Torrenting vs Buying according to the Oatmeal

Posted: February 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Movies, Tech | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

I love The Oatmeal and this is another perfect way to sum up my views on movie dowloads..

Torrenting vs Buying courtesy of The OatMeal

Torrenting vs Buying courtesy of The OatMeal

Setting up a Jenkins build server on EC2

Posted: February 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Development | Tags: , , , , , | 9 Comments

In my last post about setting up Jenkins I looked at how to do a basic Jenkins setup on an Ubuntu machine. In my case I set it up on an old machine which is fine when I’m working at home but if I make changes when I’m not at home or when my build machine isn’t running the changes are not built and tested. If you hadn’t worked it out, in a proper continuous integration environment you should be running your builds continuously. So this morning I set out to get an EC2 instance running Jenkins.

The other reason I wanted to have the build server running continually is that I need to start scheduling some jobs for Knowsis to do the NLP part of our process., which I could do with Cron, but buildservers liike Jenkins and Teamcity offer really flexible scheduling and a nice interface for feedback so I don’t need to worry about building one myself, for now.

Setting up an EC2 instance

The first step in the process is to set up your EC2 instance. Amazon kindly provide a free tier so you can get a free micro instance for a year. This should work for you initially if your builds aren’t overly complex.

I won’t run through exactly how to get your instance running as you can find plenty of guides online, if you are completely new to EC2 I would recommend this guide provided by Amazon.

One thing to note is that you should make sure you set up the security group for your image to allow all traffic on port 80 so you can actually see Jenkins.

Installing nginx

In my previous post I mentioned setting up nginx to route requests to Jenkins  but didn’t cover it. So we’ll go though it here as we need a webserver running to host the requests coming through.

We’ll need to use YUM here as apt-get and aptitude aren’t installed. Thankfully the Amazon package index includes a version of nginx.

yum install nginx

Once installed we should start the nginx server to make sure that we can see our new EC2 instance before proceeding.

sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/nginx start

You should be be able to hit your instance in a web browser. You can get the public hostname of your instance from the AWS management console, but it should look something like this:

http://ec2-XX-XX-XX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com/


Installing Jenkins


In my previous post we used aptitude to install Jenkins but the Amazon Linux AMI doesn’t have the aptitude package manager, s owe have to use YUM instead.


First we need to add the repository to the list of YUM repos:


sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo


and then get the GPG key:


sudo rpm --import http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins-ci.org.key


then we can install Jenkins:


yum install jenkins


The installer will install the server as well as create jenkins user under which the service will run. You can now start the jenkins service:


sudo /etc/init.d/jenkins start


As Jenkins runs on port 8080 by default, the next step is to get nginx to proxy all requests on port 80 to port 8080. You could probably just change Jenkins to run on port 80 by default if you wanted. Anyway, just change your nginx config (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf) so that the server section reads as follows:


server {


listen 80 default;


server_name _;


location /{


proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;


}


}


I won’t go into the details of nginx setup, but this is the minimum required to get you to a point of having Jenkins working.


Make sure you restart nginx to take account of the config changes,


sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/nginx restart


You should be be able to view the jenkins homepage in a web browser using the same url as before:


http://ec2-XX-XX-XX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com/




Security


One of the topics mentioned but not covered previously was security. As your build server is now visible publicly, you will want to set up some sort of security to prevent people from doing bad things.  The simplest way is to use Jenkins own user database, but there are other options to use an LDAP server or the underlying OS users. A few points to make sure that the server is secure:


    

  •  Disable the option to allow new users to sign up (unless you actually want people to be able to signup)
    • 

  • Change the authorisation section to either allow logged in users to do anything or use matrix based security and make sure anonymous users have no permissions
    • 



Setting up builds


You should refer back to my previous post on how to get your builds set up.7


Let me know how you get on

			

			
					



		
		

	
Lovefilm vs. Netflix vs. Sky Movies vs. Blinkbox

	Posted: January 9, 2012 | Author:  | Filed under: Tech  | Tags: , , , , ,   | 12 Comments
	
I love watching movies. I could quite happily sit and watch 2 or 3 back to back on a Sunday as long as the F1 isn’t on.  I’ve been a Sky Movies subscriber since getting Sky about 5 years ago and was always pretty satisfied with the service. In late 2010 Sky launched a partnership with Xbox which changed the game completely as it meant I now had access to 100’s of on demand movies at no extra cost.


