A Man and his Penguin

Now with open-source video drivers and a cold

After having X crash earlier today while playing Torcs and uploading some more Doc Martin, and then after reading the Linux Format interview with the guy from X.org, I decided to make more of an effort to track down bugs in X and report them.

But then I realised that they are more likely to be bugs in the proprietary Nvidia driver, because I don't believe that driver to be of a high enough quality for desktop Linux use*. And apparantly if I try to send a bug report to X.org, they'll ask me to retest with an open-source driver.

So, I've actually switched to the open-source nv driver. It provides 2D acceleration only, so no Compiz and no Torcs. But hopefully also no Kdenlive crashes (resulting from running Compiz when I shouldn't be) and no full X crashes.

I might buy a proper racing title for the Wii to replace Torcs, and then I should be quite happy not to do any more Linux gaming (unless I decide to buy one of those gorgeous** silent Sapphire cards which hopefully should have 3D support with the open-source drivers...)

I should also e-mail Kirstie some time and thank her for indirectly causing me to watch Doctor Who. I am thoroughly enjoying the show. Although I had always sorta thought about watching it, it was only seeing her mention it on her Facebook profile that actually made me think "Right, you've got to find out when it's next on and watch it".

Right now I'm getting over a cold. How annoying. I bought some Codral today and I took the afternoon tablet, but I think it's a placebo as I feel the same as I did without it. I still think Codral should actually be called "Soldieron" or "Solgiron" because the jingle is easier to remember than the name.

Miscellaneous:
I haven't spoken to Rosemary lately.
My modifications to the Return Of The Spice Girls wikipedia entry have been rolled back.
Seem to have a pinched nerve in my back; it gets pinched when I turn my head to the left
Right now I'm trying to rip all the Open All Hours DVDs; not for Surf The Channel, but just for our own records. But there seems to be some sort of DRM on them that causes k9 to choke or silently fail to copy the whole title.

That's it for today.

*I just wanted to remind people that I have resolved to not be so nasty in my blog posts, and that my self-censorship seems to be working. I was originally going to say that the Nvidia driver "sucks hairy donkey balls".

**Statements including the word 'gorgeous' are not intended to convey a sense of homosexuality.

DDOS

A DDOS is a "Distributed Denial Of Service attack". It's where a malicious party uses a bunch of computers that have already been compromised by viruses and are under said party's control, to send malformed information to a target computer in the hopes of crashing it or slowing it down.

My favourite video-on-demand service, Surf The Channel, was the target of a DDOS attack yesterday. The STC server stayed up, but was very slow. Right now, I can't get into Megavideo.com. Is this the work of the TV studios, a cracker sympathetic to the studios, or a cracker trying to discredit the studios?

Whoever is responsible, one thing's for sure. They could not execute a distributed denial-of-service attack without their botnet. That's right - your computer could have this attacker's software on it, and probably lots of other crackers' software on it too. If it does, then your computer has been contributing to a very serious crime.

If you suspect that your computer has any kind of virus or infection on it, DO NOT just hope it goes away on its own, because it won't! Don't just assume that you're the only victim of it and that it won't try and spread to your friends through e-mail, MSN or Facebook! Immediately take your computer offline; unplug the network cable, turn off the wireless switch, whatever it takes. Then run a virus and anti-spyware scan.

Once you have removed the infection, put your computer back online, update your virus and anti-spyware scanner, unplug the cable again and run the same scans again as they will likely find brand-new infections.

UNTIL YOU HAVE REMOVED THE INFECTION, DO NOT ALLOW YOUR COMPUTER ONLINE. Not even to chat to your friends on MSN. And don't tell me to mind my own business, or leave you alone, because your virus problem just sent a hundred thousand spams and hindered the web surfing of ten thousand people.

If every computer owner was a responsible computer owner, it would not be possible for distributed denial of service attacks to be carried out. And if I found out that your computer was involved in the attack on Surf The Channel, and is still not cleaned, I'll have some very stern words to say to you.

-----------

Looks like Youtube's anti-piracy measures are working in time for their appeal against Viacom: (click the image to see what I'm talking about)

Oh, and I ran my CPU at 100%, both cores, for quarter of an hour last night. Core temperatures got up to 46 degress celcius, which is well within tolerance, and the CPU fan didn't shift from 1050RPM (same speed as at idle). Cold room though, we'll see when summer rolls along. No worrying noises either like I was having before, and the PSU seemed to be cooler, so maybe the rerouting of the cables helped. I really want a modular power supply.

I've also noticed a problem with my Sony Walkman. For all new albums, it doesn't want to recognise the cover art stored as ID3s. I'll have to investigate properly some time. It's probably human error of some kind.

HDMI suggestion

Can I make a suggestion to the consortium of companies that came up with HDMI?

For the next revision of HDMI, can you please make the connectors much less of a hassle to fit? I find that it's easy to insert HDMI cables when you can see the plug and the socket, but it's physically impossible to insert them when you can't see the socket.

Considering that you often don't have enough space behind a TV to see all the ports, I find this lack of non-visual testing to be a complete oversight. It's also discriminatory to blind people, but then so is Component Video (or do they not care if their TV picture looks purple?).

For the next revision of HDMI, could you please either make it wireless, or test the plugs and sockets for their ability to be used when you can only feel where they need to go.

Viacom Big Score

Viacom have successfully convinced a judge in the US to force Google to give up:

1. All videos that have been deleted from Youtube
2. 12 terrabytes worth of database on who has watched what, and how many times videos have been watched. (which could be submitted on "three over-the-shelf 4TB hard disks", but I hope will be submitted on 1,000,000,000 sheets of A4 paper).

They didn't succeed in gaining access to private videos or Google's source code.

Here's a comment on the story that I found hilarious:

Any video ever pulled, eh?

Well here's hoping that some corporate shill at Viacom has to watch 50,000 duplicates of 2girls1cup.

But Viacom doesn't want this information as some kind of anti-piracy crackdown.  It's simple: If you get a list of who (by country) watches what video, what each video is rated and what each video contains, you've got a massive amount of demographic data there. That TV production company will know what people want to watch.

The source code that Viacom didn't get, would have been very handy for them to create a Youtube clone. But they're not weeping; they now have access to one of the most valuable databases in the world. Not only will they know how well-watched their own shows are online, but they will also know how well-watched their competitors' shows are.

I'd be very surprised if this decision doesn't get overturned, though. The vast majority of deleted videos from Youtube are not Viacom's intellectual property, and by the laws that Viacom are claiming to enforce, this is now allowed. A higher court will surely find the original decision to be invalid.

Let's not forget the Streisand effect; Viacom's actions will just encourage people to put Viacom shows online. Or the Napster effect; people will start putting their shows up on a non-American video sharing site so there's no way for Viacom to find the people behind the videos. Of course, we'd probably find that all other sites will put a rolling-delete system in place, whereby old logs are deleted perminantly, and deleted videos are irretrievably erased.

