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I pay for a DVD and then waste loads . . . → Read More: Time is short. (Or why piracy is not the problem)]]> We are constantly being bombarded by claims that the music and film industries are being destroyed by rampant piracy eating away at their profits. This whole argument really annoys me, and partly because of the following really well illustrated point.

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I pay for a DVD and then waste loads of time being told not to pirate DVDs. If I had pirated the DVD, I wouldn’t have had to put up with all that.

So how does that fit with a title of “Time is short”? Well… You may have noticed that I did not write a single blog post last month – I haven’t had the time. I also haven’t had the time to go to the cinema, the last film I saw was the penultimate Harry Potter and it not only cost an arm and a leg, but a drink and some nibbles nearly cost me the other arm.

I also have not bought much music in a while – I haven’t heard much I particularly like on the radio, and haven’t really had time to go out looking for anything new, so just stuck with my iPod. If I did buy music, it would probably be a digital download for only a few pounds per album.

You might have guessed that I haven’t bought a DVD in a while – My lovefilm subscription gives me two DVDs a month to watch, and that keeps me busy enough with a little trashy tv.

I have bought a few X-Box games, and am likely to buy some more – Quite shocking really, as they are about £40 or £45 each. So that is eating up a lot of my time as I work my way through Crysis 2 (which is a truly awesome game) and try to resist handing over my wallet Portal 2.

I am also hacking away at Arduinos, rebuiling my media PC and hanging out on twitter and facebook. I wish I could say I even read some of my friends blog’s, but sadly the only items in my reader feed being read are lolcats, failblog, dilbert and xkcd.

As I have already said my blog barely gets updated as it is.

I bought a kindle a few months ago, and so have been reading a lot of books, which really is fantastic and of course consumes huge amounts of my time.

And next month (or possibly sooner) I will be a father, so that will take away all the free time I had for all the above activities!

So where am I supposed to find the time to watch all these films and DVDs that the industry says are being pirated? Piracy is not the problem – Crap films, high prices and, yes, time. They are what is causing me to spend less money on films and music. Instead I am spending more on games, books, gadgets, toys, and soon children.

The speed below will probably fluctuate (a lot) over the next few days, but 36Mbit/s is pretty impressive:

Certainly an improvement from my previous Virgin broadband

See the official announcement for more

Particularly clever are The Mathematics Love Song which attempts to explain love using group theory (which I vaguely remember from my degree)

Amazing . . . → Read More: Amusing Mathematics videos]]> So while I am sat on the sofa, my wife is watching mathematics videos from http://mrbartonmaths.com/youtube.htm. There are some rather amusing and clever videos so have a look when you get a chance.

Particularly clever are The Mathematics Love Song which attempts to explain love using group theory (which I vaguely remember from my degree)

Amazing Maths trick that proves 1=2 is one I have seen many times before
(in case you wondered, the proof fails because it is invalid to divide by 0 [strictly speaking you get an undefined result], so the proof must have an initial restriciton of a != b at the beginning to be valid (and therefore does not prove 1=2))

James Blunt also sings his Triangle song for Sesame Street, which is rather odd to listen to.

Mathematical Pie is rather interesting too (yes, it is a mathematical cover of American Pie)

Of course you shouldn’t miss the Abbott and Costello maths which is phoenomenal

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

It looks really cool, and the realtime-editing would be very well suited to trying to draw up any form of document . . . → Read More: Cross-platform realtime collaborative editing]]> I recently stumbled across Gobby:

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

It looks really cool, and the realtime-editing would be very well suited to trying to draw up any form of document or source code at the same time when you will have too much activity for trying to use a code repository.

It is a shame Gobby does not have hooks builtin to allow loading code from a VCS or DVCS (that would be cool), but you can launch it headless on a server with an auto-save directory and then all connect in and start loading documents. There are times when I have wanted something like this, particularly when you are starting out a new piece of code and have several people wanting to get started right away. Once the pace dies down, it probably makes a lot of sense to move the file to your source code control system, but for that initial burst this looks like a fantastic tool

If you are on Wave, you can find me as “anton.piatek” on Wave

If you are not on Wave and want to have a . . . → Read More: Waving with Google]]> I have been playing with Google Wave for about a week, and while it is interesting I have not really had enough time with it to write up much here yet.

