allofmp3.com
A lot of news sites is covering allofmp3.com's 1Mb / 1 US cent download service. I subscribed and spent $10 and have been happily downloading music since. They are suffering under a bit of load with lots of server busy messages, but it's understandable given the attention they are receiving.
The story was first carried by the Sydney Morning Herald who spoke to a legal type that had the following to say:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?" Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."
First thing I got was the Wolfsheim that I had issues with earlier followed by some rare Einsturzende Neubauten that I am finding hard to even find in the usual basements in Camden.
The quality is great, they keep the files in WAV format on their servers and you get to choose mp3, mp4, ogg or wma and the desired bitrate. Higher bitrate = bigger files = pay more. This means you get to wait a bit for your downloads to be ready, but you can easily feed it into wget or something like that to fetch once they notify you by email its all ready for the taking.
Here's hoping it lasts.
MS Security Alerts via RSS
Microsoft is getting into the RSS thing it seems, they are providing a feed with their latest security alerts, you can subscribe to it here.
Forced into piracy by Wolfsheim
I purchased the Casting Shadows CD by Wolfsheim. I did not look at it properly in the shop and it turns out its a copy protected CD.
I never listen to my CDs directly, I rip them as soon as I can and then put them away for save keeping, listening to the MP3s on my iPod or Laptop via the radio if I have to. I don't pirate music all my MP3s are from CDs I actually own and I don't share any music.
Now with this Wolfsheim CD I had no choice but to resort to asking someone to look on P2P networks for me since it does not work in my PC and for most does not work in my 1999 Sony Surround system. He found an excellent 192k bit rate copy, now at least I can listen to the music I bought the way I want. I do not know how a small band like Wolfsheim (they are big in Germany) would sell out to the big record labels like this but it is definately giving me second thoughts about buying any more music of theirs and I am now definately not going to the live show that is here next month.
Nikkor 70-300 G Lens
I purchased a Nikkor 70-300mm G lens for my D70 this week. I have never had a zoom lens before and was not sure if I would use it much so I opted for the cheapest on the market - £115 - once I know I like it I will get the real thing.
I was not expecting much from the lens since the usual know-it-all's on the forums were having nothing but bad to say about its clarity around the 300mm mark, well I am glad to say I am absolutely very happy with the lens.
It does fantastic long distance shots which in combination with my 18-70mm gives me an amasing 16x magnification, it also does great with the kinds of shots where the background needs to be distorted.
Click on the image for some more flower shots which demonstrate the depth of field you get out of a long lens nicely.
Distributed referer log spamming?
I always look at my web server logs, I find the various log spammers, bots and RSS readers really interesting. About a week ago I noticed a lot of log spamming all in a short period of time and thought something must be going on but waited till it happened again.
Today again I got 5 log spam attempts in a very short interval from different IP addresses. As this is the 2nd time this happens I can only imagine this is 5 machines that is acting in a coordinated fashion.
64.69.172.9 - - [16/Apr/2004:15:29:46 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 32759 "http://www.nudecelebblogs.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
201.128.123.11 - - [16/Apr/2004:15:33:09 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 32759 "http://paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
212.163.30.100 - - [16/Apr/2004:15:34:15 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 32759 "http://www.shatteredreality.net" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
217.219.165.3 - - [16/Apr/2004:15:34:46 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 32861 "http://britneyspearsnude.blogspot.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
80.58.35.46 - - [16/Apr/2004:15:37:23 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 32759 "http://www.amateurxpass.com" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
The IP addresses are in US, MX, ES, IR and ES and interestingly enough have exactly the same user agent. 2 of the machines are running mail servers and may also be NAT/Masquarading machines I am guessing.
Eitherway, I think someone is controlling a bunch of bot machines and using them to spam logs. I wonder if I contact the hosting companies of these sites if they will shut them down?
Sauce Reader
I previously mentioned moving from Newzcrawler to Sharpreader as a desktop aggregator. Again I am getting a bit annoyed at the lack of development pace of Sharpreader and minimal improvements that has been made between most recent releases.
Lockergnome mentioned a new release of Saucereader and I checked it out.
It is very nice looking indeed with a modern interface, supports importing OPML files and has most of the bells and whistles you would want. I really like it and would switch to it permenantly once the following has been addressed:
- More keybindings - there is no simple way to move to the next unread item, the interface is a nightmare for people who do not like using their mice such as myself. My wrists are buggered, using a mouse hurts - using this software hurts a lot. Keybindings for opening in a new window etc would also be useful.
- Visual indication of new items arriving - something like a baloon popup but it has to be configurable, sharpreader has a rediculous baloon that takes loads of CPU.
- Abiltiy not to use IE as the browser, IE does not have proper ad blocking and so forth, I really do not wish to use it.
- Configurable actions on items - at the moment clicking on a item shows the RSS feed values of it, double clicking opens it in IE inside the reader, this isn't nice at all. I like double clicking to open on a external browser such as firefox where I can catch up on all my sites and open interesting things in different tabs then later on go and read each opened tab.