-----------------
I found out today that I still don't forgive the Spice Girls.  I don't even forgive them for the song Right Back Atcha, much less "Tourgate". I notice they haven't released a live DVD here yet either. Maybe they were telling the truth when they said that they hadn't recorded one.

June 20 to today

Part of this post was written on June 20th but not uploaded, then I appended more onto it today.

Today, I became part of the future of television.

My copy of the first episode of Doc Martin was added to
SurfTheChannel.com, and it has "New Show!" next to it. My online handle,
3rdalbum, is also displayed on the video page.

I'm rather pleased, and I've decided to put the rest of the episodes on
there. I can edit and fully upload one episode every two days. If I have
a day off work, I can do an episode in one day.

Unrestricted video-on-demand is the eventual future of television, and I
helped the online community to make what we currently have, even less
restrictive. I also hope the site puts Doc Martin on its front page as a
featured show; that would be really good.

I'm also going to put in an occasional advertisement. As in, one
advertisement for every three or four episodes. Actually, in the second
episode I've put in a hilarious advertisement for Firefox that I found
on Youtube. It's the one where the other browser logos are making lots
of funny noises, and the Firefox one tells them to shut up.

I'll also put in an ad for Ubuntu, in a later episode. I just need to
find one that's short, brings the point across, and has good production
values. I've had a quick look, and I might have my work cut out for me.

In other news, Asus has released the Atom-based EeePC 901. Pricing is
the same for the Windows version as the Linux version, but the Linux one
has 8 gigs more storage. I think more people will buy the Windows one
because they've completely missed the point of the machine, but I'm sure
the Linux sales will be good due in part to people who already have
Windows and want a bigger SSD.

My boss decided to get rid of Firefox off the work computers. The
extended warranty program is now filled out online, and the website
displays the contract in a popup window. Of course, Firefox's popup
blocker was turned on, my boss thought Firefox was "causing problems",
and promptly removed it before I even arrived to work.

Removing it opened a can of worms. All saved web pages try to open in
Firefox when double-clicked, and of course Firefox is no longer there.
My boss called the IT support line to get them to fix it, and they decided that installing IE 7 was the answer. But, of course, we were
running XP SP 1; so he spent hours running Windows Update and spyware
scans (surprisingly, found some!), and then installed IE 7, and found
that it didn't fix the problem anyway.

I apologise unreservedly for what I wrote here before. As this blog post was written piecemeal, I was in a bad mood while writing that part. But that's still not any sort of excuse for writing that in such a public place. I was wrong to say what I said, and I'm ashamed.

Isn't IE 7's font rendering just awful? They've applied some horrible
anti-aliasing to the fonts on the web pages, which just makes it look
blurred. When I was younger, and the CRT monitor was king, I liked
anti-aliased fonts. Heck, merely two years ago on my old
computer's CRT monitor, I turned on anti-aliasing for XFCE
and liked it. Anti-aliasing looks shit on an LCD, which is why
Ubuntu's default font settings are so great.

My father works specifically with fonts as part of his job. He agrees
that Ubuntu's font rendering is nice.

Today, thanks to the Gentoo wiki, I managed to replace the ugly PC speaker noise with the playback of a short sound file. I will post a distro-agnostic version of the howto. I also uploaded the third episode of Doc Martin and I'm just about to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who.

What's the most offensive word you can think of?

I just tried posting a comment to a Microsoft blog. Denied - the offensive language filter had found something it objected to. I realised that I used the phrase "thrust upon", so I changed it and resubmitted. Still offensive language, apparantly. So I looked further, and found where I refered to the root account on Linux. I changed it to "superuser". Resubmitted. Still too offensive.

By this time, I was thinking "Have they really blocked the word Linux from this Microsoft blog?". Finally, I removed the sentence "If any Mac users are sniggering, then don't; your whole operating system is full of these kludges". Resubmitted. It went through fine.

I thought the offensive word was "kludges", but looking back I realise that "snigger" was the offensive one because it contains the word nigger. How dumb; snigger is a word, and not one that's in the least offensive. (in America I'm sure they'd say "snicker").

But yeah, I bet Friendster lets me put the word "Nigger" into this post. Nigger. Niggers. Sniggering.

"He called me a dirty bitch, a cheap-ass whore, and a dick-sucking slut. And then he called me the N word!"

How to remove Mono :-P

Thanks for reading my post about Boycott Novell, and thanks to the people who discussed it. Now let's answer some questions that I got asked on MSN, that you might be wondering about too :-)

The forum post on Linsux was indirectly what made me write the article - I agreed that something had to be written about BN, but I disagreed with the Linsux article. So, in true Linux style, I wrote what I thought needed to be written. But there's more to it than that; I was shocked by the "Credibility Index" page of BN because it reminded me of how George Orwell used to send letters to Downing Street, listing the people in parliment and public service who he thought were communists.

If you are worried about Mono, then remove it by all means. If you want to stop the ubuntu-desktop metapackage from being removed too, then it's safe to manually delete the files that were installed by mono-common and any other affected packages. When you dist-upgrade, Apt will ask you if you want to fully install the new mono-common, or if you want to keep those files deleted.

I don't work for any software company, nor open-source software project.

Now, let's stop commenting on Boycott Novell stories or anti-Boycott-Novell stories, and let's just vote the bad ones down. Press the red button :-)

Boycott "Boycott Novell"

Recently on FSDaily, there has been a flood of stories being submitted from the site Boycott Novell. This site claims to be "Exploring the reality behind exclusionary deals with Microsoft and their subtle (yet severe) implications".

The keyword is "Reality". Unfortunately, there is not a lot of reality or even any facts behind Boycott Novell's articles, which seem to come several times daily. Let me explain:

I once knew a man who suffered from autism. He would take any single event out of context and create a full paranoid backstory around it, and start spreading it around as if it were the truth. If somebody told him that they didn't think Hi-5's latest album was as good as their previous albums, he would start telling people that Hi-5 had fired their previous music producers due to budget cuts and that fans were threatening to stop listening to Hi-5. The trouble was, this autistic guy believed every lie he created, and that's what made himself so believable!

Boycott Novell must be run by an autism sufferer, because it does *exactly the same thing*. If somebody in the free software community says that they feel ambiguous about Mono, then Boycott Novell starts writing articles about how people en-masse are deleting Mono from their systems, and that Microsoft is secretly funding Mono's development through Novell in an attempt to create a case to sue Linux users for patent infringements.

This would all be very spooky, except that they provide NO EVIDENCE of anything they claim. The closest thing to "evidence" would be when they quote previous articles they've written.

