article page 2 - Dave's Blog

Most existing DRM attempts to only allow the user to access the DRM'ed content with particular applications or with particular credentials so that if the file is shared it won't be useful to others. A better solution is to encode any of the user's horrible secrets into unique versions of the DRM'ed content so that the user won't want to share it. Entangle the users and the content provider's secrets together in one document and accordingly their interests. I call this Blackmail DRM. For an implementation it is important to point out that the user's horrible secret doesn't need to be verified as accurate, but merely verified as believable.

Apparently I need to get these blog posts written faster because only recently I read about Social DRM which is a light weight version of my idea but with a misleading name. Instead of horrible secrets, they say they'll use personal information like the user's name in the DRM'ed content. More of my thoughts stolen and before I even had a chance to think of it first!

Cool and (relatively) new methods on the JavaScript Array object are here in the most recent versions of your favorite browser! More about them on ECMAScript5, MSDN, the IE blog, or Mozilla's documentation. Here's the list that's got me excited:

some & every

Does your callback function return true for any (some) or all (every) of the array's elements?

filter

Filters out elements for which your callback function returns false (in a new copy of the Array).

map

Each element is replaced with the result of it run through your callback function (in a new copy of the Array).

reduce & reduceRight

Your callback is called on each element in the array in sequence (from start to finish in reduce and from finish to start in reduceRight) with the result of the previous callback call passed to the next. Reduce your array to a single value aggregated in any manner you like via your callback function.

forEach

Simply calls your callback passing in each element of your array in turn. I have vague performance concerns as compared to using a normal for loop.

indexOf & lastIndexOf

Finds the first or last (respectively) element in the array that matches the provided value via strict equality operator and returns the index of that element or -1 if there is no such element. Surprisingly, no custom comparison callback method mechanism is provided.

Last time I wrote about how I switched from Delicious to Google Reader's shared links feature only to find out that week that Google was removing the Google Reader shared links feature in favor of Google Plus social features (I'll save my Google Plus rant for another day).

Forced to find something new again, I'm now very pleased with Tumblr. Google Reader has Tumblr in its preset list of Send To sites which makes it relatively easy to add articles. And Tumblr's UX for adding things lets me easily pick a photo or video to display from the article - something which I had put together with a less convenient UX on my bespoke blogging system. For adding things outside of Google Reader I made a Tumblr accelerator to hookup to the Tumblr Add UX.

Of course they have an RSS feed which I hooked up to my blog. The only issue I had there is that when you add a link (and not a video or photo) to Tumblr, the RSS feed entry title for that link is repeated in the entry description as a link followed by a colon and then the actual description entered into Tumblr. I want my title separate so I can apply my own markup so I did a bit of parsing of the description to remove the repeated title from the description.

Working on GeolocMock it took me a bit to realize why my HTML could use the W3C Geolocation API in IE9 but not in my WebBrowser control in my .NET application. Eventually I realized that I was getting the wrong IE doc mode. Reading this old More IE8 Extensibility Improvements IE blog post from the IE blog I found the issue is that for app compat the WebOC picks older doc modes but an app hosting the WebOC can set a regkey to get different doc modes. The IE9 mode isn't listed in that article but I took a guess based on the values there and the decimal value 9999 gets my app IE9 mode. The following is the code I run in my application to set its regkey so that my app can get the IE9 doc mode and use the geolocation API.

        static private void UseIE9DocMode()
        {
            RegistryKey key = null;
            try
            {
                key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Main\\FeatureControl\\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION", true);
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                key = Registry.CurrentUser.CreateSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Main\\FeatureControl\\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION");
            }
            key.SetValue(System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainModule.ModuleName, 9999, RegistryValueKind.DWord);
            key.Close();
        }