If you are on Wave, you can find me as “anton.piatek” on Wave

If you are not on Wave and want to have a play, I will give an invite to the first person that comments on this post asking for one (only one, so if there is already a comment asking then you are too late). Please fill in the email field in the comment box (which stays private) as I will send the invite there

For reference the previous test got 9Mb/s download and 0.49Mb/s upload. The old speed wasn’t too bad, but still wasn’t as good as Be . . . → Read More: Virgin broadband – not so fast!]]> I wrote a while ago about the speed of virgin broadband vs. Be but my internet has been feeling rather slow recently… So I decided to take another speed test.

For reference the previous test got 9Mb/s download and 0.49Mb/s upload. The old speed wasn’t too bad, but still wasn’t as good as Be provided.

Obviously this new one is slower – the question is why? this test was about the same time of day, and as luck would have it the same day of the week. Is July a quieter internet usage month that September? Or has my service just become over-subscribed?

I will certainly be thinking carefully when it comes to the end of my contract… as paying for 10mbit and getting 2.4 is hardly value for money…

So I signed up and the modem arrived two days later. I plug it in, trying to follow their instructions, phone them up . . . → Read More: Virgin Broadband and linux = pain]]> When I moved house in July, I decided to sign up for Virgin Broadband. Virgin was an obvious choice as they could connect me and have broadband available within about two days.

So I signed up and the modem arrived two days later. I plug it in, trying to follow their instructions, phone them up for activation and…. nothing happens. There is power on the modem, but the “link” light never comes up. After about an hour on the phone, they say they will open a tech request for it. The next day I get a call from Virigin (from India) asking if my modem is working. I explain that I am at work (as most people in the UK are between 9am-5pm) and will check when home – It was indeed working.

The next step, is to then register your connection with a computer, so I plug in my linux laptop and desperately try to make the web pages work. First it tells me I don’t have a new enough browser and unsupported OS. So I tell Konqueror to pretend it is some level of IE on windows. That works, and I am now declining offers of screensavers, setup exe’s and all sorts of downloads. Eventually it gets to a page that simply won’t load. There are several javascript errors popping up, so I wonder if I can see the addres in there. Stepping through the javascript in the debugger, over a invalid reference, and suddenly the next page loads – I am done!

I wish I had searched around first. Apparently there is a much simpler version of the website that does the basic job, without all the screensavers and browser checks:

“instead of doing what they tell you to do, you go to https://autoreg.autoregister.net/ you get prompted for whether you’re signing up for Broadband or Dialup, and on clicking Broadband, you’re lead through the sign-up procedure with no complaints about compatibility, and within 5 minutes he was online with his GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) system and Firefox browser.”

http://wiki.hands.com/chezfil/entry/virginmedia/

I decided to grab a copy and try it out.

I am very impressed with it so far. It is basic – lacking plugins, so no . . . → Read More: Google chrome on linux]]> A colleague from uni who now works for google wrote a brief post about google chrome, which has just been released for linux and he is working on it.

I decided to grab a copy and try it out.

I am very impressed with it so far. It is basic – lacking plugins, so no flash or java, the UI options are almost non-existent and apparently printing does not work. Despite being basic, I am really liking it.

Chrome is incredibly fast -not only do new windows and tabs open instantaneously (wheras firefox has a bit of a delay), but the contents of windows is rendered so much faster than in firefox. Even very complex javascipt sites (such as a few I use at work that are a real pain because of the large tables and lots of js) load so much faster. Using chrome makes me feel like my broadband has got faster – which is a little bit of an odd feeling.

The current release is a development build, so expect problems and crashes if you try it out – I for one will probably be seeing how much I can manage to use Chrome for, as the speed increase is fantastic!

It installed easily on Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Jaunty – 32 and 64 bit debs available

A quick google shows I am not alone:

So I decided to try it out…

iplayer security dialog - extremely bad! Why can't they get a digital signature for the download?

First I had trouble . . . → Read More: BCC releases iplayer desktop for linux]]> BBC recently announced that iplayer now supports downloads on windows an linux, in the form of iplayer desktop. You can get started on the iplayer labs page.

So I decided to try it out…

iplayer security dialog - extremely bad! Why can't they get a digital signature for the download?