Most recently, Boycott Novell has published a story about how Mark Shuttleworth has supposedly "sold-out" to Microsoft by having licensed Windows Media codecs in the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Oh, and Mono, of course. Look at the source of this shocking revelation: their own IRC channel!  A more recent edition of the article says that Mark Shuttleworth should "be wise of the mistakes of others" in licensing Microsoft technology. Yeah; every consumer electronics company *really* got burnt by putting licensed Windows Media decoding in their DVD players! Sony and Samsung certainly didn't survive the fallout of putting WMA playback in their MP3 players! </sarcasm>

The story even implies that Canonical has cut a Novell-style deal with Microsoft, just because he said he is willing to work with Microsoft when and where interests do not conflict, and where there is transparency. The case he provides is a good one, and I especially urge you to read the last paragraph.

No Canonical-Microsoft deal has been forged. Licensing of the codecs has come not through Microsoft, but through Fluendo who have native Gstreamer versions of the codecs that reportedly work better anyway.

I've had enough of Boycott Novell. I have to read parts of the stories (not articles, stories) as I'm browsing FSdaily. Attacking anything and everything is the mission for every day. Sometimes I wish they'd conduct a full ethnic cleansing of their own computers, deleting all lines of code contributed by anyone who's had any contact indirectly with Microsoft, which would result in the complete breakage of their systems and an end to the flow of FUD from their site.

But if there was a culture shift at Boycott Novell, so they could start reporting on real shady deals, and things that are definitely bad for Free Software, then I'd be happy to read their site. Heck, I'd be happy to write for it as long as it gets some actual sources for information, rather than behaving like my autistic aquaintance. Oh, and when it removes the "Communist Credibility Index"  from the site, which is a truly McCarthyist creation of theirs.

Until then, let's boycott the site, and click the "Negative" button on their stories on FSDaily to bury them.

When VOIP and DRM hurt sales

Today I called Uniden to order some cordless phones for the shop. When the lady answered, I had a lot of trouble understanding her. Occasionally her voice would drop out or go fuzzy - like she was speaking underwater. I thought she was on a mobile phone.

But then I realised that she was on a landline. Or, more precisely, she was on a VOIP line. Probably the whole Uniden office was, considering that they sell VOIP phones.

I know that she was on a VOIP line. Other people, placing orders for regular cordless phones, might not know. They might think "I'm not ordering Uniden phones if they're going to have such bad call quality!". In any case, people ordering VOIP phones would also be wary of ordering from them.

--------

DRM makes my job difficult. The other day I was trying to sell a stereo to a lady. The stereo is excellent, from a well-respected name in audio, and often just "sells itself". It has a USB port.

Customer: So, I can plug my daughter's iPod into it and play the songs?

Me: Well, if we're talking about an actual Apple iPod, then not really. Apple makes the iPod so it scrambles the order of the songs, to discourage people from copying songs off eachother's iPods. You could play the songs, but they would be in the wrong order.

Customer: Oh, alright. Well, as long as she can play them, I guess that's okay. We've bought some songs from iTunes that she'll want to listen to on here.

Me: Actually, that's going to be a problem. Songs from the iTunes Music Store have encryption in them that prevents you from making copies. The stereos with USB ports can't decrypt the songs, because Apple doesn't give <the stereo manufacturer> the password.

Customer: I don't understand. <I explain again in different words>

Customer: That's not very good! How would I play those songs that we've bought?

Me: You'll have to burn them to CD, and then re-import them back into your computer.

Customer: How do I do that? Could you write it down for me? <I do.>

Customer: I'll have to check with my daughter whether this will be any use to her.

She did eventually come back and buy the stereo, but I have pity for them - having their songs playing in random order and having to burn and re-rip all the songs they've "bought" (bought a license to listen to). I wonder whether, by now, they're realized that their old unbranded MP3 player is actually superior to the iPod?

---

For the last couple of weeks I've been watching Doctor Who on the ABC. The revived edition of the show, with Christopher Eccleston. It's so refreshing to see a classic show revived and actually being canon with the original, without having everything insultingly "reimagined" ala Battlestar Galactica and Bionic Woman, being "dark" and "gritty drama" where only the character names are retained and everything else is different. The new Battlestar Galactica is shit science-fiction and shit TV, where the in-flight scenes actually somehow look more fake than the 1979 original show where they reused the same 9 shots over and over. At least the makers of the 1979 TV show... heck, the makers of the awful Galactica 1980, could comprehend that not every character has to have some huge character flaw that does nothing except grind gears against everything else in the show.

But I'm digressing.

The new Doctor Who is a continuation, keeping with the feel of the original, the same overarching plot, the same enemies, and even the same sense of humour. I bought two of the DVDs from the first new series and I watched the first one last night; this made me fall head-over-heels in love with the show, and I can't wait for UKTV's Series 3 marathon this weekend with the 10th Doctor.

It's funny. I originally started watching Stargate SG1 mostly because a girl I was interested in watched it. I found out that another girl I like watches Doctor Who, so I started watching it.

Oh, I had already been interested in those two shows anyway, but in both cases this gave me the spark I needed to make the effort to watch it.

If I'm honest, for a while I watched Smallville for the same reasons; a THIRD girl; but I stopped watching it because I stopped liking her and I hated the show :-)   Did I mention that I hate the revisionist bullshit of Battlestar Galactica? Let's hope the dickhead behind that show is nowhere near the set or script of the new Star Trek "original series" movie.

Bittorrent is crazy...

Right now I'm downloading the movie Sydney White, as of course I'm a huge Amanda Bynes fan. Don't worry, I'll buy the movie on DVD when it comes out (I actually own two bought copies of Hairspray, so there!).

According to my calculations, by the time I download the movie once, I will have uploaded it twice. In 14 hours, it's downloaded 297 megabytes and uploaded 405 megabytes. It's also caused the wireless driver to fail once and my card to lose connection to the modem once as well!

I have 10 ports open in the hope that more people downloading from me will equal more people uploading to me, but it looks like the Bittorrent theory falls down here. And thanks to the (excellent and very clever) way that Bittorrent handles downloads in segments, I can't even watch what I've already downloaded!

Oh well. I should have the rest of the movie in 19 hours time.

Faceparty deleted my account!

I tried logging into Faceparty today to check if anyone had sent me any birthday messages. Account not found. There was a 10,000 word essay saying about variaous reasons why my account might've been deleted; no, I am *NOT* on the UK sex offender registry, I *did* have pictures on my profile, I'm *not* 50 years old and using Faceparty in leiu of an online dating site.

Some notice would have been nice, as would a reason. I've been with Faceparty for years.

If they're going to do this, then they can get fucked.

DON'T buy Panasonic Full-HD Plasma

We just got in a TH50PZ700A for the floor. This thing sucks arse. The contrast and brightness (especially whites) are terrible compared to the 42 inch regular HD (TH42PX7A). To add insult to injury, the 50 inch uses 650 watts (the 42PX7A uses 350 watts), and requires 3 cooling fans at the back.

Really, don't buy this plasma. If you want something in 50 inch and full HD, for god's sake, get an LCD. Or the Samsungs might be okay.

EDIT: Just watched a little bit of Neighbours on it, which is broadcast in 1080i. The picture is just sharp enough to be able to tell that it's 1080i. But the contrast, black levels, and brightness still all suck.

