TPM software

Some minor success playing with my TPM this afternoon.

First, I could only get the IBM DAA code to pass the first of its 4 tests - the self-test one. It couldn't connect to the TPM. I didn't look into it too far.

I thought that maybe having an uninitialized TPM might be the problem. Whenever I log in to Vista, I get a bubble from the Infineon Security Platform Solution reporting the TPM status as "uninitialized". But then I found a Microsoft article explaining how to initialize the TPM and turn it on/off and clear it. It involves Running tpm.msc (from the Start ... Run menu as an admin user), and following the prompts. It includes a reboot, where the bios presents a big warning explaining what's about to happen - quite nice. After the reboot, it's initialised, and you can set a password. Or did I type in the password before? Can't remember.

I thought that might fix the DAA code, but no. Same behaviour as before.

The next thing to try was TPM/J. It worked nicely. I can't say I tried everything, but it at least gave different responses according to whether I put the right password in or not. It gives me great optimism for future exploration/exploitation. I wonder if it's worth building a little GUI for it. That could be a good project for an undergraduate. Maybe I'll pass it on...

Oh, a couple of minor things: I was going to play with the Protégé ontology editor as well, but ran out of time. I also came across TimeML, a way of extracting rigorous temporal specifications from natural language (or something like that).

Happy Birthday Helen

It was lots of fun today. Helen enjoyed unwrapping everything, and especially liked her princess dress & tiara, books, Paint Your Own Piggybank, cushion, doll-on-a-swing, and the £10 from the cousins! Emma and Lily enjoyed the afternoon too.

Digital wrongs management

I want to start exploring digital rights management (DRM) and trusted platform modules (TPM). There doesn't seem to be much open source stuff out there. As Steven suggested, it's likely that most Free Software people are not interested in creating such stuff.

It's interesting to read the strong points of view that people have on DRM. While I can understand that many people don't like the idea of such mechanisms, and that they may deplore the way that industry seems to be producing hardware that has TPMs, I can't really believe that they think TPMs should be outlawed, or come with owner-overrides. I think the emotion must be clouding their judgement.

I have found the OpenIPMP (Open Intellectual Property Management & Protection), which uses JBoss, MySQL, and Java as the server (almost LAMP), but then the mpeg4 encoding and decoding plugins are written in C++. I haven't digested the plugin architecture yet, to see if it would work with PDF or HTML. I haven't even explored the rights expression language XrML.

On the TPM side, I've found TrouSerS and jTpmTools suites, but I haven't had too much success yet. There doesn't seem to be much opportunity to play around with such things at work, so it's an evening activity at the moment.

With tonight's yummy roast pork, we tried the 2004 Bouteille Reserve Speciale Margaux (Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot). Now I can tell from the label that Margaux is in the Southern Médoc part of Bordeaux. What I can't tell is just who made the wine. I found the words Parempuyre (Gironde) in 2pt type at the bottom, but Gironde is a department, and Parempuyre is a commune. If I were to take comfort from this list, I'd have to say that since Château Clément Pichon and Château Ségur (the only two listed in Parempuyre) are in the Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs, this wine should be superior, if not Exceptionnels. At least it's not just plain Bourgeois. I'll just have to hope that Géraldine can set me straight soon. That was our last bottle, so perhaps my next purchase can be more educated.

This wine cost £15.95 at Waitrose supermarket, which makes it about the 2nd most expensive one I've tried. But worth it. Joanna and Berenice seem to have agreed, so it must be good. I think it's the complexity and the oak that I've been missing, although it would be nice to compare a few side-by-side.

Oxford - City of (non) Crenellations and Grotesques

We spent the weekend (after Stephanie's Saturday morning hobbies) in Oxford, visiting Emma, Steven, Ben, and Imogen. It was great fun to catch up with them, and Oxford was a very pleasant place to be. The children all seemed to enjoy each others' company too. It will be wonderful if we can get together again in Malvern sometime. These pictures were taken in the Oxford Castle area, after at least one of us overdosed (after pizza) on a chocolate-triple-glory.










There were some interesting etymological discussions over lasagne (amongst other chat about custard consistency, unfinished research & DIY, and the perils of sitting behind the right person at a church) on the nature of grotesques and gargoyles, and on whether the bumps on the spires might be called crenellations. It seems (according to the city's dictionary) that this term refers to the battlements on castles. I'll wait for further inspireation before trying to work out what the right word is.

We explored some of the inner-city colleges in varying depths - particularly Magdalen and Christ Church, but also University and Merton. We discovered that Christ Church Cathedral is supposed to be the smallest Cathedral in England, but the choir is good. They sang Walton Jubilate Deo, Leighton responses, and a plain Te Deum, Venite, and psalm for us this morning. It's at least the 2nd time I've heard the Leighton since we've been here, and I've seen them on various music lists a lot more than that. Must be top of the pops at the moment. It was slightly surprising to hear such an obvious breath in the treble solo "his mercy is everla...asting" after only a quaver of the high note. And the phrasing in the psalm singing was quite different from what I'm used to - it seems to be done purely by rhythm, and not by volume. I think I can generalise to the following rule: if the 2nd last or 3rd last syllable is stressed and the ones afterwards are unstressed, then make the stressed one 3.5 times longer than the others.

I have found that Hugin and autopano are very good at stitching a bunch of photos together into a panorama. I haven't explored them in depth, so it's possible that they can do clever things to straighten out images, but the fish-eye effect is interesting anyway. These four panoramas were taken from the top of the tower of St Mary the Virgin University Church at midday today. It's nice to be able to do these things, and to have the photos as a record of our visit, but if you want to see what it's really like, I have to recommend Google Earth.

