Random thoughts along the roadside…

TV Links Shutdown: Implications

October 20th, 2007

So, apparently the popular TV/Movie link site “TV Links” has been shutdown on friday, according to news sources on the internet. A great commentary on this situation can be found on this Guardian blog.

It brings up an interesting question: is linking illegal? How can I be sure that what I’m linking to is legal or not? For that matter, if linking is illegal, then is viewing the content illegal? What about the things that most people don’t realize is possibly illegal, like mixing in copyrighted music into video files. What about taking videos of computer games, how legal is that?

This is rather similar to the shutdown of the Pirate Bay, where all they were hosting were (essentially) links to download the alleged illegal content. Does that mean it’s illegal for me to post a link to the pirate bay, since they may host illegal content. And then theres all the sites that Google links, wonder how much illegal content they link to. *sighs*

Of course, the biggest problem here is that the people in the studios and recording industry making these decisions are morons. Seriously. One of the reasons TV links was shutdown was because they were able to profit from their enterprise.. well, why haven’t the studios profited off of this concept? Same thing goes for mp3’s… one of the primary reasons I think people use these questionable or outright illegal resources is because its way easier and far cheaper to use those as opposed to legit resources.

Instead of spending money on prosecuting and finding these alleged pirates, why don’t they provide a equal or better service that they can monetize? Thats how the free market works, people use the best services.

Most of the TV networks now have streaming video on their sites of the current season, with commercials, and I think this is a definite step in the right direction. I’m not sure how much they’re making off of it, but certainly I would rather watch high quality video immediately on their site rather than using other ways to do it, and I think as these become more popular more consumers will agree.

Of course, I’m not really saying anything new here, people keep repeating the same thing over and over again. Maybe one day they will learn.

Posted in Privacy | No Comments »

If you want Google to buy you, play the lottery instead

October 18th, 2007

This is a great quote:

” There are more people that win $5 million in the New York lottery than get acquired by Google (BusinessWeek.com, 10/22/07). ”

Not quite sure why the date is post-dated, but it was in there anyways. Interesting article though.

Link

Posted in General | No Comments »

prnRename: an AutoIt based utility to rename IPP printers in Windows

October 17th, 2007

Using CUPS in conjunction with Windows is pretty easy to do, except there is one big major annoyance: you can’t rename the printer to something “friendly”, its always something long and annoying with the URL of the printer in it.

So, I jumped into the registry and figured out how to change it, and developed a tool using AutoIt (which works really well for these types of simple things) that allows you to change the URL and the name displayed for the printer in Windows Explorer.

See, at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers lies registry keys for all of the printers you have there, and you’ll notice that the key for the IPP printer starts with two ,, and the URL. So, you just need to rename that to whatever you want, then change the following keys/values under that key to the same thing (this is AutoIt code, but I think you get the point).

RegWrite($key,"Name","REG_SZ",$newPrinterName)
RegWrite($key & "\DsSpooler","printerName","REG_SZ",$newPrinterName)
RegWrite($key & "\DsSpooler","uNCName","REG_SZ", "\\" & @ComputerName & "\\\" & $newPrinterName)

After making the changes, restart the spooler service

net stop spooler
net start spooler

And, thats pretty much all there is to it. Obviously, use this at your own risk, seeing as this is modifying undocumented registry entries. Source code is included.

Download Windows 2000/XP IPP Printer Rename Utility

Posted in AutoIt, Howto | 2 Comments »

No, I am the supreme computer god!

October 9th, 2007

Jon thought HE was the geekist person to ever take this quiz. I took it after him, and apparently I’m geekier than he is. Or, it just doesn’t keep statistics correctly:

0% scored higher (more computer geeky),
0% scored the same, and
100% scored lower (less geeky).

:^D

Posted in Funny | 2 Comments »

MS Word docx amusing error

October 7th, 2007

Wow… I was looking over a paper for my girlfriend, and word popped up the following warning to me. It was great. 🙂

In case you don’t get it, its a docx file, which IS the latest format. LoL. Stupid errors…

Posted in Funny | No Comments »

Visual Studio 2005 not putting User Controls into Toolbox

October 6th, 2007

I’ve been developing in C# for my Senior Design project, and I have a lot of user controls that I’ve been using in the project, and while most of them are instantiated at runtime, a few needed to be embedded into the forms. And of course, I couldn’t actually do that since I couldn’t drag any of the controls into the Toolbox, even with a successful build. After playing with it for awhile, I found the solution.

It was as easy as this:

Tools -> Options -> Windows Form Designer -> General -> AutoToolboxPopulate = true

For some reason, it was not set on my desktop but was set on my laptop. So odd… hope that helps ya if you happen to have that problem!

Posted in C#, Howto | 1 Comment »

“POKE” is a registered trademark of Facebook

October 3rd, 2007

So, I got kicked off of Facebook for a few hours because I was being “spammy”, and this gave me the opportunity to review their TOS. Turns out, “POKE” is a registered trademark of Facebook.

Seriously?

I respect companies wanting to protect their business and all, but sometimes it just seems like they go too far. Sorta like people and frivolous lawsuits resulting in the silliest warning labels…sheesh.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Google Documents

September 25th, 2007

While working on the “Green Space” project (which really isn’t about green space) we’ve been using Google Documents extensively to collaborate on press releases, agendas, and other random things. Its been AWESOME, despite the fact that the user interface for Google Docs really sucks, IMHO.

Ironically, before I actually used it, I couldn’t see why anyone would want to replace their desktop word processor for something like Google Docs. Now, I can see why to some extent — though, I can’t imagine using it for EVERYTHING. The best and most useful feature is the fact that multiple people can work on the same document at the same time, which is pretty freaking awesome for projects like ours.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

The “Green Space” @ WMU

September 19th, 2007

I haven’t been blogging much lately since I’ve been involved with a HUGE project lately protesting an ugly parking lot at my University, and its been taking up all of my time that isn’t already been taken up with schoolwork.

We created a Facebook group which has over 800 members now. The use of Facebook here has been a great collaboration tool and a good way for us to get interested volunteers to help us. Also, the viral nature of Facebook has allowed us to reach people we ordinarily couldn’t reach.

On Monday night, a group of volunteers gathered at the ugly parking lot in question and proceeded to mark EVERY element of the parking lot with its price using chalk. We also proceeded to chalk around the area to draw attention to the chalk in the parking lot.

The response has been simply phenomenal! We’ve appeared on TV, had newspaper articles, and been invited to radio shows. We’ve had students and staff tell us that not only were they amused by the project, but also that it was very informative. Its been quite a fun experience for me.

I highly recommend the website I created for it. Check it out at http://greenspace.virtualroadside.com/

Posted in General | No Comments »

Anatomy of a Boing Boing link using OWS

September 11th, 2007

My roommate just got a page of his linked to by Boing Boing, so I just added a better heatmap function to OWS to do some better visual analysis of the hit. As you can see, the results are quite nice.

As you can see, the initial traffic spike peaked at 1:00pm on 9/8 with 639 visitors or so that hour, with traffic falling off until the end of the day, with another spike with people waking up at 9 or 10 the next day, and then falling back to mostly normal levels.

A more interesting observation is the spike in bot/crawler traffic, as shown below.

Apparently people aren’t the only ones who follow links on popular sites such as Boing Boing. 🙂

This heatmap is not yet in the latest version of OWS, but it is stable and available in SVN right now. OWS 0.8.0.4 will have this, which will hopefully be introduced by the weekend if I have time..

Posted in OWS | 2 Comments »