Like the glory days of Napster

I just had a look online for the Kelis song "I Don't Think So" for my boss. He loves singing along to the Big Brother commercials whenever they come on, and that's the song they use.

Usually when you try to find Mp3 download sites, they're always shady paid sites - where you have to pay 85 cents for an MP3. Or, you can click the link for free, but that just takes you to another Mp3 site, and you find the song there and click the link, and it takes you to yet another site.

But today I discovered Bee MP3 (URL is what you'd expect). Bee MP3 actually works - I think the songs are hosted at other sites, but they actually all seem to work, and it's all quick and painless. Good selection too - who says you need iTunes to get Mylene Farmer albums? I'm very happy.

(I also downloaded the song "Sweet About Me" by Gabriella Cilmi, because I think it would be a great song to have in the background of an Ubuntu TV commercial; this idea is still cooking).

Obviously I'll still buy CDs, but for one-offs this site is tops.

Hitachi Australia closed down

It's a sad day for consumers, it's a sad day for retailers. Hitachi Australia has announced that it's closing its doors.

This is a real surprise to me, as I can think of a number of other brands that I'd expect to leave first. I thought Hitachi was doing alright.

Luckily we never dealt much with Hitachi - we only got in two Hitachi plasmas, both of which sucked, and we have sold some of their fridges. The wording of the announcement actually isn't clear if just the consumer electronics side is closing, or if it's the whole kit and kaboodle (including home appliances).

In any case, I feel very sorry for the staff who would be laid off, as well as anxiety about warranty issues. Lets hope Hitachi does keep service happening for the next 5 years. Now that Centrex has gone bust, people's Centrex aircons have been breaking down just months before the end of warranty, and guess who is their first port of call?

I also feel anxiety about NEC and Sharp. Consumers simply are not asking for NEC or Sharp, and pricing can sometimes be out of whack compared to their competitors. Sharp's LCDs are very reasonably priced, though. We'll have to keep an eye on both of those companies, as I think Sharp has made it clear that they're afraid this will happen to them too.

Hairspray!

As soon as I got out of work I went to Kmart and bought the single-disc edition of Hairspray. I haven't watched it yet; I'll try and get my parents to watch it with me.

When I got home I went to my computer, and the wireless connection to the ADSL was very very slow. I tried rebooting the computer and the router, but it didn't actually work. I did some fiddling around and now everything is going. Is wireless really ready for the desktop?

Not sure if I got phished; maybe

Shit.

On Myspace, a friend of mine posted a shoutout saying that they'd been to a party and had all these wild photos on their profile. I think I may have clicked on the link and then been asked to log into Myspace again. I'm not sure if I "logged in" on that form; because the link was actually a phishing ploy! A bit later I saw the comment again and thought "I don't remember actually looking at that", so I clicked the link (again?) and idly noticed something unusual about the URL. When the page loaded, Firefox warned me that it was a phishing site.

Which makes me think that I didn't click the link before. But to be doubly-careful, I changed my password on Myspace.

That's really thrown me a curveball - I thought I would be smart enough to evade phishing attempts, but maybe I didn't. I fell for the "lowest common denominator" attempt of social engineering too, which is doubly-shameful.

From now on I'll have to be more careful, especially with very popular web apps.

"You can try to stop my speaking mouth and I know you probably will"

I posted a comment on the Hairspray blog a few days ago. Queen Latifah reckoned that Edna Turnblad is "a man dressed up as a woman", so I posted a comment to the HS blog post where she says that, and I corrected her. Edna is a female character. John Travolta is a man who dresses up as a woman in order to play the character. That's basically all I said in the comment.

And what do you know? My comment gets deleted! Seems that somebody doesn't like anyone even claiming that one of the stars of Hairspray got something wrong. That's a bit shithouse.

OLPC is cleverest computer since Macintosh

I have been reading a couple of reviews and comparisons of the EeePC and the One Laptop Per Child XO computer. These reviews and comparisons are completely flawed in their two focii:

1. The hardware specs versus the price
2. The use of the computers for "ordinary" tasks in the Western world.

As a computer destined for the developed world, the EeePC is clearly superior. But in terms of the cleverness of the hardware and software, and in terms of fitting purpose, the XO machine is incredible. I've just been reading about its security system; from deterring theft between the factory and the destination school, to encouraging students to share custom-written programs WITHOUT being able to cause hardware, software or data damage. Believe it or not, there is a security system on these machines which provides better protection against threats than what is on most internet-facing servers.

Read it for yourselves, it's fascinating: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=security;a=blob;f=bitfrost.txt

The OLPC machine is completely tailored to the precise tasks at hand, so I believe it's the most revolutionary hardware/software system developed for end users since the Macintosh in 1984. Possibly even more so. And being so deeply appropriate to its end use, and so revolutionary in terms of system design, makes it a clearly more impressive computer than the EeePC.

Getting hammered by Storm

Today I opened my inbox and found three e-mails sent by Storm-infected computers.

Anyone who lets Storm onto their computer is a nincompoop. Not even my grandfather was naive enough to open the Storm binary or even click on the "http://253.124.76.92/" address in the e-mails.

Stop fighting! Give me my frickin' video!

An e-mail back from Tom, who is Tier 2. No, he won't send me an unprotected copy of the video, because it is "not available". Once again, I was given a link to the feedback form so I can "request" it.

I will do some digging and see if there are any actual Customer Service people I can e-mail at Apple. I need to threaten to close my iTunes Music Store account before I will see any action. It would also help if I could find a precedent - some time before where Apple has provided unprotected audio or video on request from an angry customer.

But I am serious. If I exhaust all opportunities, I will stop using the iTunes Music Store. I have all the music I want from it, and I won't stand for DRM any longer.

Tom, you did not make me happy!

For some reason, Derek from Tier 2 iTunes Music Store Customer Support didn't get back to me - instead, it looks like my e-mails were passed onto Tom (whose e-mail signature didn't identify him as being from Tier 2). And Tom didn't make me happy at all!

He basically told me again to use the form. And, once again, that it's not possible to burn the videos to DVD; no reason given. (Of course, I KNOW the reason, but he doesn't know that I know!).

In a subtle way, he told me to get an iPod. Dickhead. There's a reason why I bought the Sony, thank you very much. And the video I downloaded is 480 lines of resolution (possibly more, actually) - why should I buy an iPod and a set of video cables so I can watch the video on my TV at half its correct resolution?

There's one last-ditch thing I want to try, with regards to transcoding the video. I believe that VLC on Windows can use the key from iTunes in order to decrypt the iTunes music store music files. It may, hopefully, be able to decrypt the video too, and then I can use VLC's transcoding abilities to create an interim file.

Tomorrow I will think up something to say to Tom/Derek; something along the lines of "Your advice to me is to buy an iPod?!" and "At no point was I told that my video would be locked to Apple software!"