The improvements to the Xbox dashboard released in December (2011) to include apps from third party movie streaming services such as Blinkbox, Lovefilm and as of today Netflix has drawn to my attention to the possibility that I could get rid of my £16 per month Sky Movies Subscription if it could replace the quality of service currently offered by Sky. Whilst the £4.99/£5.99 price point seems pretty convincing I was interested to see exactly what movies each of the services had available and which movies they were missing. In a recent article I read that Netflix had negotiated exclusivity deals on new movies with Lionsgate and MGM so it would be interesting to see how much the catalogues actually differed.


I don’t have time to do a full cross reference (although I was tempted to script something up to scrape them) so I’ve chosen a selection of more recent films that I know have been made available for online streaming and a selection of much older films. I have checked each film on Sky Go, Lovefilm and Netflx as well as on Blinkbox which is not a subscription service but I thought was a useful comparison for streaming library completeness. I have ignored Lovefilm offerings where they are available on DVD but not for instant streaming.













Lovefilm
Netflix
Sky Movies



Blinkbox (pay per view)




New/Recent Movies









Super 8
NO
NO
YES

YES(£3.49)




Cowboys and Aliens
NO
NO
NO *

YES(£3.49)




Rise of Plant of the Apes
NO
NO
NO *

YES(£3.49)




Twliight
NO
NO
YES

YES (£1.99)




Harry Potter (8)
YES(£3.49)
NO
NO *

YES(£3.49)




The Hangover
YES
NO
NO **

YES (£2.49)




The Hangover 2
YES(£3.49)
NO
NO **

YES(£3.49)




Four Lions
YES
NO
NO**

NO














Old Movies









Harry Potter (1)
NO
NO
NO **

YES (£2.49)




Plant of the Apes (1968)
YES
NO
NO

NO




The Godfather
NO
NO
YES

YES(£1.99)




The 39 Steps
NO
YES
NO

YES (FREE)




Blair Witch Project
NO
YES
NO

NO




Con Air
YES
YES
YES

NO




Home Alone
NO
NO
YES

NO




Being John Malkovich
YES
YES
YES

NO




An American Werewolf in London
NO
YES
NO

YES(FREE)














Unlimited Streaming Subscription Price per month
£9.99
£5.99
£16.00



N/A

















* available on demand. £3.99 each







** were previously available






As we can see Netflix has pretty poor coverage at the moment compared to Lovefilm in terms of newer releases while Netflix seems to be better in terms of back catalogue. Out of the three subscription services Sky has the best coverage across the board, one limitation of the Sky Go service is the total number of movies that they have available at any one time which does change regularly, I have marked those movies which I know that I have watched on Sky Go on my Xbox previously.  The Blinkbox pay per view model would work out expensive to watch 10-15 movies a month although they do have a large selection of free movies available – the quality of which does vary. Blinkbox also announced today that they were making streaming available for free on some titles if you buy the DVD in Tesco stores and provide your clubcard details (Tesco own Blinkbox).


I’m not planning on moving away from Sky yet, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months and whether Netflix start to strengthen their catalogue with more studio deals. Meanwhile Lovefilm’s new owner, Amazon, will be sure to strengthen their streaming business in light of the Kindle Fire potentially getting a UK release later this year.


UPDATE – Blinkbox have got in touch to say that some of the movies that were marked as unavailable are actually available. I’ve updated those that are available to stream (some are only available to purchase)

		



		
		

	
Cloud Wars Episode II – The Swedes Strike Back

	Posted: May 4, 2011 | Author:  | Filed under: music, Tech  | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,   | Leave a comment
	
Back in April I correctly predicted that Spotify would soon offer their mobile service to all customers, including free accounts, following their restrictions placed on non paying users; this is a huge step for them in the ongoing battle to get a full cloud service out there. To be clear, this update does not allow non-paying users to stream music that they do not own – only the tracks they have synced from their personal computer to their device. The desktop version of Spotify has been able to sync a users owned music over WiFi to a the mobile device for some time, a smart move on Spotify’s part to save streaming bandwidth costs. This new update now includes iPod syncing, something that has required the owners to always be tied to iTunes. Today’s announcement is really significant in terms of getting users into the Spotify ecosystem and in my opinion really puts Lorentzon & Ek’s company out there as the leaders in the cloud race.


