For those who may be confused, this blog is set 4 years in the future, and reviews future technology trends and issues. The views here are purely my own, but through this blog I narrowcast, therefore I am.

This column charts the problems and successes I have had utilizing new technology both for work and pleasure. What better way to start off than to relate a problem I had recently with my SAN at home? I had installed a hybrid fiber/wireless SAN with management system way back in the summer of 2009 and had been reasonably happy with it. In the past three months though I had seen the available capacity decrease more rapidly, and like any reasonable parent had blamed the children. They produce so much 1080p/60 content (read 3GB/s ‘junk’) these days that our initial 10Tb had to be increased with another 10TB last year. Even so, we were down to less than 1 TB and were in danger of having to erase the 12th season of ‘24’ (the one where Jack’s daughter works for him as a summer intern but she turns out to be a mole who is then captured by her terrorist handlers and has to defuse a nuclear bomb guided by Jack via video-conference). I subscribed to a net-application called SAN-Sense and for about $15 and over a period of about an hour it analyzed the drives and reported back that over 54% was taken up with hundreds of copies of the same video,  “Paris Hilton Baby”, 4 minutes, 700 GB. Nobody except cave-dwellers can have failed to have seen the video and everyone has their own idea about who the father might be. One copy is plenty. The problem turned out to be the metadata tags which had been randomly altered in an attempt to get the video to pass through my content catcher – in my case Clip-Grip’s “U-Cache” V2.2.

Until there is a worldwide taxonomy defining the XML structures for video content that can be resolved to a person’s XML preference data then these issues will continue. Great news for Best Buy but not so good for the consumer or those firms that depend on getting guaranteed access to personal media caches under a subscription agreement.