"Please send your complaint to /dev/null@apple.com"

I asked Samantha to provide me with the contact details of somebody who could help me further. She replied back with another typical form letter, but with the following body:

Finding a solution for you is important to me, so I have requested assistance with the issue you reported. You will receive an email after the matter has been investigated and further information is available.

Thank you for your patience. I want your iTunes experience to be as enjoyable as possible.

And in exactly 1 hour, I had a message from Derek, at the 2nd tier customer support desk for iTunes. He told me to submit feedback to the iTunes Music Store website. Dude, I might as well send it to /dev/null.

Obviously, Tier 2 customer support is not high enough for my purposes. So I will air my grievances to Derek, let him try to assuage my frustration, and then ask to speak to someone higher.

If you are trying this idea out for yourself, remember these rules:

1. Always be polite, and use correct English.
2. If you are getting nowhere, elevate. (ask to speak to someone higher).
3. Make it in Apple's / iTunes' best interests to help you.

I'm ropable

Samantha from iTunes Music Store Support got back to me about the ticket I raised with them. Her form letter suggested I try upgrading the video to iTunes Plus. A good suggestion that I hadn't thought of. In my line of business, it's like someone buying a fridge and it being faulty on arrival, and then me offering to upgrade them to a functional model for a small fee. Can you imagine how quickly Consumer Affairs would shut down my shop if we operated like that?

Anyway, I downloaded the latest version of iTunes (actually, I already had a copy that I used with WINE), installed it onto Windows (got a creepy feeling while clicking the "Agree" button, remind me not to read the EULA again!), and tried the iTunes Plus upgrade procedure.

Fantastic. NOT! For $1.50, I could convert 3 songs (out of about 70), and no videos. Two of those songs were the Spice Girls' single Stop, which I had bought from iTunes solely because of the Stop To The Top campaign (I already have a CD single of it). The other was the Moby & Mylene Farmer duet, which I could already unprotect with QTFairUse (that program rocks!).

I have e-mailed Samantha back, telling her that it doesn't work and that I need another option, and hopefully she'll throw her hands up at this point and say "Sorry, can't be done". At which point, I take it up a notch.

I'm aware that I could download the video from Youtube, and in fact I tried a few minutes ago, but parts of Youtube are down at the moment. But it's the principle of the thing.

I WILL get the music video in unprotected format, no matter how long it takes or how many people I have to hassle. Hopefully I'll inspire a politician or a judge to make DRM illegal in this country.

I got an e-mail from Storm!

Just checking my e-mail, I found an e-mail telling me that my ecard was waiting. On opening it, I found a link to the "crazy kitty ecard" which is actually a Storm binary!

I found a "From" e-mail address. I went to the domain name in the "from" field and it is some sort of cafe. I e-mailed them with the following message:

• To Whom It May Concern,
  
  I have been sent a spam e-mail from an e-mail address belonging to your domain name. This spam e-mail attempted to convince me to download a malicious file - a virus. Here is the message:
  
  

  To
  Subject	[Spam?]Your ecard is waiting!
  From	<schulkebass@bjs.co.za>  Add to Contacts
  Date	Sunday, October 28, 2007 9:02:40 PM
  [ ↓ ↑ ]	View Message Source
  Headers	Message-ID: <002e01c81962$d2266480$4cdaac8e@kcfjy> Content-Type: text/plain;format=flowed;charset="windows-1250";reply-type=original MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Priority: 3 Received: from c2mailmx06.mailcentro.net (10.2.14.106) by C2MAIL02.mailcentro.net (NPlex 5.5.042)id 47238B3B00001F7F for webmaster._.dancepop@zzn.com; Sun, 28 Oct 2007 06:03:26 -0700 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Flags: \Recent

  Please click here to view your Crazy Kitty Card Online.

  (and then there is an IP address of a compromised computer, serving up the virus).
  
  Please update your anti-virus software immediately and run a scan. (unfortunately, this is a resiliant virus that can evade anti-virus scans). If the e-mail address listed in the "from" field is attached to a particular computer, you will definitely want to disconnect that computer from the Internet until you have removed the infection - either through anti-virus or, if that fails (or the anti-virus program doesn't see the infection) through erasing the hard disk.
  
  You will also want to educate your staff on the dangers of downloading random programs from the internet. This virus spreads only through people downloading and running it, so it's obvious that someone with access to the infected computer has received the virus through their own actions.
  
  If you have any questions, please e-mail me back on this address.
  
  Christopher Lees
  http://bigbolshevik.blogs.friendster.com/a_man_and_his_penguin

I wanted to commit DoS against the IP address that was serving up the page, but that is a seriously bad idea as it gets the whole botnet to do the same thing to you!

I also recieved a Nigerian scam e-mail; I tried a "social engineering attack" by sending them the Storm binary and telling them that my bank account details were in it.. but Hotmail recognised the virus and wouldn't send the message.

EDIT: I used nslookup on the IP address in the Storm e-mail. It resolved to the customer subdomain of a particular Swedish ISP. I have sent an e-mail to their abuse department, giving them all the relevant information, and I hope they chase it up.

I think I got it!

I'm getting REAL close to having working video on my Sony MP3 walkman.

I decided to ditch the GUI frontends and delve into the not-so-difficult world of FFMPEG on the command-line. This FFMPEG command creates working video, but stuttering audio:

ffmpeg -i (infile) -b 500 -s 320x240 -vcodec mpeg4 -ab 128 -acodec aac outfile.mp4

I believe it's because this command will create audio at 48 kilohertz sample rate if you feed in a VOB file (raw DVD video, which I was), that was causing stuttering audio. If you add -ar 44100 before the -ab argument, that should fix it. I'm just copying over the new file right now, and I'll test it.

EDIT: Same problem occurring. This time I'm trying completely different settings. I don't care about finding out what the exact fault is (I don't have time to encode all these videos many times!), I just want to find an incantation that works so I can write a GUI frontend.

I am currently trying this command:

ffmpeg -i (infile) -b 576 -s 320x240 -vcodec h264 -ab 128 -ar 41000 -acodec aac outfile.m4v

So, I've changed the video codec to h264, the bitrate to something a little more round (in computing terms, 576 is more round than 500 - it's a math thing), and the container format to m4v. Right now the actual bitrate is climbing to above 768kbps, which is non-supported by the player; we'll see if the MP3 player will play it regardless.

Enjoying this MP3 player

Once you get some proper ID3 tags into the MP3 player (I was right, you put the album covers into the files themselves), it works really well. I'm amazed by the bass response, and especially by the speed of the player. When you turn it off, it actually goes into a low-power standby mode for 24 hours. During that 24 hours, if you turn it on, it instantly starts playing the music, video or slide show. Instantly. At the exact place you stopped it. As if all you did was paused it.

The one thing I have yet to work out is ripping a DVD straight into the proper MPEG-4 format. I tried using K9Copy yesterday, but it didn't work in the player. Gnome says the file K9Copy created was DivX, which the MP3 player doesn't support; but I thought DivX was just MPEG-4 anyway.