Apple, Amazon and Spotify already account for 90% of  worldwide digital music revenues for and I think this move could prove to be a significant shift in Spotify’s publicised revenue problems if they can get customers to move away from Apple. This is all the more likely given their pending US launch and the hype around the lack of launch for the last yeat. Having worked on the original purchasing implementation, which was powered by 7digital, it was actually quite interesting to see how many purchases were made through it when users could still listen for free – it really points to users’ preference to own their music over the “rental” streaming model.


I think the most interesting outcome from all of this will be the backlash reaction from Apple. In the past, Apple have changed the way that music is stored on iPods during software updates to prevent third-party software from being able to move music onto the device. It wouldn’t take much for Apple to do this and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next software updates will cause problems for the engineers  over in Gothenberg & Stockholm.


The other question surrounds the iOS app and whether Apple will allow future updates to it or if they will even just remove it from the app store entirely. At 7digital we’ve struggled to get our iOS app through the submission process; an app that does considerably less to compete with iTunes and the iPod compared to that from Spotify. Unless Spotify has an agreement with Apple – which I find highly unlikely, I wouldn’t be surprised if the app store guidelines change to say if your app name contains the word ‘Spot’  and your logo is green then it can’t exist in the app store.


On top of this there is the well documented case of Apple wanting 30% of any app subscriptions which would effectively ruin Spotify’s model as they will not be able to operate on these terms. I guess the ball is now in Apple’s court.

		



		
		

	
Late 2011 Music Industry Predictions

	Posted: April 14, 2011 | Author:  | Filed under: music, Tech  | Tags: , , , , ,   | 1 Comment
	
It’s probably a bit late on to be making predictions for the year, but we haven’t really seen any major announcements yet, apart from that small one by Amazon the other week.


Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Drive
Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Drive


Amazon


So we were all pretty surprised when Amazon announced their Cloud Player/Cloud Drive online locker service, with all the expectation and talk focussed on other services it just crept up out of nowhere and sprung itself on us.


I’m sure they were in talks with the labels and publishers to do this all along but given the to-ing and fro-ing  shenanigans of the music industry I guess they thought it was simpler to fire a warning shot to wake them up and get something moving. As has been the case with a number of services in the past it seems easier to offer an apology and seek forgiveness than to seek permission in the first place.


It’s a good service at it encourages users to purchase music in exchange for additional space in the cloud, something which Amazon have available to them in abundance. I see more users being swung to using the Amazon service than having to pay an annual subscription.


Prediction 1: It’s a far from an ideal service as you have to upload your music collection to the cloud to use it and on standard asynchronous broadband connections that would take an age for a decent sized music collection. I think they will introduce some sort of matching service that will just add content to your locker if it identifies it on your local system. I think they need to seek forgiveness from the music industry for launching the cloud locker before doing this or it will surely create havoc.


Prediction 1a: I keep banging on about an Amazon device and I see this as just another sign. Expect it before the year is out.


iTunes
iTunes


Apple


It’s been much talked about since the purchase of Lala and the rumour mill is always turning about their cloud service. MobileMe is supposed to be  the vessel for this service although knowing Steve Jobs it will probably be some new hardware that you push into your inner ear and is controlled by thought alone. This will likely be a US launch initially with a couple of months before worldwide roll out. This is likely to be a subscription service – MobileMe is already a subscription service at $99/£60 per year.


I think the interesting thing here will be about how Apple view this service. If it is just going to be something to encourage the sale of more hardware then it will be quite vanilla, like Ping. If their plan is to encourage the sale of more content, then I would be interested to see if they release apps for other platforms (Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7) to allow non iDevice users to get their music, videos and iBooks on the go. It does seem counter-intuitive but I do think that this could encourage sales of other products like Apple TV which is where I see one of their next major pushes – especially as they are never going to win the mobile OS war. It’s also unlikely to happen in the near term as it will harm their app strategy to move themselves on to Android when they are encouraging all to develop for iOS.


