Posts by A J Stiles

get_iplayer

Evil Penguin-Shagging Communists™ might prefer "get_iplayer" (which grabs stuff from the BBC's iPlayer; pretending to be an iphone if there's an iPhone version, otherwise just grabbing the RTMP stream of the Flash version) and "ffmpeg". Can then convert things to DVD-friendly format, if required, and burn them to disc -- or copy them over to a HDD media player.

http://linuxcentre.net/get_iplayer/packages/get_iplayer-current.tar.gz

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtmpdump/ (needs libboost-dev)

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/download.html

All this stuff is Open Source, and so ought to run even on an AppleTV -- assuming gcc's been ported to it.

@ Tim Parker:

"Component" video nowadays means YUV. Though the plugs are coded green, blue and red, they are not carrying the red, green and blue components that a SCART connector expects; rather, the green plug is carrying the Y signal (= 0.6 * G + 0.3 * R + 0.1 * B + timing pulses), the blue plug is carrying the U signal (= B - Y) and the red plug is carrying the V signal (= R - Y). Getting back the original RGB signals requires a bunch of op-amps and resistors (and before ICs, it would have required at least three valves).

All this was done, historically, for broadcasting purposes, so as to be compatible with existing mono receivers (although in the end, we ended up abandoning any attempt to squeeze colour into the old 405-line system and introduced a brand new 625-line system for colour broadcasting, so perhaps we needn't have bothered). The Y signal just looks like a mono picture. The U and V signals don't need as much bandwidth as Y, since the human eye actually has poor colour resolution, so they are modulated onto a carrier and added to Y to create a single signal for broadcasting.

The reduced bandwidth requirement still applies to digital storage media, of course. DVD data is natively YUV.

Licence count is a poor measure

Counting the number of licences is hardly a fair measure of how much software is installed.

If you have 100 machines running Windows, you need 100 licences.

If you have 1000 machines running Ubuntu, you need one licence.

Interference shielding? Pah

Interference shielding? Pah!

I used to live near a MW transmitter and I never, ever had a problem running naked PC guts in the open air, without any RF shielding. Of course, this was in the days of many volts and few megahertz. Modern kit may be more sensitive to RF interference.

Putting lipstick on a pig

The iPod sound has already been tainted by silicon. A valve amplifier is not going to make it sound any better.

@ David Wiernicki

It'll *never* be 3133731337. Which part of "signed 32-bit integer" don't you get?

Easy Solutions, but Won't Happen

The solution is simple: use OpenPGP to encrypt data on physical media and OpenSSL to encrypt data on electronic media. And never, ever disclose your OpenPGP private key to anybody, ever, not even law enforcement.

But, it's not going to happen as long as Microsoft are part of the equation. Outlook Express is a product that people aren't meant to use seriously; the idea is that they're supposed to realise it's shite and fork out for the real Outlook. (Never mind that that isn't what actually happens; what's important is what's *intended* to happen.) Microsoft aren't going to put OpenPGP support into Outlook Express, because it's meant to be deliberately crippled.

Better Idea Innit

Frankly, I'm sick of all this moral absolutism.

Just ban minors from using the Internet without adult supervision, and create an offence of failing to supervise a minor properly while they are accessing the Internet. Then there will be nobody there for the paedophiles to go after.

PostScript in hardware

Any printer that does PostScript in hardware is bound to be decent. Adobe aren't going to let their name be associated with crap.

And, incidentally, a printer with PostScript in hardware also works well for evil penguin-shagging communists to print their porn / bomb-making plans / drug recipes on.

If it comes down to it

The only time that firearms would be useful in Britain would be if the Rule of Law finally broke down. And if that happened, it wouldn't matter too much that they were illegal. My first stop, therefore, is to be my old comprehensive school; where there are still well-equipped chemistry and metalwork labs. I know the correct proportion in which to mix sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre, and I know how to run a lathe.

Until it comes to such a time as a rather crude home-made gun will be much better than nothing, I am quite content with nobody else having guns.

Database not necessarily the answer

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's natural for IT people who know about databases and things to suggest a searchable online database to keep track of the statute books, but that would be solving the wrong problem. What we really need is statute books that don't require a database to keep track of in the first place.

Also, if we're going to have a written constitution, we could run afoul of all manner of unforeseen consequences. At the very least, the government must be dissolved immediately upon the adoption of a new written constitution, so that nobody could write themself a new rôle and walk into it: they would all have to stand for election all over again.

