You need tinycdb which builds to tinycdb x86_64 rpm and tinycdb devel x86_64 rpm.

There’s been quite a bit of international and nacional hoopla and hubhub about iTunes movies and HDCP, most of it concluding Apple is evil.
Well, Apple is evil, just not particularly on this case.

Most people commenting this issue don’t know HDCP is part of HDMI. In fact, HDMI is just DVI + audio + HDCP and HD playback devices are not supposed to output HD (specially digital HD - the juri is kind of out on analogue) on non “protected”, ie DRMed, ie HDCP, ie HDMI devices. So, MacBooks are doing what every other device that wants to playout licensed HD content must do.
Granted, Apple could play downscaled video to DVI. Either they don’t want to to preserve the HD experience or they just didn’t get around to it.

[26/11/2008 Update: Apple updated Quicktime to allow downscaled playblack on non-HDCP displays. See guys ? ]

• In an insanely cool tech advance scientists have developed tiny “light sabers” to kill individual cancer cells. It’s not everyday you find light sabers and cancer fighting on the same news bit.

• On the mobile front, Flash is coming to Android/G1 to annoy Apple, sadly but expectedly the Nokia 5800 will be marked up with services for Xmas and Sagem has figured out how to put a GPS in a SIM card for some reason (definitely not for good reception).

• There’s one more wave generator but this one needs to be tied to the sea floor and Better Place’s grid is going to be deployed in the Bay Area which is a major boost for electric cars in the US.

We’d even invent geek conspiracy theories to explain the evil decisions, which we thought were made against engineering purity and thus made little or no sense to us. Often, we’d focus blame on the marketing departments of these companies [Faisal Jawdat, a tech reviewer on this book, threatened me with death by sarcasm if I didn’t point out how ironic it is that I then went on to work for Microsoft.] — Making Things Happen, Scott Berkun

• This has been a sad sad week for democracy in the EU. Not only has the EU Secretariat found there’s no public interest in finding out how public money is funneled into MS despite Microsoft having convicted in the EU for unfair trade practices but also it has turned down requests for access to the ACTA documents. The European Union wastes our money as it sees fit and signs into secret laws. All for our own good of course.

• In an ironic twist of fate Halliburton applied for a patent on patent trolling and may soon be taking patent trolls to court on patent infringement …

• Lots of Nokia stuff this week. The list of upcoming phones might have been leaked and if it’s true a phone with a big screen, hw keyboard and an heap of sensors is in the works. On the other hand the Nokia 5800 promised at under 300 EUR is showing up on nokia.es at 429 EUR. Bad Nokia, bad! On more phone news, treos and blackberrys are crappier than iphones contrary to anecdotal evidence, according to a SquareTrade study at least.

• While Dean Kamen is working on a Stirling powered car some guys are working a way to make hydrogen from water without precious metals. And the friendly neighborhood mini nuclear reactor is making the rounds again so this has been an energy filled week.

• Finally, a must have iphone app, Ocarina for the iPhone

Did xkcd create the web interest in rule 34 or was it the other way around ?

Here’s an idea for HD manufacturers, add a crypto chip that encrypts everything that goes into the platters. Then add a physical rip-cord (or tab, something) that destroys the crypto chip.

When you bin the disk and send it for mandatory recycling all you have to do to make sure your data is safe is pull the wipe rip-cord.

• Obviously, the big news this week is Obama becoming president-elect of the USA but CNN made the rounds too with craptastic pointless holograms

• Apple’s plan seem to be humming along nicely and the iPhone is #2 in smartphones market share totally bypassing Blackberry and inching closer a distant Nokia. I’ve said this before, the no-brainer exchange integration on the iPhone (not even mentioning Nokia enabling exchange on all E and N phones) will kill RIM unless they make depoying their service easier.

• In tech, not only are clever fellows working out how to make fuel grade oil with fungii but also clever fellows seem to be figuring out how to make chlorophyll bateries, Wireless USB is going nowhere fast, France passed laws to ban P2P users and cable and dsl ISPs have started filling for bankrupcy, Nokia is hiring like crazy but it’s also laying off, Firefox hit 20% worlwide and Ballmer admited tacitally the IE engine is a turd and they may explore other options like WeKit,

• Amazon saves the world, one frustration at a time

The handheld market is a bitch. And to prove it, here are 3 companies heading for the tubes.