First I had trouble upgrading flash – Installing it was easy, but I found I still had a flash 9 install listed in my about:plugins page. Following the Flash – MozillaZine Knowledge Base page helped me solved this (it turns out I had a flash 9 file in my ~/.mozilla/plugins folder)

Then it was time to install iplayer. First it installed Adobe AIR, which was simple enough. Then the iplayer desktop app installed inside AIR – the security dialog for this was particularly unappealing as it did not have any knowledge of the publisher, let alone a secure signature or certificate to assure me it was really BCC content I was installing

After that it was plain sailing – Top Gear started downloading straight away, and was done within minutes.

It plays great, works fullscreen (though my laptop can’t manage full screen well, I probably need to look at setting up 3d acceleration which I didnt do when I installed it ~2 years ago as the drivers were rubbish), and the volume still goes to 11 like the iplayer.

To get the two to play together, you need to turn off live commenting.

In my case, as my blog is . . . → Read More: WordPress, k2, openid]]> I use the k2 theme for this wordpress blog. I used to write my own, but k2 is much, much neater. I also use the openid plugin for wordpress. (I wrote about openid’s before)

To get the two to play together, you need to turn off live commenting.

In my case, as my blog is also my openid url (see this tutorial in delegating your open id if you want to use your blog or website as your openid url, and any provider), I had to add some code the the k2 style’s functions.php

add_action('wp_head', 'custom_header');

function custom_header () {
        ?>
        <link rel="openid.server" href="...openid provider url..."/>
        <link rel="openid.delegate" href="...openid provider url..."/>
        <?php
}

Now you have your own blog as your openid url, and your blog accepts openid’s for comments with the k2 theme

It is an absolute must read if you use Gmail

Today I played with getting it working under linux. The single click reverse vncserver part is still the same, . . . → Read More: Remote support for my family]]> Andy Piper write about Remote PC support for family members a while ago, and I remember playing with the single click reverse vnc, based on ultravnc. However I dont run windows often, so the idea died.

Today I played with getting it working under linux. The single click reverse vncserver part is still the same, but for the client I had three choices – Run a native vncviewer, which wouldnt support encryption, run the java ultravnc client which also does not support encryption, or get the ultravnc viewer working under Wine.

The third option was most enticing, as I want encryption working. Wine launches it fine, but getting the encryption to work was harder – fist make sure you have the version 1.16 of the MSR4C plugin, as the single click ultravnc builder uses that version. Then copy your encryption key and the plugin file to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program_Files/ultravnc/ so that when wine runs th program it finds them all in the right places. I then launch the viewer with wine (from within that dir to be sure everything finds the right files) as follows: wine vncviewer.exe -dsmplugin MSRC4Plugin.dsm -listen

Then all you have to do is set up your firewall, and of course customise your single click help executable

I tried it out – First I was annoyed by the “US only” thing at registration, so I said I was in the US. then I was frustrated by how . . . → Read More: Web based photoshop]]> So Adobe has released their web based photoshop. Its not a full photoshop (unsurprisingly) but it is free and available anywhere you have a browser.

I tried it out – First I was annoyed by the “US only” thing at registration, so I said I was in the US. then I was frustrated by how long the flash login box took to load up and then I found that I cannot import a single photo as it thinks they are all corrupted… I suspect it is because I am running Linux.

There is a brief review on Photojojo too, though they seemed to like it.

If you are looking for an online photo editor, its worth trying  picnik too

If you don’t know much about OpenId’s, . . . → Read More: OpenID]]> I noticed that Yahoo recently started offering OpenID authentication as part of a Yahoo account, this means you can now use your Yahoo Id or Flickr account to authenticate for comments on this blog. Of course I had to install the wordpress openid plugin to make that work.

If you don’t know much about OpenId’s, you may want to read more about them on OpenID.net. A quick summary is that an OpenID allows you to log in to sites that support OpenID but having one username and password on a OpenID server. You just put the address of your OpenID (which can be your own website) and the other website asks your OpenID server whether you have logged in.

If you don’t want to use Yahoo’s OpenID, you can use any OpenID provider (which is the point of OpenID) such as Blogger,Wordpress or even build your own OpenID provider just for you.

I decided to build my own, mostly for curiousity. I used phpMyId, which is about the simplest php script to install. Drop the 2 files in the right place, edit the files to create the username/password (you may need access to a command line linux box for this) and then you can log in. If you want to make your website be the address for an OpenID, you need to add some html to the header of the index page (called delegating your OpenID) but this is included in the instructions for phpMyId.

Once you have an OpenId, you will probably want to test it.