bootstrapper too we can do things the "right way."Per-Meth…