Bandwagon is giving away free tryouts to bloggers. So, I figured that I’d write a short review of the service and give it a spin once it ships.

The idea behind the service is simple: to backup people’s entire music collection online. It doesn’t seem like they have limits for how many GB of data they store but the service is 99$/year which will probably have a limited customer base. Online music backup has been discussed by other people in the past so there is definitely a market for it.

Bandwagon posted some screenshots of their interface as well which looks simple and nicely organized.

The one weird thing about the product that I can’t figure out is why they don’t aim for a more general backup platform. For instance, I could see the need for similar backup functionality for iPhoto. It would make it more enticing to customers to have a more complete online backup solution, rather than a bunch of unique specialized ones. Something like “iLife Backup”?

Anyway, all of this is speculation at this time, since I haven’t tried the actual service. They’re shipping on February 22nd; after that, I’ll write a fuller review.

Update: Well the service ended up being a dud. They’ve dropped it and started one where the user provides their own storage online. Pretty lame!

If you’ve ever purchased music from the iTunes Store you may know that there are limitations imposed on the files that you get. Without going thru some quality loss, you’re limited to playing it in iTunes or an iPod only.

Recently, a bunch of European governments have started complaining about this. Rightfully so!

And, in response, Steve has posted his thoughts on DRM. His position is that Apple cannot realistically open the FairPlay DRM to other vendors without it resulting in leaks in the protection. So, he argues, music should either be protected with proprietary technology by each vendor (like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft do today) or it should just be protection-free, open to everybody.

Personally, an iTunes Store with no DRM would definitely get my business so I’m really glad that these issues are finally being explored by the European governments. Hopefully, with enough pressure, the music labels will remove the DRM requirements to the music they sell online and Apple will follow suit.

One can only hope that all this nonsense will eventually go away!

YouTube has the superbowl ads.

It’s been 6 months since I’ve written anything on here. Wow, how time flies!

Well, lots of things have happened since then. I went to Poland for the first time since we came to Canada (16 or so years ago!) I saw my Dad for the first time since then. That was quite an experience! He was really great, we got along very well. I also saw a bunch of the family and close friends of my Mom and Dad. The trip was short. Only two weeks. I landed in Amsterdam, train to Berlin, train to Szczecin, saw my Grandmother (she rocks!), then a final train to Wrocław. During the trip, I saw tons of relatives and playground friends. It was really exhilarating!

Poland looks different than I remember but not significantly. I will definitely need to go back in a year or two; this time for a longer stay.

Meanwhile, work has been keeping me really busy. I’ve been trying to spruce up some of my open source stuff and I finally moved it to Bluecouch. Tereska still hasn’t been updated but I’m working on a new version. I’m also working on two or three little applications on the weekends but it’s hard to get the time together to make significant progress.

That’s it for now. I will definitely be better about keeping this site updated. I moved everything over to the latest WordPress and with a new hosting plan, so there should be more regular entries.

I was really stoked on Thursday. I found out that I’ll be going to WWDC this year. Sweet! I’m in San Francisco right now. Got in just a few hours ago.

This is really exciting for me; I’ve never been to WWDC before and it’s kind of an expensive conference. If I didn’t go on business, I would probably never get to go on my own.

This year’s should be really fun with all the buzzing rumours about new products and machines, and whatnot…