Archive for January, 2004
Skyscape
Monday, January 19th, 2004Jesux
Monday, January 19th, 2004Fantastic. A Linux distribution designed for Christians. My personal highlights from the feature list:
- Special hack of emacs “M-x doctor” mode, “M-x pastor”
- Optionally disable logins on Sunday, the day of rest
- Login screen has full text to Lord’s Prayer
- bash(1) is default. The “Bourne-Again” shell is already the default; but we like the shell, and we love the name :)
Fireworks
Sunday, January 18th, 2004
Now the fireworks in me are all gone
It’s time I realised:
My girl, you make all the smart moves
And you see through all my wrongs
When the fireworks in me were all wrong
Well then I realised:
I don’t need convincing
I’ve seen enough to want to try and change things
You fell in love, I fell in line
I thought I’d found my place
Before I knew how much it costs to play it safe
Could I leave you?
I never let you down.
- D McNamara
Screw You, EMI
Sunday, January 18th, 2004Last year, I bought the latest Radiohead album, Hail To The Thief. Last week, I decided I wanted to be able to listen to it on my laptop whilst at work.
Personally, I would classify being able to do that as “fair use”.
However, EMI in their infinite wisdom have “copy-protected” the disc. Of course, by “copy-protected” I really mean “corrupted”. Some digging on Google revealed that the corruption mechanism used by EMI is known as “Copy Control” and is produced by a company called Macrovision. More digging revealed that this is apparently one of the more difficult protections to crack (i.e. it can’t be foiled by “holding down Shift when inserting the CD”, or “applying some judicious felt-tip pen to the disc”). Basically, if you have one of these discs, it’s pretty much a lottery as to whether or not you can rip it, depending on your CD drive.
I have three CD drives – one in my laptop (which steadfastly ignored the disc) and two in my desktop. Of the two in my desktop one is an old 48x CD-ROM drive which made worrying noises when I inserted the disc, and the other is a Ricoh DVD-CDRW combo drive.
I was lucky. Using CDex I was able to extract every track except the first one to WAV using my RICOH drive. I then subsequently encoded the WAVs to MP3 using LAME.
The only problem was the first track. For some reason ripping it was never perfect, with varying amounts of jitter error on each attempt. My only guess is that EMI corrupted the first track more than the others to deter determined CD drives from reading the disc. Bastards.
The best rip I got doesn’t have the first 3 seconds and has a few pops at the end, but I guess it’s better than nothing.
So, EMI, screw you. It took a few hours, but I now have an almost perfect rip of the CD I bought with my own money.
If anyone else has experience defeating Macrovision protection on EMI discs I’d like to hear it. I can’t believe this corruption scheme is unbeatable…
I was bored
Friday, January 16th, 2004and I noticed that null.org.uk was available, so I registered it :-)
Will come in handy when I finally join the 21st century and get broadband…
What Price A Life?
Friday, January 16th, 2004Tom Hurndall’s mother has written about her feelings on the shooting of her son, and Israel’s continuing policies in Gaza and on the West Bank.
Ha
Thursday, January 15th, 2004Geek humour:
“The `#pragma’ command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, `#pragma’ first attempts to run the game `rogue’; if that fails, it tries to run the game `hack’; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue.” — Manual for the GNU C preprocessor for GNU CC 1.34.
Words Fail Me
Wednesday, January 14th, 2004Shot British peace activist dies.
I don’t know how I feel. Sad, angry, frustrated.
I hope Sophie and her family are coping – well, coping as well as you can in this situation. The only thing I can say with certainty is that (knowing Sophie) this will not be the end. If there is anyone who will fight for justice for Tom, it is Sophie and her family.
More details:
Vote Dean!
Wednesday, January 14th, 2004I admit that until recently I’d regarded the American scramble to the White House as largely uninteresting. Bush will probably get back in (thanks to finding Saddam in a hole), and the Democrats will slink off and get back to blaming all their problems on Ken Starr.
Well, that was my opinion until I read a recent speech given by Howard Dean, the front-runner as the Democrats head towards the caucuses and primaries. I’ll quote part of it here:
“In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way – by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices, and bringing out the worst in people.
They called it the “Southern Strategy,” and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like “racial quotas” and “welfare queens” to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America’s problems.
The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few. To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us….
In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one paycheck to the next. It’s time we had a new politics in America – a politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices. Because when white people and black people and brown people vote together, that’s when we make true progress in this country”
Wow. If this man means and does what he says, he *could* make a real difference.
So, any Americans out there – vote Dean!