I'm using Acidrip at the moment to try again.

I also put some photos onto the MP3 player. One of the ones I put on was of Sun Park from Hi-5, taken by my friend Niel. I realised last night that Sun actually is a cutie!

EDIT: Acidrip looks like it's humming along nicely; the video is at the correct resolution and the sound is synced. Gnome says it's FFMPEG MPEG-4, which looks correct.

Great bass

I am listening to "You Can't Stop The Beat" on my new Sony MP3 player. I guess this is an initial review, but I created an inverse pyramid on the equaliser, using Sony's ClearBass technology. I am very impressed with the bass response. I'm getting a very loud bass, but without the distortion that you would get with any other MP3 players.

I have four gripes with the MP3 player so far:

1. There's a lanyard included (in the packing box, not the product box) but I can't seem to get the lanyard into the little hole on the player!

2. For some reason, some of my MP3s are coming onto the player as "Unknown Artist". Maybe the MP3 player only recognises older styles of ID3 tag.

3. I downloaded the covers of Hairspray and another album from Amazon.com and put them into the same directories as the albums, but the MP3 player hasn't automatically picked up on them. I might need to do something else, or (here's a possible explanation) it picks up the cover image from the actual tag.

4. The USB port on the MP3 player is completely non-standard, so you need to use the included cable.

Here's what I already love about the Sony MP3 player:

1. Drag 'n' Drop. Works out-of-the-box on Linux. You can't get much better than that.

2. The ClearBass makes a huge difference.

3. The reported playback time of 33 hours for music and 9 hours for video. That's hell impressive.

4. The interface and the visual effects in it are nice. I especially like the screensaver, which fades in and out every so often.

5. The thing comes on INSTANTLY if you've used it in the past 24 hours, and goes right back to the exact place you were (even in videos!)

Probably more later once I have had a good play with the player.

A dumb website for finding out your IP address

NSFW (that stands for "Not Safe For Work", or especially in this case, "Not Safe For Wife").

http://www.moanmyip.com/

Big Walk in 6 days!

This Sunday, I'm doing the Big Walk - 18km from Perth to Fremantle. I'm really looking forward to it - I'll get Saturday night to myself as well. But the Big Walk is an excellent event that is always a lot of fun; great atmosphere, especially when it's a nice warm day. You do the walk, then you can have lunch in Fremantle and take a look around the Freo markets. That reminds me - the weather is getting warmer, maybe the Joondalup markets will be starting again soon.

I get the feeling that my co-worker doesn't much like her Ubuntu-based computer. I think it "oops"es on shutdown because of all the kernel modules I loaded, or because the wireless card isn't actually shutting down properly. Bloody proprietary hardware.

My MP3 player is 10 days away. According to the Sony rep, drag 'n' drop is "the way things are going". Let's hope it is, because the idea of having to use extra software just to put songs onto an MP3 player has always disgusted and mystified my father and I. How come Sony can do it sans-software and Apple can't? Maybe, shockingly, the Sony machine is just smarter than an iPod?

I'm listening to an album of reggae cover versions. It makes me laugh how they occasionally change the lyrics to be more Jamaican.

Angelica put some more pictures up, two of them seem to have been taken with me in mind :-)  But one of them, I can't get into! I tried Firefox and Epiphany, but it sorta looks like they've been blocked by Friendster. Oh well, I'm sure she'll send them to me at some point, if I swap for some risque pics of myself! :-)

2 years since the most insidious virus was analysed

It is approximately 2 years since what is debatably the worst virus/malware attack was analysed by researchers. I'd just like to spook you by describing what this malicious piece of software did:

Basics and Installation:

• If the user inserted an infected disk, the malware would invisibly install itself.
• "The software will then remain resident in the user's system, intercepting all accesses of the CD drive to prevent any media player or ripper software... from accessing the music tracks of the... CD."

How it works:

• The malware "conceals itself from the user by installing a patch to the Windows operating system. This patch stops ordinary system tools from displaying processes, registry entries, or files whose names begin with $sys$."
• This "cloaking technique... can be used by other malware "piggybacking" on it to ensure that it, too, is hidden from the user's view."

• The software installs an executable "as a Windows service, but misleadingly names this service "Plug and Play Device Manager", and "Approximately every 1.5 seconds this service queries the primary executables associated with all processes running on the machine, resulting in nearly continuous read attempts on the hard drive. This has been shown to shorten the drive's lifespan."
• It installs code as a device driver, which intercepts calls to the CD-ROM drive. This phoney driver will insert random noise into the audio data being read from a CD, making it unlistenable and unusable.
• It "loads a system filter driver which intercepts all calls for process, directory or registry listings, even those unrelated to the... application. This rootkit driver modifies what information is visible to the operating system in order to cloak" the malicious software.

Removal:

• Removing this malware is close to impossible: "Attempting to remove the software by deleting the associated files manually will render the CD drive inoperable due to registry settings that the program has altered."
• Most anti-malware programs have been updated to be able to safely remove the rootkit.
• The crackers responsible for the initial infection also distributed what they claimed to be a "removal tool", which in fact is another piece of malware in itself. It opens up the computer to direct scripting attacks, and sends personal information to third parties. DO NOT INSTALL THIS "removal tool"!

Reactions by the crackers:

• They have openly described it as a rootkit :"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
• And boasted about their ability to write other such malware: "we know Rootkits. We're #1 in the Rootkit buisness [sic] and all future versions will not be easily found by researchers, in fact we'd pay them $1 million if they actually find our Rootkits."

Infection Spread:

• A researcher has collated information that says that 568,000 networks were compromised by this malware.
• The infection has been made worse by several other pieces of (otherwise unrelated) malware which piggybacks off the damage done by the initial infection.
• Even the Department of Homeland Security has commented on this particular attack.

Have you guessed what virus I'm talking about? That's right, you agree - it IS the most insidious code to hit your computer. It's the Sony audio CD DRM Rootkit.

And we should NEVER let Sony BMG forget what they did to so many people's computers. Sony Entertainment should be charged under the full extent of US law.

(all quoted text from Wikipedia)

Spammers - getting smarter

I got a Hotmail message from someone claiming to be a girl, asking me to add them on MSN. I was suspicious, but naturally I didn't want to exclude any possibility :-)

So I did, and I found them immediately online. More suspicious. This girl has a risque photo - more suspicious. And I started a chat session.