@ Brent Gardner

The lack of typing in JavaScript is not the problem. The problem is the use of one operator to mean two very different things, viz. the "+" sign for numeric addition and string concatenation.

This was fine in BASIC, because BASIC distinguishes numeric variables from string variables -- any attempt to add a string and a number without making proper use of STR$ and VAL invariably results in a type mismatch error.

PHP takes the opposite approach: numbers and strings are the same type, and distinct operators are used for distinct operations. The + sign *only* means addition: it converts whatever it sees to a number first, then adds. String concatenation uses a different operator: the dot. This is also the fraction delimiter, of course; but you're sufficiently unlikely ever to want to concatenate numeric constants that having to type an extra space either side of the dot is a small price to pay.

JavaScript goes and ballses it all up by using "+" both to add numbers and concatenate strings, despite these not actually being considered distinct types; so unless you're very careful, you can start finding out that 1 + 1 == 11.

Time for big-style reform

The concept of copyright originated at a time when the wherewithal to be a publisher was confined to a minority. Times have changed since then.

People do need to be rewarded for sharing their work with Society At Large, but perhaps a government-mandated temporary monopoly over its distribution is no longer the best way to accomplish this. This is the "unthinkable" we have to think.

Zune fulfils a need

Zune fulfils a need from Microsoft's point of view. They need a pit into which to dump money in order to place themselves in a lower tax bracket. Plausible Deniability for the fact that they are making money.

What I can't understand is why there was never a market glut of cheap cassette players styled to look something a bit like a scaled-up iPod .....

@roffey123

If you bury organic matter in a shallow landfill, it decays to methane -- which is 20 times more damaging in its unburned state than the carbon dioxide you would have got from burning it. You could try processing it via some sort of biological digestion, but Hess's Law says the energy you get out of it in the end will be the same, irrespective of the exact sequence of chemical reactions.

Consider also that every molecule of CO2 that comes from this plant -- and much of it will invariably be from plant or animal sources, hence originally from CO2 already in the atmosphere -- means one less molecule of CO2 from a fossil-fuel power plant somewhere else .....

Joke

It's a joke, but a sick one.

From their own site: "Media trials can be just as effective as court ones."

I see this as being a very clever attempt to point out the absurdity of the law; a bit like Howard Marks going into police stations with a lit bifter and demanding to be arrested (this was before the smoking ban; so nowadays he probably *would* be nicked, but not for the dope).

All those who are saying "it's illegal", it's a defence to any crime that committing it was the only way to prevent a greater crime.

Tards

If your birthday falls between July 23 and August 23, does that make you a leo-tard?

Probably a GOOD thing in the long run?

It says *something* that they had to rely on a Trojan Horse to deliver malware to a Mac.

If you don't want to pay for software, then that's fine -- you don't have to. But stick to Open Source, and then you know it will not do anything it shouldn't.

How it is the other side

KDE detects things like disk insertions and offers you the option to browse the files in Konqueror, burn a CD/DVD in K3B (if it detects a writable CD), automatically download photos or do nothing. It *doesn't* run random executables without your say-so.

Microsoft have gone out of their way to make everything easy for ordinary users, but in doing so they have also made it easy for those with less than honourable intentions.

It's just a shame that DOS never used an attribute bit to differentiate between executable and non-executable files, the way Unix always has. That alone would have saved much grief. The need to right-click on a freshly-downloaded file and enable it to be executed might just have saved a few computers.

Hmm

All this, of course, is a direct consequence of prohibition.

People inject heroin because it's the most efficient way of getting something precious and expensive into the bloodstream, they do it outdoors because they risk being evicted from their homes if they do it there, and they leave their used syringes lying around because ..... well, for the same reasons anybody leaves litter lying around, really.

Polypropylene (which is what syringe bodies are made from) has a higher melting point than germs can withstand, so they are actually recyclable. If some plastics factory offered a nominal financial reward for used syringes, the market would end up taking care of things .....

One way to find out

There is exactly one way to find out what software really does:

Read the Source Code.

How many times need anybody say this before somebody does something about it?

So what?

I've always thought that ISPs are missing out on a potential goldmine by not offering an advert-blocking service -- for a nominal fee, of course. Nobody likes advertisements, after all, otherwise VCRs wouldn't have fast-forward buttons; and it's riduculously easy to do, if you run a transparent proxy. No software required on the client end either, so it Just Works with all browsers and OSes. You request a page, and up it comes -- minus advertisements.