- More sorting options for the display - I would like to sort new items on top no matter what the date in them says. Maybe I just have not found the right toggle or click since their page sorting does seem rather powerfull, I will keep fiddling this.
Most of these concerns/wishes has been mentioned on their support forum and I could tolerate most of these problems except the first one. I will not use a overly-mouse intensive program. Once that is fixed I will use this as my aggregator, for now I will have to go back to the old Sharpreader.
w.bloggar
Previously I mentioned that I am using Zempt to do my posting to my blog. Unfortunately development on the Zempt front has gone pretty much dead, in fact the domain was being domain squatted for a time so I have been looking for a replacement.
Today I found it in w.bloggar which is a very nice looking posting tool for a number of weblogs that I can recommend to anyone who does not like the web based posting tool restrictions.
Neat Image noise reduction software
Noise in photos is a fact of life, you cannot avoid it. Thankfully there are good post processing tools available today and also the cameras themselves has improved significantly in this area by improving the optics and CCD and also by having powerful in-camera noise reduction software.
For those who aren't fortunate enough to have a good enough camera that produce noise free images there are other options like post processing. The current package that is best for removing noise is Neat Image.
Traditionally to take photos in low light situation you would buy a "fast" film, a film with a high ISO rating. Digital cameras has a similar concept but is executed by amplifying the signals coming from the CCD, in both cases the advantage is slow shutter speed in low light with the draw back of more noise the higher the ISO rating.
My Nikon D70 has a Auto ISO setting where you instruct the camera the slowest shutter speed you want and it will manipulate the ISO according to the image you want to take, this is useful if you do not have a tripod or do not have time to set up a tripod but need to get the shots in low light. I fiddled with this once and noticed that on highest ISO ratings the noise was just too much to my liking but I am however keen to see this function become usable for some cases where I want to use the camera and so noise reduction is key.
I took a sample shot in my flat now with the D70 at ISO 1600, the room was nearly dark only a small desk lamp on the furthest corner from me, I would usually consider the shot to be impossible to do with hand holding due to the long shutter speed, but the ISO makes it trivial. I then fed the resulting image through Neat Image using their provided noise profile for the Nikon D70 and the results are amazing. I am including two 100% crops from the images as examples. View the extended entry for larger full scene examples.
Keep in mind the room was very dark, I can just about make out that writing with the naked eye in the same conditions, the noise removal obviously comes at a bit of a price, but neat image also has an excellent sharpening tool and if you view the full images you will see the improvement this has done. I will definately go try the Auto ISO again this weekend!
Personalised Google
Someone on IRC mentioned that Google Labs has released a new service that personalised Google results based on your own preference. It is called Google Personalized and it roqs.
You start by telling it your preferences, basic categories that interests you, this gets saved as a cookie on your machine. Thereafter searches that you do default to no personalization but it has a nifty sliding bar for level of personalization which changes the results accordingly.
I did a simple test by choosing only an interest in Open Source and then did a search on Windows, you can see the results pre and post filtering in the following screenshots.
click on the images for bigger versions.
Kudos to Google for this, if this is a sign of things to come I am very impressed. I can only hope that Google will eventually allow us to filter our searches using something like regular expressions, there are a few domains that I never want to see in a search result.
Spymac offering 1Gig free mail.
After recent announcements from Google about GMail a small fry company in the web email business announced that they are offering 1Gb email to all current and new subscribers.
The company in question is Spymac for your free membership you get:
1Gb Email space
250Mb photo hosting
100Mb web space
Blog and Forums
WebDAV access to all your files
FTP Access to all your files
iCal hosting
You can read more about it here. Thanks for BoingBoing for the mention of this. I will try it out soon!
UPDATE: I tried it out, read the extended entry for my experience.
Links
- @ripienaar
- Flashpolicyd
- Flickr
- London DevOps Group
- MCollective Plugins
- R.I.Pienaar
- Ruby PDNS
- The Marionette Collective
- Wiki
Tweets
- Dante's Ingerno is a fun game
- DC visit done. Puppetmaster now has 4GB ram. What a PITA. Time to have good look at masterless operation
- Nice. Some aws ip trying to abuse my dev asterisk machine. Don't see many spammers/scammers using ec2 yet but clearly just a matter of time
- Sent a bug report about broken ruby stomp gem in 1.1.4, hopefully this mail does not fall on deaf ears like previous ones :( #activemq
- Damn you apple for inviting me to reserve an iPad when I do not live in the states and so cannot.
- Blog Post: New release of my Puppet Concat tool with 0.24.8+ support http://bit.ly/aA9RYh #puppet
- French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD http://bit.ly/9r2307
- It's ironic how you cannot send email with google charts api images to gmail users and expect it to work. way to go.
- Google charting API really is very sexy
- High Scalability: Saying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra at Digg http://bit.ly/9Kli5f
Reading
Planned books:
- The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner
- Relentless by Dean Koontz
- Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
- The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois
- The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Current books:
-
Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett
Recent books:
- Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to Get the Most Out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Schulz
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
Categories
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