(16:26:07) Chris: Who are you?
(16:26:20) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): hey, A/S/L?:)
(16:26:37) Chris: I was just wondering how you got my MSN address :-)
(16:27:00) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): hey whats up babe, U got a webcam? finally someone adds me, I am soo fuckin horny today for some reason lol
(16:27:25) Chris: Is this an actual person?
(16:27:56) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): listen hun, I'm just about to start my webcam show with jen, come chat me there in my chat room? We can cyber, I'll get naked if u do..lol!
(16:28:11) Chris: You're a spammer
(16:28:35) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): I can show u how to watch for free if u promise not to tell anyone else how to do it???PLEASE:-$
(16:28:47) Chris: lol this is a good one
(16:30:00) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): well since its the law that u gotta be 18 (nudity involved), u have to sign up with a credit card for age verification! BUT.. Once you are inside, just clikc on "Webcams" and that section is 100% free... let me know what name you use to sign in with so I know it's you babe! http://hotgal.localgirlcams.com/ fill out the bottom of the page then fill out the next page as well and u can see me live!
(16:30:12) Chris: Let's see what else this bot will say
(16:30:21) Chris: It's "typing" again...
(16:30:27) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): Please dont mention anything about that in the chatroom once u get in ok?:-$
(16:30:51) Chris: Okay... and I won't mention anything about this to MSN!
(16:31:37) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): OH SHIT.. k I'm late to start my show, I gotta get off msn...I'll see ya inside my chatroom babe.. remember not to mention that I am upgrading u for FREE... You can use your msn name to sign in so i know it's you..
(16:31:56) Chris: Oooo, for free! I'd better let you get onto your "show"
(16:32:32) Chris: It's not responding to that last message

Yeah, so it's pretty dumb spamming, but the spammers are getting smarter. Before, they'd just send a single message on Myspace or Faceparty; now they send multiple messages. This particular bot was even setting its MSN status to "typing" for a few seconds before actually sending the message.

When I tried initiating a new chat session, I got this:

(16:33:01) Chris: Hi
(16:33:07) emily85grand@hotmail.com (spammer?): AUTO-RESPONSE:hey just in the middle of my webcam show if you want to watch click the link http://hotgal.localgirlcams.com/
(16:33:31) Chris: Very realistic! Except that the whole "conversation" has been an "AUTO-RESPONSE"

I'm a "Safety Guru"

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/

Take this Phishing quiz. Identify which are the screenshots of the genuine sites, and which are evil phishing scams.

There are also two text questions at the end.

I got 10/10!

I wonder what the percentage of Linux users who got it right would be, versus the percentage of Windows/Mac users? I reckon Linux users would probably do better on average.

Test your Sharp DVD recorder

The rep from Sharp came in today, and I've no idea why but he wanted to see how to make one of their DVD recorders that we had on display (the DV-RW370) region-free.

He had been given some instructions from the factory that makes them, apparently the instructions they provide Sharp are always wrong in some way. And he also had a DVD-RW with some new firmware on it.

The rep set up the DVD recorder and tried typing what he'd been told: 9876 <enter>. Didn't work. Eventually, I worked out that you had to press <ch skip> 9876. You've got to press 9876 very quickly.

This brings up a menu with two items: The first upgrades the firmware to whatever is on the disc that's in the drive, and the second tests either the DVD or the DVD drive (I don't remember which, I didn't concentrate on it).

We didn't end off getting the firmware working. Either it was the wrong firmware, or Rob had burned it to the disc incorrectly. You'd think that the firmware would be a binary file, but no; it appeared to be hex stored as an ASCII text file.

That was quite exciting, finding this hidden feature in the unit. The highlight of my day. But yeah, if you've got one of those DVD recorders or if you are ever called upon to install one and you want to impress your customer, you know what to do!

Microsoft Surface Parody

This is one of the funniest videos I've seen in a long time.

Microsoft Surface Parody

Digg has joined the fight

The battle lines for high definition disc DRM has been drawn.

A valid device key for HD DVDs has been discovered and posted... pretty much everywhere. Including this blog:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

(Friendster, if you notice this and it's going to get into trouble, then please contact me and I'll remove the actual key from this post [or do it yourself]. I don't want to get my blog provider into trouble with Dr Evil).

Stories containing the key were Dugg and redugg, and Digg deleted them and banned the users. More users posted the key in comments to other stories, and these were deleted. Finally, Digg has thrown in the towel and actually published the key themselves, and this seems to have become the most Dugg story of all time (almost 17,000 diggs).

Josh posted the key on Ubuntuos.com the other day, but in such a roundabout way I didn't understand and posted a rather dumb comment.

---------
In other news, Dell has announced it will be selling Desktop Linux. This page says it all: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/unbuntu?c=us&cs=19&l=en&

But, if you turn images off in your web browser (or look at the alt attribute of the main image), you'll see that Ubuntu has been misspelt "unbuntu". Geez.

----------

I also went out today for a number of hours and bought myself some nice new clothes. This was at Hugh's suggestion. I found some great gear that I would never have previously thought would suit me, but actually does. All up I spent $200 on clothes today. Now I look sexy, so maybe the girls will ike me a bit more :-)

Microsoft supports spam

A bold assertion? Not really so bold. Look at this screenshot of the opening page when I logged into Hotmail today:

It clearly shows a typical Viagra spam as being from one of my contacts. I assure you, I do not subscribe to Viagra spam, nor do I know any Viagra spammers (I do know someone who takes Viagra, doesn't have impotence and buys it off an old man who does - which ironically is more illegal than sending spam!).

This isn't the first example of blatant spam coming as from "one of my contacts". This has been happening to me a bit. Microsoft must have deals with these spammers so their messages get pride of place on Hotmail accounts. Nasty. I hope their Australian office gets hit with the full extent of the law.

In other news, I found out that I had $4.33 left on my iTunes account, so I downloaded Mylene Farmer's song "Beyond My Control", and her duet with Moby "Slipping Away". I don't want to give the DRM-mongers $4 for free! But I still feel guilty, especially since I want to get more music cards to download some of Mylene's other albums. I think buying DRM'ed tracks is okay as long as you de-DRM them and distribute them to at least 5 other people :-)  I have distributed my Mylene albums to one other person - anyone out there want some MP3s?

Is my computer slow?

Right now I'm compiling Wx 2.8 in the background, while editing the podcast with Audacity.

It took a while to configure, and it's already taking a surprisingly long amount of time to actually compile. Maybe that's due to the sheer number of source files to compile, when I'm used to compiling programs with only a small number of larger files. But it makes me a bit nervous about compiling the latest version of Audacity (which is the reason why I'm compiling Wx 2.8 - it's a dependency). Will it take forever? Should I be running the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu? (Note: I don't actually believe in performance benefits with the 64-bit edition).

I also think I will buy those parts and build that computer.

Internet Initiation

There are two things you must see before you can regard yourself knowingly as a veteren of the Internet.

Tubgirl and Goatse.

And I finally saw the latter today. I even have the privilege of seeing the original message from the Cake Fart Man.

Also, go to www.museumofhoaxes.com. (this site is safe-for-work, as long as your workplace allows you to visit non-work-related sites)

And final part of this entry, I think I've managed to convince my boss to get in some more reliable stuff than Conia.

He loves to work

I just discovered that my computer loves to work.

I found, through Gnome's system monitor applet, that my CPU was at 100% load. Top told me that gnome-cups-icon was using up my CPU - this is a known bug. So I used Top to kill the program.