Palm

Palm sadly ate itself. I’ve discussed this before, at some point Palm believed they would rule the handheld world and that obviously, now, didn’t go so well.
Well ahead of the technology Palm come out with a wireless device before 2000 that was able to do very limited browsing on the pre dot-com Web (which was itself limited). The early PalmVII success, the dot-com times and some PalmOS licensing deals put some high hopes on Palm’s exec heads and it went ahead spinning off Palmsource as a separate company to develop and license the next generation of PalmOS while palmOne focused on the hardware side. A couple of years latter it was pretty obvious Palmsource couldn’t develop a cross-platform new-gen OS and palmOne couldn’t develop nice hardware cheap enough to compete with the new competition. Oddly enough it was during this period what I consider to be the best palm ever, T2 came out. Shortly after the split palmOne merged in Handspring, a splinter group from the original Palm. Handspring designed really interesting hardware and efectivelly invented the smartphone with the GSM springboard for the Visor (which then was integrated as the Treo180). On the other hand Handspring was utterly unable to extend PalmOS properly and support the developer community so the Treo line never picked up enough steam (hear that Apple ?).
So eventually Palmsource capsized, got bought out by Access and palmOne took a nasty hit acquiring back the exclusive rights to the Palm brand. Soon after, with the market fully focused on smartphones and faced with an old OS plagged by Handspring leftovers, Palm destroyed the hard earned brand by releasing Treos with Windows CE instead of PalmOS. Loyal fans were shocked, casual buyers were confused and nobody understood why buy a CE Treo when he could buy cheaper hardware from a competing vendor and get exactly the same crappy experience.
Eventually, Palm pulled a play from the old book and went ahead of the times inventing the netbook. Sadly, it was expensive and useless and the Folio never went on sale. To this day Palm is still pinning and longing for Access to develop PalmOS6 which is actually Linux based and called PalmOS2 now.
Palm, have you ever heard about Android ? It’s supposed to be hell-u-va cool and stuff.

Motorola Mobile

Do you have a motophone ? Yeah, me neither. That’s a bit of a problem for Motorola. The problem is Motorola can create 2 types of phones, cheap and expensive. Sadly both types are ugly and have ugliers user interfaces. The only decent motophone is the razor but then you open it up and try to use it.
But Moto turned to Android, so lets hope google tells them about designers. And UI specialists. And testers. Oh well.

Sony-Ericsson

You probably remember when Ericsson phones were butt ugly, had crappy UIs and were built like small GSM bricks. Then Sony came along and made them considerably less ugly, redid the UI and kept the very decent radios. Those were the days of K600 and P900. But the SE that kept UIQ alive reared its ugly head on the M600 and infected the whole line to generate depressing phones like K850i.
Lets see if SE turns it around with the X1 or if, most likely, becomes HTC.

This year seems to be about the do it yourself game. It started last Xmas with Drawn To Life for the Nintendo DS ,a pretty fun game for 5 year olds where you get to draw your own hero and number of elements of the 2d side scroller. It’s actually pretty decent and if your 5 year old (nod nod wink wink) likes SpongeBob you can get this Xmas edition, Drawn to Life: Spongebob Squarepants which is basically the same thing but you get to draw Mr SquarePants.

The big thing this Xmas is Little Big Planet which I never actually played but from the reviews seems like a pretty souped up Drawn To Life. For starters you move from a DS to a PS3 which means about a gazillion more eye candy. And then Little Big Planet seems to not be designed for 5 year olds.

And then, you have the grandaddy of all DIY games, Spore. You get 3 flavours, Spore which comes with a assload of crappy DRM for the PC that will make the game not run and screw your system for ever, or you can with the graphic card issues on the Mac version. Then you have something called Spore Creature Creator which I don’t understand and the DS version, Spore Creatures which is a diferent game aparently and gets boring afer about 5 minutes. So adding together the craptastic DRM, the lack of polishing and the overall pointlessness, Spore is the big failure of the DIY game year.

Barack Obama will be the next president of the USA. People, let’s get optimistic again and get the economy going.

On a side note, life is imitating 24:! Quick, get Jack Bauer on speeddial!

• I knew bundling software patents and business processes was a good thing. That’s cause there’s a lot of money to get software patents going there’s even more money to get business processes patents not going. This was the case in this court case where a Federal Appeals Court made patents on non-material ideas against the law. So, as it stands, and untill it’s overturned again patents on methods to scam the IRS, speedy online shoping cart processing or double-clicks are unenforceable.

• In a “strange” case of life imitates The Simpsons real life voting machines are switching votes from Obama to McCain. Turns it the touchscreen was not properly calibrated or something.

• We knew my kid’s gokart is faster than IE7 but we didn’t know the PS3 browser is faster than IE7. I’m not sure how this benchmarks are achieved but they’re fun anyway.

• On tech, nuclear powered planes are back to the drawingboard, a US based company developed coloured e-paper type stuff that looks promising, bot swarms will either settle Mars or kill us all.

• Japanese rhino zoo emergency drill. ‘Nough said.

For when you can’t buy TextMate.

• Komodo Edit
• TextWrangler
• Smultron