Australian Election

Well, some pluses, some minuses. The Senate vote is the saddest part for me - especially the Queensland figures. I assume the ABC's figures are based on people voting above the line, and perhaps the Democrat supporters are the least likely to do that, but it's sad to see there will be no Democrats in the Senate. It's a shame that their conscientious and important contribution was not more widely appreciated. The Greens have a responsibility to try to fill these big shoes now, otherwise indications are we'll see the impact of sloppy legislation in the years to come.

It doesn't look to me like John Howard will be able to hold onto his seat. I think that Kevin Rudd has had to be rather conservative (whatever that means, these days), and also adopted a great deal of spin-doctoring (like the Liberals too) to achieve what he has. That's mostly unfortunate, but it's the rational approach, given the behaviour of the other parties and the voting public.

The most pleasing thing is to see that no single party will have control of the senate - at least after June next year. It seems that we'll have 37 Liberals and 1 Family First on the approximately conservative side, and 32 Labor, 5 Green, and Nick Xenophon on the other, although that categorisation is imperfect.

It will be interesting to observe the Coalition leadership process, now that Peter Costello had stepped down. I wonder if the coalition will want to demonstrate a move towards the centre.

Senate preferences

It's interesting to see the senate "above the line" preference distributions for the Australian elections, and how misleading they might be. You could look at the Queensland preferences here. Perhaps you'd have to be gullible to think that the "DLP Democratic Labor Party"preferences would go to Labor. They go to Fred Nile, then the Liberals. The Australian Shooters Party does too. The Fishing Party votes go straight to the Liberals, but the Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party votes go to Family First, then the Nationals (but not the Liberals). "One Nation WA" preferences go to Family First, and they put "Pauline" way down the list, but Pauline's go straight to One Nation WA, and then to Family First. The wacky Citizens Electoral Council (who allegedly want the repeal of GST) throw preferences straight to Liberals. Arguably the most misleading arrangement is that the "Non custodial parents party" give preferences to Family First.

I suppose we have to be glad that we get the governments we deserve.

More from GetUp.

Interesting links

Just for a change, here's some geeky stuff that I want to remember/share.

I try to skim Freakonomics occasionally. Risk perception and smoking. Thoughts about selling votes.
Worse than failure: curious perversions in information technology is cute too.

Spring Security (previously known as Acegi) is updated. In fact the whole Spring Framework is updated, now at version 2.5. I haven't caught up with it all, but I want to understand why the Spring people are keen on annotations - last I heard they weren't.

I've been reading some Martin Fowler. The Time Modelling business is interesting, especially in relation to the Time Bands concepts reported earlier.

Some public sources that I'm reacting to in thoughts about security architectures:

• Jason: Horizontal Integration
  
• Commission on protecting and reducing secrecy in government
• FuzzyMLS
• How confident are you that a system behaves? What if there are multiple arguments?
  

Weather

We had to get the girls out of bed when we saw outside at 9pm. It has been raining all day, and it was only 3° mid-afternoon as we were driving back from Wales. I think it might be officially classified as sleet, but the girls weren't interested in such technicalities. It seems to be taking them a while to go to sleep.

During the morning break at school, the girls experienced the joys of receiving snowballs from flight. It also emerged that some of the steeper hills roads had been impassable Sunday night.

By the way, we summed up our weekend by saying we saw an abbey, a mine, a pub, a castle, and a cathedral. Culture overload, perhaps.

Chepstow

We're in Chepstow, having driven through Forest of Dean, Mallard Pike Pond near Blakeney, to Tintern Abbey. The children almost enjoyed exploring the ruins, until we mentioned the possibility of hot chocolate. It was rather chilly walking around in the open. We took the audio tour option, where we walked around with little voices in our heads telling us what we were looking at. We were invited to walk into the church imagining that we were following the monks' procession, and then explored the church, night stairs, dining hall, chapter house, infirmary, etc.

(Afterwards, we discovered a more child-"accessible" part of Tintern! And nearby, we managed to see what is probably the ugliest pig in the world.)

We've just come back from the Big Pit, an underground coal & iron ore mine near Blaenavon, where we were taken (for free!) 90m underground, for a look at the stables, tunnels, drams, engines, etc. They wouldn't let us take cameras, phones, or even electronic watches underground, due to the requirement for absence of spark producing devices.

There were some interesting ducks in the Forest of Dean - I don't think I've ever seen such fancy ones before.

We explored the town looking for dinner venues - mostly in pubs - and eventually found a reasonable one. Tomorrow morning we'll visit Chepstow Castle, although since it doesn't open until 11am, we'll either have a very leisurely breakfast, or consider venturing further away for tourism. Newport's cathedral is supposed to be the smallest of all the English and Welsh ones. The 10:30 choral service isn't quite compatible with the rest of the day's schedule, but we'll see. Driving mapless through Newport may also be a challenge - although I suppose there's always Google Maps!

Catching up on photos

These photos don't quite belong here, chronologically speaking. (Maybe I should say "they don't belong now".) But I'm finally getting around to uploading them for you.

We have a picture of Joanna and Christopher during one of her Mums up the Malverns walks. She can add more details about just where they were later. As you can see, the tops of the hills are fairly bare of trees, but there are walking tracks hither and yon.

Then there two of Christopher near water. He's up close and friendly with some ducks at Slimbridge, and peering at the bridge near Pershore.