Heck, I'd gladly pay an extra £15 a month for advert-blocking -- if I hadn't already set up the exact same service myself on my own equipment, so not costing me anything.

@ John Young

Anybody who is stupid enough to try to steal *live* power cables probably is not smart enough to know what they're made of.

Warning icon, because they should have heeded (hed?) it.

Not a bad idea

This really is not a bad idea. Loyal Nokia customers probably already have a suitable charger kicking around (there seem to be about three Nokia chargers for every man, woman and child in the UK). Even those who haven't, probably use a computer from time to time. Modern batteries don't even need to be flattened completely before recharging, so there's less urgency.

@ Beard

If the nVidia driver was Open Source, then Ubuntu could customise it to match their system seamlessly.

As things stand, you're reliant on nVidia for drivers. And if they decide your graphics card is to old to bother with releasing a driver for it, you're shafted. Your elected representative may be able to help you.

And it's not going to go away

Part of the problem is that you can never make a building secure by screwing on a lock from the outside -- because it can be *un*screwed from the outside. You have to screw the lock on from the inside.

The other part of the problem is that the business activities going on in that building rely on all manner of tradespeople having access. Not only that but they have got used, over the years, to having full and unfettered access to the building -- and learned to take shortcuts through rooms to which they never really needed access. Although *most* of them are well-behaved and don't poke about in other people's drawers, anybody could wander in pretending to be on official business and wreak havoc. And *any* access restriction is going to affect people who have a legitimate reason to be there.

Across the way, meanwhile, is another building. This one had locks fitted properly from the inside ever since it first opened for business; and any tradesperson who needs access has to have their own key, which only opens doors they actually need to use in order to go about their legitimate business. Occasionally, someone in that building leaves something unlocked and a malicious interloper gets in. But that building's blueprints are available in the library for anyone to look at; and nine times out of ten, a problem will be spotted by some responsible person who will inform the management rather than exploit it for their own ends.

Microsoft and Adobe's Viral Marketing

If Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop had working anti-copying measures, so home and small business users lacked the option to use pirate copies of Office and Photoshop, then most users would *not* pay for Office and Photoshop, but would pay for an inexpensive, competing application. The amount of money in it for Microsoft and Adobe would not be much. (As a side-effect, there is almost no market for inexpensive closed-source applications which would compete with Office and Photoshop: those motivated by money will use pirate software, while those motivated by ideology will use Open Source.)

The fact of all those users using pirate copies of Office and Photoshop means they are familiar with Office and Photoshop. If Fred in the Shed has been using Cheap Office 2002 for years to write letters and organise his CD collection, then suddenly gets a job, he might point out to the company that Cheap Office 2002, or its 2009 incarnation, is entirely capable enough for his needs. And that is where Microsoft are potentially losing a sale.

If only more people would take the the Ernie Ball approach to dealing with the BSA .....

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

Simpsons Movie

Does this cover the naked Bart (and his disembodied todger) in The Simpsons Movie?

Medical vs DIY superglue

The medical version of superglue uses ethanol as a solvent. The stuff you get in pound stores uses methanol, which is poisonous in smaller doses than ethanol.

And no, the fact that it contains a cyano- group is not much to worry about, since it's already bound tightly to something. Just don't heat it.

Problem is moral absolutism

The problem can be summarised thus:

It's wrong to apply moral absolutes. Ever.

@ various

Mark: Photoshop is free-as-in-£0 as long as you know where to go. And Adobe aren't complaining. If some Fred-in-the-Shed learns to use a pirate copy of Photoshop (which is hardly a loss for Adobe, since he'd never have bought it at the full price; without the option of piracy, he'd have bought a legitimate copy of a cheaper alternative product instead), and then subsequently gets a job involving editing graphics, he's naturally going to want his employers to buy Photoshop. If Fred-in-the-Shed pays for some cheapo photo editor and then subsequently gets a job involving editing graphics, then he might be able to convince the company that what he's used to already is good enough for them and 1/10 the price of Adobe Photoshop. And *that* is a lost sale for Adobe.

@ Suburban Inmate:

Do not ever use a RAID controller (unless it's True Hadware RAID: the sort that plugs into an expansion slot, has space for a memory module, costs more than your motherboard and shows up as a single drive) as a RAID controller under Linux! This invariably requires the use of a proprietary, binary-only driver. Instead, use it as a normal interface for separate disks and use Linux's own native software RAID. Although all the hard work is done in userspace, this often runs *faster* than the proprietary, binary-only drivers in kernel space.