Google


Google


The last of the three big hitters, or AGA as they are collectively know at 7digital, have been rumoured to be launching a service for about a year now. They seem like they have been stifled by the music industry, like everyone else. We’ve seen screenshots of a leaked music application showing the ability to sync music content in the cloud although very few other innovative features have been shown.


Prediction 2: There are talks of the launch going ahead very soon without agreement from Warner so it’s likely to be launched at Google I/O in May. Like most Google products this is likely to be a US only service at launch which will probably not launch globally for some time, if at all. I doubt that it will be anything special compared to everything else available. I imagine it will be a big bang launch and get a lot of hype because it’s Google but will quickly fizzle out with more innovative services out there that can offer better curation of content and frequent service updates with newer features.


Spotify
Spotify


Spotify


Spotify have been trying to get into the US for as long as I can remember. They have apparently paid all the necessary advances to the four majors and have got the signatures to do it, but something is holding them back. I think the music industry has probably been trying to tie the launches of Apple, Google, Spotify and Amazon together so that no one gets an advantage as the first mover – which is all moot now that Amazon has broken ranks and made a run for it. I’d expect to see Spotify go state-side in the next couple of months.


Prediction 3: It was interesting to see that Spotify has reduced their service to only allow 10 hours listening per month for Open account subscribers. Aside to it being aimed at getting hooked users to move onto one of their paid subscriptions, this could also be due to a few other things; an agreement with the labels for the US launch, a cost saving exercise for US launch in case of high demand or …. wait for it…. the start of what I think will become another cloud based service. They currently only allow you to stream your own music on mobile devices with premium account but I can see them offering a free service. With the option to play your own music plus 10 hours per month of free streaming as a way to listen to music that you don’t own. I imagine the music industry will like this as it should encourage purchasing where users want to be able to listen to certain tracks unrestricted.


7digital


7digital


Obviously I can’t say too much about our plans for the coming year. We’ve had our cloud based locker since I joined the company back in 2007 so this years buzz word is all a bit old hat for us, but we’re looking to offer a bigger and better service to rival all of the above.


Earlier this year we announced our partnership with RIM on the Playbook  which is another big step forward in our aim of giving 7digital users access to their content whenever they want it and wherever they are.  We’re really focusing on being as agnostic as possible and making our service available to as many customers as possible no matter what device, what personal computer OS or what service provider they choose. Coupled with our territorial coverage this gives us some of the widest reach out there and gives consumers the greatest choice.


In order to achieve our goal, we’ve not only been partnering with device manufacturers, we have also been working on our own mobile applications, which are available from the relevant app stores:


    

  • Our Blackberry app has been available for some time now and that has had several refinements to support new Blackberry devices and improve performance as well as a number of great feature additions.
    • 

  • Our Android app launched late 2010 and allows users to download and listen to their purchases on the go. We have some great additions to this app coming soon, so keep an eye out for those
    • 

  • We’re still working on getting an iPhone app similar to our Android offering, into the app store. In the meantime, iOS users can always use our mobile optimised web store.
    • 







7digital Mobile


7digital Mobile






Expect some announcements from us soon….but that’s all I can say right now.

		



		
		

	
The NFC arms race

	Posted: February 24, 2011 | Author:  | Filed under: Tech  | Tags: , , , , , , ,   | Leave a comment
	
The renewed thought of Amazon creating their own device has made me realise how they are actually one of only a handful of companies currently able to challenge Apple’s dominance in the device arena, specifically around the emerging field of contact-less payments.


The next iPhone purportedly contains NFC technology which would allow the device to act as a contact-less payment method. This is already currently available in some Android devices, but due to the open nature of the platform there’s no single company who is going to actually implement the underlying payment service.


image courtesy of maclife


In order to own an iPhone you need to have an iTunes account, whilst it’s not necessary to add a card to the account I would expect all of those users who own an iPhone (or an iPad) will have at least one card registered. Apple can therefore hit the ground running with the iPhone 5 and become one if the biggest payment services in the world overnight.


