Thursday, April 21, 2005

Book Review: Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Sean Carrol's recent "Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo" (Amazon.com) adds depth to the lay understanding of evolution by describing precisely how mutations change the forms of organisms over time. The title cribs a famous quote from Darwin's "Origin of Species," and references to Darwin, Huxley, Stephen Jay Gould, and others are strewn throughout.

Dr. Carroll describes how a synthesis of embryology (the process of development from embryo to adult form), molecular biology, and paleontology -- known as Evolutionary Development -- leads to understanding the process of evolution. The chapters on molecular biology are dense enough to bottom out the non-biologist, but reading even without complete understanding helps to fill in the picture.

The blueprints contained in the DNA of all living things on Earth, from earthworms to butterflies to zebras to humans, are shockingly similar: they describe how to "build" modular structures like limbs, organs, and tissues that are similar in all species, and differences in form are mostly the result of how these blueprints are applied. Genetic "switches" control how "toolkit genes" are activated (or not!) to make stripes or spots, gills or wings, and fingers or hooves.

Dr. Carroll gives us a glimpse of the breathtakingly beautiful processes of life that deepens rather than dispells the mystery of how we came to be human.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Diskless DVDs

I have two girls, ages 3 and 6, and they both have their own frequent flier cards for several airlines. The ability to watch Nemo and Dora the Explorer in flight is not a necessity, but it is as close as any entertainment can be.

Watching DVDs on a laptop is easy enough -- almost every laptop sold today has the right hardware and software included -- but you're stuck fumbling with a stack of DVDs.

Watching a DVD is one of the more power hungry things you can do on a laptop: wathing a whole movie may require some luck in addition to a full charge on the main battery. My laptop, like many, can use two batteries simultaneously, but the second battery goes in (wanna guess?) the DVD ROM drive bay.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could copy movies to your hard disk and watch them from there? No more fumbling DVDs and a lot less switching batteries!

I found a solution for doing just that that works very well, but it requires several tools, and still has some limitations.

First, most DVDs (certainly all of them that my children want to watch on airplanes) are copy protected -- you can't just "rip" them like you can your CDs. Even DVD archiving software will refuse to copy a copy-protected DVD.

Some of the copy protection schemes used are simply by agreement -- reputable software vendors agree to design their software to refuse to copy DVD content that is flagged a certain way. This is easy to work around -- just find a software vendor that isn't feeling quite so cooperative. However other protection schemes, such as "bad sectors", defeat would-be copiers by purposely inserting bad sectors (errors in the formatting) in the DVD content, effectively making Windows believe that the disk is damaged, and therefore not copyable.

AnyDVD from Slysoft.com solves this problem by adding a special driver to Windows that "descrambles DVD movies automatically in the background." Using this tool you can copy, archive, and even duplicate protected DVDs.

Which brings us to the second part of the problem: DVD movies are actually made up of many "files" that must be organized a certain way in order for you to watch the movie, so this structure must be preserved. There are probably ways to work with movie archives in the regular Windows filesystem, but I didn't take the time to figure them out.

Instead, I found another tool that makes this a non-problem. VirtualDrive from Farstone Technology allows you to capture images of CDs and DVDs and save the to your hard drive as ".VCD" files that can then be mounted as virtual disks. As far as Windows is concerned a mounted VCD image of a DVD is identical to a phyical DVD interted into an attached drive. So, you can play your captured DVD movies using any DVD player software exactly as you would with the phyisical DVD, but you can leave the DVD at home.

Side Note: My computer actually did not come with a DVD player, so it did not include the required DVD decoding software that is usually bundled with DVD ROM drives. (Windows Media Player cannot play DVDs without third-party DVD decoding software!) "DVD XPack" from Intervideo solves this problem with a Windows Media add-on.

So, now I can copy my kid's DVDs to my laptop and my wife an I can enjoy up to two batteries worth of uninterupted bliss.

However, problem remains, and it is one that raises some interesting questions for me:

Each captured DVD takes from 5 to 8 GB (yes Gigabytes!) of disk space. So after all this trouble, I still only have room for at most 2-3 movies on my laptop. I can double or even triple that by upgrading the hard disk in my laptop (largest on the market today is 100 GB), but we're still talking about a pretty small library (~10 movies), especially compared to the 10,000 songs that my iPod holds.

So, one might wonder, why has the movie industry invested so much in copy protection that inhibits legitimate use, like making it easier for my kids to watch movies on a computer? It is hard to imagine a successful Napster for movies -- a typical song is around 5MB, where a typical movie is at least 1000 times larger. Hosting a sharing site with a few hundred movies would require roughly a terabyte of storage, and downloading a 5GB movie would take hours. If Moore's law continued to apply to both storage and bandwidth it will be 2010 or later before sharing movies over the internet is really practical.