H.264 is famously a heavily patented video codec, managed by the patent group MPEG-LA; open source fans and video engineers alike decried the patent pool, seeing it not as a defender of intellectual property, but largely as a fixture of broken patent law and an unfortunate middle-man to the situation. For those interested, famous computer scientist Donald Knuth has publicly provided a letter written to the US Patent Office explaining the illogical and harmful nature of software patents.

Update: One strong arm of the current H.264 standard is it’s widely available hardware support, enabling devices such a mobile phones to decode the video without depleting their batteries. Fortunately, at Google I/O, the following hardware vendors announced their support of WebM: ARM, AMD, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Broadcom and Qualcomm.

A little known gem of the IT world is the PsTools suite, originally available on resource discs for Windows NT/2K. One program of particular interest in this suite of command line tools was psexec, which allowed one computer to remotely log in and issue commands on another (Windows) computer, but without any client service software (well, technically there is, but we’ll get to that). Here’s an example:

(from the administrator’s computer, S-ADMIN):

C:\pstools\psexec.exe \\S-REMOTE “ipconfig /all”

The command above would run the useful “ipconfig /all” command on the computer S-REMOTE, but display the results on S-ADMIN (the computer issuing the command). Even more interesting, one could issue this command as well:

C:\pstools\psexec.exe \\S-REMOTE “cmd.exe”

which essentially starts a telnet session on S-REMOTE.

What makes this all the more interesting is that unlike tools such as DameWare NT Utilities, one need not install a piece of client software first – it just works. Technically, it does install a piece of client software, but this is done through the Windows Service Scheduler and is uninstalled when you log out – effectively, there’s no client software necessary.

Thanks to recent improvements in Samba 4, however, this is now possible to do from a Linux box. A very capable programmer, using the current codebase of Samba 4, has put together winexe. Winexe is exactly like psexec (as far as I can tell), except that it’s open source, and works from Linux, making it a very valuable tool for any system administrator who runs Linux on his own machine.

The usefulness of such a program is near limitless: you can remotely install a VNC server with a preset password on Windows boxes, essentially deploying a DIY virtual desktop environment, or you could use it to edit registry entries (through regedit.exe’s CLI). Note that if you merely want to grab file listings of a remote computer, the more conventional smbclient will do you well.

Is this useful to you? Do you know of other tricks or tools for administering Windows computers from a Linux machine? Share your knowledge in the comments below.

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others’ patents.

Theora developers confirmed they have received no such legal threats (yet) but the idea of the MPEG-LA (a patent group who controls H.264) readying some type of legal assault against the Xiph.org developers is not entirely uncharacteristic.

To complicate the matter, it’s widely believed that Google will be releasing, as open source, their recently acquired VP8 codec at the upcoming Google I/O conference. This is particularly exciting to the open source community, not only because it would add a second royalty-free, open source video codec to the public, but it would add one quite possibly superior to H.264; On2, the company Google acquired and with it, the VP8 codec, claimed that their codec performed better than H.264. Furthermore, an acceptable standard for video on the web thus far has been On2′s VP6, used in all versions of Flash since version 8.

The theme of this story is very important: software patents. Software patents have been granted, used in court, and established themselves as a major legal and philosophical foundation of the computer software industry, but that is not to say they are not suspect. From famous computer scientist Donald Knuth’s letter to the US Patent Office:

Congress wisely decided long ago that mathematical things cannot be patented.  Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed.  The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts.  Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their publishers had permission from the owners of the words.  Algorithms are exactly as basic to software as words are to writers, because they are the fundamental building blocks needed to make interesting products.  What would happen if individual lawyers could patent their methods of defense, or if Supreme Court justices could patent their precedents?

From roughlydrafted.com. The entire entry is an excellent read of the birth of Adobe and their tenuous relationship with Apple over the years, bringing welcomed perspective to the recent Flash debacle.

This news continues to ongoing story of the future of video on the web: a number of open source-leaning groups including the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the popular Firefox web browser, are strongly advocating that the HTML5 standard include a non-proprietary video codec as standard, and had labelled xiph.org’s Theora as such a codec. Technical concerns over Theora (whether FUD or not) raised the issue that if any open codec were to become de facto, it would have to be on the technological forefront. Given the highly patented nature of new developments in video codecs, this seemed unlikely, until Google announced plans to acquire On2, the company that originally developed the codec that would later be known as Theora, and also later sold newer versions of that codec for use in Adobe’s popular Flash product. On2′s most recent codec developments, called VP8, are reportedly highly competitive with the industry standard yet proprietary H.264 codec.

Given enough time and advocacy, there is a real chance that VP8 (or whatever it is re-branded, if at all) could challenge the use of H.264 and provide the Internet with a technologically impressive, open standard for video encoding.

Fedora (and Linux in general) has never been the flashiest operating system to run, but it may be the smartest: given time and willingness, there’s almost no feature it cannot provide, and with Fedora 13, it looks like Exchange-compatible mail and calendar servers are no exception.

Zarafa, developed by a Dutch company of the same name, works as a bridge between Exchange-compatible clients (providing both the MAPI protocol and a OWA-like web interface) and your regular Linux services: you can continue to use your same IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV and LDAP servers, while Zarafa will do the job of translating all that open speak into the MAPI protocol that clients like Outlook can understand. (For the record, Outlook supports IMAP, but not CalDAV. I am uncertain if it supports LDAP, e.g. for address books.)

I doubt Microsoft ever wanted to document the MAPI protocol: Exchange is a staple of the modern IT industry, a trusted service to provide that which is most important to most corporations: collaboration and communication. If products like Zarafa prove to be fully compatible and stable with that ecosystem, it’ll be another proprietary technology liberated from its economy and left open for those willing to learn to use.