Google on the other hand have little to challenge with in comparison, they have never really dealt with consumer transactions at scale; Google Checkout has never found much traction against Paypal. Due to the open nature of the Android OS, operators will want to build their own solution to charge purchases to their customer’s phone bills, which will serve to dilute Google’s ability to develop the Checkout platform.


Amazon, however, do have the customers, they also have a payment method for every single one of them. If they were to introduce an Amazon device this year, it would allow them to run head to head with the iPhone in what could potentially be the start of a very disruptive period for the finance industry.


Paypal are in a strong position with their existing user accounts for payments but obviously aren’t into manufacturing devices. They could benefit from either a manufacturer tie in or creating device specific apps that use the NFC chip to charge the user’s Paypal account. Consumer adoption is likely to be limited and the experience would be second rate to one at device level.




Facebook Places
Facebook Places, Deals and NFC could be huge


Facebook have recently brought on Goldmann Sachs as an investor which could potentially be linked to their strengthening of Facebook credits which, this year, will become mandatory for any purchasing inside Facebook apps.  ASOS and now French Connection have built complete eCommerce platforms inside of Facebook and if it’s users are buying credits to use inside these Facebook apps this has the potential to make Facebook one of the biggest banks in the world. If that’s the case then I wouldn’t be surprised if we see them start using NFC technology which coupled with the Facebook Places/Deals platform would make them a strong contender in this race.


NFC based payments itself could pull up lame at the first hurdle as the entire success or failure of all of this rests on adoption of the technology by both the retailers and more importantly the consumers.

		



		
		

	
Amazon Prime to include free streaming – another signal of impending hardware launch?

	Posted: February 23, 2011 | Author:  | Filed under: Tech  | Tags: , , , , , ,   | 1 Comment
	
Amazon have announced that they are to offer free unlimited streaming movie and TV show to Prime customers in the US . The are offering about 5000 videos including many of the usual TV series, The Sopranos, The Office, Friends etc. The movies aren’t big new hits but do contain some fairly recent releases.  Non of this is new to Amazon though, they have had the Unbox service for some time (now rebranded as Video on Demand) which has the big hits for rental, but this is a great way to introduce some new customers to that service. The device support is great, there are a lot of supported systems most of which are connected TVs or media centres but they also offer the option of Windows Media so you can stream via a Windows PC or an Xbox.


As I mentioned previously, following the complete acquisition of Lovefilm, Amazon looks to be on the start of a major content play which in my opinion signals them taking a serious step into the world of connected devices.  The signs are all mounting up for an Amazon device to be released or even set of devices:


    

  • Amazon bought touchscreen technology specialists TouchCo at the start of last year and have previously stated that they weren’t going to integrate these capabilities into the Kindle product line….so where are they planning to use them?
    • 

  • Lab126 is the arm of Amazon that developed the Kindle and it’s thought that is where the next generation devices are being designed and built. They have been on a hiring frenzy since last year for engineers.
    • 

  • Amazon’s App store is due to launch soon and the developer portal is now open for content submissions. They are planning to run a similar 70:30 split like Apple for developers wanting to sell their apps. Apps will be sold inside the regular Amazon store.
    • 

  • The Amazon MP3 store and Kindle bookstore have been around for ages and will be staple additions to any hardware release.
    • 



The talk of an Amazon device has gone quiet of late but I wouldn’t be surprised if that rumour mill kicks up again following today’s announcement of an Apple press event on March 2nd – rumoured to be the iPad 2 launch.

		



		
		

	
Amazon acquire Lovefilm

	Posted: January 20, 2011 | Author:  | Filed under: Uncategorized  | Tags: , ,   | 2 Comments
	
After being the major shareholder since 2008, Amazon have apparently bought out the remaining shares in a deal thought to value Lovefilm at £312 million.


See Techcrunch Post for more details


I imagine this is part of a content play for Europe in preparation for the rumoured Amazon Android tablet along with their App store which I expect will ultimately become something akin to iTunes.