And as for homebrew drivers, I feel a couple of orders of magnitude more confident doing it when I have the Source Code available. Yes it's a pain and sometimes I feel like I'm just too old to be mucking about with this stuff, but there's nothing to beat the buzz from getting a piece of hardware to work against the will of the manufacturers and Microsoft. (See also my earlier posting about a strange way of learning French.)

@ andy o'rourke

The Apache web server (Free) runs 2/3 of the web sites on the Internet. Microsoft IIS runs just over half the others, and the slack is taken up mostly by direct and indirect (possibly Caged) descendants of Apache. By your logic, we'd be seeing fewer attacks against IIS than against Apache. But that isn't the case.

The fact is, Free software is better immune to attacks than Caged software, because it's more likely to be done properly -- the knowledge that other people are going to be reading your code have that effect.

(And by the way, I've a really simple idea that, if implemented, would make it impossible for worms and viruses to propagate. That is for every computer in the world to have a different instruction set and addressing schema, so code compiled for one machine won't run on any other machine. But the industry doesn't want that, otherwise they'd be out of a job.)

Easy way to avoid programming errors

The best way to ensure that the software you use is free from elementary programming errors is to read the Source Code. The second best way is to have someone else, independent of the original programmers and whom you trust, read the Source Code for you. (Which is exactly what happens when you use a Linux distro.)

If they won't show you the Source Code, decline politely and walk away. Be sure to let them see you count your money back into your pocket.

Please not Skype

I'm with MacRat. Skype is a terrible piece of caged proprietary software.

As long as it remains caged and proprietary, it will never be compatible with Asterisk, which is the Real World's favourite VoIP system *precisely because* it was released under the GPL. And as long as it remains caged and proprietary, it will remain terrible; for some of the terribleness springs directly from the cagedness.

On the other hand, I suppose if it keeps people from talking about bling, Kerry McFadden putting a new pillowcase on the bed in the spare room, their plans to binge-drink the weekend away, new trainers, and using the word "innit" on the Real World's VoIP systems, this incompatibility might actually not be such a bad thing.

Charges?

How can any charges possibly be brought in this case?

It was the girl's GRANDMOTHER, for crying out loud! Don't members of a family have some implied right to be together?

Beh

3600lb. and 3700lb. are the same thing, more or less -- it's most probably a rounding error.

The original figures in kg. would be much more enlightening.

Never trust any figures that aren't in proper measuring units, and especially don't trust figures with commas for thousand-separators.

OR a TV analogy (Mark)

If you can't PROVE you don't have a TV set, you are fined for watching TV without a licence.

Um. Wait a minute .....

@ AC

Try calling *my* line with your number withheld and see what you get!

It's the telephonical equivalent of wearing a mask and jumping on someone from behind, and the day it becomes illegal not to show your caller ID it can't come soon enough.

@ Charles

Prove it. No handwaving or weasel words. Show me some evidence of data being recovered from a modern hard disk drive after even just one overwrite. You can't, because it's never been done -- and it never will be.

The laws of physics say that data overwritten once is unrecoverable with the unmodified drive, and twice is unrecoverable with any fancy analogue electronics hooked up to the drive. (The graph of magnetic field vs current applied is a hysteresis loop, so there might be a difference between a 1 that was always a 1 and a 1 that used to be a 0 before; but a digital device deliberately uses the closed ends of the loop anyway, and is designed not to be able to see the difference. Two overwrites with complementary data ensure the drive is filled with 1s that used to be 0s and 0s that used to be 1s, so even using fancy analogue electronics won't tell you anything. And the shape of the loop means you can't see anything more than one overwrite ago.) Magnetic force microscopy, if you've actually studied the papers, is so technically unfeasible as to be a non-threat.

If The Authorities do indeed have methods of recovering data that has been overwritten multiple times, then they're ultimately getting it from somewhere other than the overwritten drive -- which nonetheless constitutes a useful blind to divert attention from the *real* "data recovery" methods employed.

You're also dead wrong about high-temperature incineration. You need only demagnetise it, either with a strong alternating field (the BBC used Weircliffe machines on their audio and video tapes) or by heating it to its Curie point.

But it's still overkill, and you're still depriving someone of a useful instrument.

WTF?

It has already been established that any "IP rights" that may be inherent in a photograph belong to the photographer, *not* the subject. A black mark to the University of Wales for bowing down to the whims and caprices of fools.