Brilliant post at the Republic of Geektronica

One of my favorite blogs is The Republic of Geektronica. The latest post is a great example of why this is so.

Go read it.

No more Sony CDs for me

I buy a lot of music. I've posted a few photos of a small part of my collection of CDs here. I'll note that in both photos, the CDs are two rows deep. This is in addition to over 1000 vinyl records, cassettes, and music DVDs. The point here is that the recording industry should be considering me as one of their best customers.

With that in mind, I'm making a pledge right now to never buy another CD from Sony BMG, or any future version of that corporation. This is tough, because Sony BMG owns the back catalog of a lot of my favorite artists -- Bruce Springsteen, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan. But I've decided that I now have had enough of their corporate contempt, and can find other places to satisfy my musical cravings.

If you haven't been following the tech news, you can catch up on it starting with this engadget.com entry. Short version: some Sony CDs automatically install software on computers when inserted in the CD-ROM drive; nasty, sneaky software that is as bad as any virus or spyware. Well, I don't need their product anymore. I'll be getting any new music from archive.org, where it's perfectly legal to download, copy to my hard disk, burn onto a CD, etc. And for the old favorites, why, I'm buying a new turntable.

UPDATE: Another link, this time pointing out that Sony's licensing of these not-really-CDs-anymore is quite alarming.

UPDATE: Wired columnist Dan Goodin goes even further, proposing a boycott of Sony. Sounds like a plan, because Sony is so far treating this as a PR gaffe, and still acts as though they did nothing wrong.

Tags: sony, rootkit, drm, boycott

Head Lemur's got copyright right

I just read a terrific opinion piece on copyright, that perfectly sums up my feelings on the topic. Rather than restate what's already been said so well, I'll just suggest that you click here and read the Head Lemur's post.

Usually, I hate blog entries that just point to other blog entries, but this deserves a wide audience.

Tags: copyright

NetFlix class action? OPT OUT!

Did you ever get one of those "official" letters saying that you may be entitled to something because of a class-action lawsuit? I hope by now it is starting to become common knowledge that this is the biggest con game going. If you don't believe me, check out the latest one, a suit against NetFlix. Pay particular attention to what you would get, what the initiator gets, and most importantly, what the lawyers get.

There's only one way for you and me to fight this lunacy. OPT OUT! Don't take the crappy little token they offer -- the five bucks or one month free or whatever. Take the time to send in the form that says to these bottom-feeders that they do not represent you or your interests. 'Cause they don't.

Tags: netflix, lawsuit, classaction

Slashdotting the Speaker

I've been an avid reader of Slashdot for years, but only occasionally submit a story to them. It does, however, always give me a 15-seconds-of-fame feeling when they pick my submission. That happened today, when I submitted an item about Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the House, starting his own blog. The story got picked up, and the comments started flying. Now, by Slashdot standards, this was small potatoes -- I've seen stories that generated thousands of comments. What didn't occur to me until I started reading the comments, though, was that I had just unleashed the Slashdot Effect on the unsuspecting Congressman.

Ah, well, it will be an good learning experience for him. I hope the server holds up okay.

As a follow-up to the prior post, I've been flipping back and forth between Flock and Firefox for a while. Flock has some nice features, but I lose Flash and GreaseMonkey when I'm in it. Also, I tried to post this entry with their built-in blogging, and it gave me a very Microsoft-like error message -- in other words, one that doesn't actually tell you what went wrong. Note to the Flock developers: More error information is better than less. Especially for a "Developer Preview".

Tags: slashdot, congress

Testing the Flock browser

I got an email today inviting me to test the "Developer Preview" of Flock, a new Mozilla-based web browser. The interesting thing about it is that it is designed to integrate with social bookmarking sites, blog sites, and other collaborative uses of the web. In fact, I'm writing this blog entry inside Flock's blog editor, as one of my initial tests. If you're reading this, the test worked.

If this is a new paragraph, it's worked even better.

I think I'll try running this in lieu of Firefox for a while, and see what my comfort level is. So far, for a pre-beta, it looks very, very promising.

Live365 radio from the command line

One of my passions is the music of Harry Nilsson. Luckily for me, one of the perks of the Internet Age is that finding others that share your passions is pretty easy. For Nilsson fans around the world, the website and mailing list run by Roger Smith has been the medium for that sharing. (Click on Harry's name above to see Roger's site.)

One of the longtime members of the NilssonWeb is Tom Westendorf, or "Old Tom" as he calls himself. Recently, Old Tom started a radio station on Live365.com, heavily featuring our Harry in the playlist. Naturally, I wanted to hear it. I couldn't, however, stand the idea of having to run a graphical client or a web browser in order to listen. I run Linux, after all, so I'm no stranger to the command line. Not to mention that we're talking about audio streaming here. There's no pictures, folks, so why should a GRAPHICAL User Interface be required?

This leads me to this episode's Scripting Pet Trick, which requires only two appications installed on your box: curl, an incredibly useful URL retriever, and mplayer, the best media player ever.

The trick here is to tell curl to remember the cookies it gets when browsing Live365, using the Unix 'cut' utility to pull information out of the cookie jar, and feeding that information into the URL for mplayer.

Other things to note: you have to register (free) with Live365.com, and get your userid and password, and fill them in at the top of the script. Obviously, this is not a secure way of handling things. I should probably have the script ask me the password every time. Also, you'll see that I had to yank the userid out of the session cookie value before passing it to mplayer. I'm also hard-coded to Tom's station here. You may want to browse Live365 for some other choices.

The script:

#! /bin/sh

USERID=useridgoeshere
PASSWD=passwordgoeshere

curl --cookie-jar curlcookies   --output curldump --location-trusted "http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/login.cgi?url=http://www.live365.com/index.live&membername=${USERID}&password=${PASSWD}"

SANE=`grep SaneID curlcookies | cut -f7`
SESS=`grep sessionid curlcookies | cut -f7 | sed s/${USERID}%3A//`

# Westendorf radio
STATION=326329

mplayer "http://www.live365.com/play/${STATION}?SaneID=${SANE}&membername=${USERID}&session=${SESS}"

Happy streaming! (Oh, and Tom? Nice playlist...)

Tags: live365, streaming, audio, linux, curl, mplayer, sh, nilsson