Immediately, rkhunter (for Windows users, it's like an anti-malware program) started up.

After that was done, my system decided to update its searching database (updatedb; I don't use Beagle).

My computer had better like working at 100% CPU! That's what it's going to be kept at for the next couple of minutes while I make a DVD.

Mozart played on Slashdot

Funny, funny, funny composer puns posted by Slashdotters to this article:

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/20/1853224.shtml

Digital TV sucks

I wrote a LOT more about it before, but I accidentally hit Shift-Backspace and so I lost everything. I might rewrite it some day.

The gist of it is: Although you don't get little specks and lines and things with digital free-to-air broadcasts, the quality is still lower than analogue. With digital, fast-moving objects either cause a reduction in frame rate (causing jerkiness), or leave a trail of blocks behind.

The Australian government is going to "phase out" analogue TV broadcasts so it can sell off the frequencies and make a lot of money. In return, TV stations get a very limited bandwidth (at the bottom end of the frequency spectrum) with which to broadcast in digital. Having such a low bandwidth causes the stations to use a low bitrate, which causes the problems I mentioned.

I would love to lobby the government, preferably with the backing of electrical retailers and consumer groups, to increase the bandwidth available to TV stations and legislate for minimum acceptable bitrates. The minimum acceptable bitrate for Standard Definition would be 50% greater than what the current average level is right now. The minimum acceptable bitrate for HD would be 75% higher than what it is now.

Because it is just greediness by the government, limiting the bandwidth like this. Honestly, this isn't just a "conspiracy theory" or anything, but it IS doing this just for the greater amounts of money it would get from corporations which want to buy good frequencies.

SonyBMG are dickheads

I bought the excellent Shannon Noll & Natalie Bassingthwaighte single "Don't Give Up" today. If only Natalie's part was a bit lower in pitch, she really sounds like she's straining to hit those notes!

I love music with this sort of feel - it kinda reminded me of Mylene Farmer & Seal's duet "Les Mots".

But anyway, I put it into my CD burner and Sound Juicer had a lot of trouble playing it - it was crackly and kept stopping. Which is very strange, as I've never had that problem with any other CDs. Then I checked the CD cover, and found that the disc is distributed through Sony BMG. The CD is protected through Digital Restrictions Management, obviously.

But I put the CD into my DVD burner (yes, I have two optical drives in my machine, lucky me!), and that had no trouble playing it.

Who would want to pirate the song anyway? Most Australians don't really understand and appreciate this sort of music, and it's played enough on the radio so that nobody really needs to buy the single :-)

What if someone wanted to play the CD in their computer? They might not be able to do it. What if someone wanted to pirate the disc and send it to people on Limewire, or make copies? A pirate is much more likely to have two optical drives, otherwise they probably have a real CD player and a cable so they can record the audio from the CD player back into their computer. A pirate wouldn't be hindered, but the law-abiding citizen would be inconvenienced. This pisses me off.

Computer Stupidities

Posted to a forum on www.linuxmail.org:

I am trying to upload a video for my friend and it is taking waaayyy to long!

I have tried to re-name the file to see if it would make a difference but it doesn't. I can upload pictures in a snap! But uploading a video is a different story!

If anyone could please help out, that would be great! 

How can someone who knows the word "upload" not be aware that videos are bigger files and therefore take longer to transmit?

As I'm sure many people have said: "If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a second of video worth 24,000 words?" (of course, Americans would say "29,970 words" as that's the frame-rate of their video)

More interesting spam

"hey! how are you doing? i'm charlene from sacramento, but i recently just moved. i'd like to chat some time if you want to make your way over to this webcam site i use. it's really cool, but unfortuantely for me the guys on there aren't as cute as you! lol, well check out my profile for the chatroom and some more pics".

The guys on the webcam site aren't as cute as me? Wow... those must be some REALLY ugly guys!

"Linux spam"

The strangest thing happened today. I opened my webmail and found a spam with the subject line "New Linux 2".

Must be the first time anyone has thought "Linux" is something that people will click on, as I've never used that particular e-mail address in relation to Linux. As far as I can remember...

Also, yesterday I tried booting a Xubuntu 6.10 Desktop CD on my iMac (128 megs of RAM). It booted, but was horrendously slow (and I had to modify its Xorg.conf). I will run some tests and see what processes I can safely kill from it, and then make sure those processes never get loaded at startup on Copland.

Why browser detection is so WRONG!

We're all annoyed when a website tells us that we need to be using Internet Explorer on Windows. I got *really* annoyed at NineMSN when one of its sites told me that I needed IE 5 on Windows, with Flash 5 and Windows Media Player 9. I even e-mailed the web developers, telling them that I was using Firefox on Linux with Flash 5 and the MPlayer plugin with w32codecs. In reply, I got the same old crap about "Internet Explorer has essential security features" and "we will look into allowing Firefox users into our site".

For these kinds of reasons, I've always hated browser detection. It's okay if it merely says "These are the system requirements, which you don't live up to, but click here if you want to continue nevertheless". But I've just come across an example of why browser detection is the MOST EVIL thing on the web.

Using your sparkling new Flash 9 beta for Linux and Firefox, surf to www.hi-5.com.au. You will be told that you need Flash 8, and not let into the site. "That's bad", I hear you say, "But it's obviously set up to detect whether you're running Windows too".

Not so. I tried going to the site using Firefox for Windows on Wine, which also has the Flash 9 plugin. Same problem. It used to work when I had the Flash 8 plugin installed on it. Curiously enough it works with Internet Explorer on Wine; I think it might have the Flash 8 plugin.

I'm running an XGL session right now so that might be the problem, but I doubt it.

I'm sure there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites with browser detection that have broken now that IE 7 has been released.

LaCie moving to Linux

I used to borrow a LaCie CD burner from my father's workplace. It was 100% reliable, even though it made many trips back and forth in the car and often sat in a messy room. Throughout the years, I've used other people's LaCie hardware devices, and heard nothing but good things about them. LaCie supported Macs when few companies would.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, LaCie is now supporting Linux on its DVD/Lightscribe burners. Their proprietry burning software won't be the subject of a crippled port, ala Nero. Instead, they've engaged the open-source community, and K3B will be used for burning.

Seriously people, if you're looking to upgrade to a Lightscribe DVD burner, get a LaCie.

In other news, I'm having fun with the UbuntuOS blog (that's where I found this story). I've stopped using Konqueror, but I still use Akregator for my RSS reading (which does its HTML rendering with KHTML).

Yet more news (I couldn't be bothered creating a seperate post for this): Apple iPod Video units have been shipped with a Windows virus preloaded. Over 20 iPods were infected in-factory, and Apple has apologised for "not catching" the mistake.

I can barely believe my luck - I've met the girl of my dreams (online) and she actually likes me!

Very humorous story

This is a very funny story that someone posted on a Planet Ubuntu blog:

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2002/11/fired.html

But I don't need to worry about it, because... whoops, this isn't one of those posts :-)