Welcome To The Machine

Looking for concert tix at Ticketmaster tonight, I got to talking about reCaptcha w/ SWMNBN, and found this video. Take a look.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

In related news (or lack thereof), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has not yet been picked up for a second season. C'mon, FOX, surely Summer Glau beating people up trumps another *freakin'* season of Family Guy or American Dad??

Submitted for your consideration

On the plane to and from EclipseCON, I had the opportunity to watch a couple of episodes of Dexter -- kudos to Air Canada's new inflight a/v system. I was immediately hooked. At the end of the following episode, I saw this interesting juxtaposition:

Still from Dexter S01E04 end credits.

Considering the moralizing tone of the show, I find it intriguing that one of the Bush family is being personally thanked for assisting get this show on the air.

After all, it's all about deception, wearing masks, and using people to further your goals.

Video Codecs & Unpacking Script

BitTorrent a lot?

Annoyed at always having to unrar, move the resulting video file, then move the source folder out of your incoming folder and into your 'ready to be deleted when share ratio is > 1' folder? (I use > 3.) I am. Here's a quick unpack script for doing the above in one simple command. Works with foo.rar and foo.part01.rar as the input file.

Secondly, do you find sometimes you can't play the videos you've downloaded? Or you try to share them with someone, and they work great for you but that someone can't play them? Here's a quick list of places to get a/v codecs/players for Windows. You may not need all of these, but if you can't play audio or video, try these. As always, YMMV.

1. Install updated Windows Media Player & DivX Codec/Player Bundle
2. Install codecs from c|net: [1], [2], [3] and Nimo

For linux users (*ubuntu, debian, etc.) see these walkthroughs for installing libdvdcss and w32codecs: [1], [2], [3].

The Pirate Bay files charges against media companies

I just had to reproduce this in its entirety because it's so cool to see TPB once again fighting the good fight against the media giants for their illegal activities online:

Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.

The companies that are being reported are the following:

• Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
• Emi Music Sweden AB
• Universal Music Group Sweden AB
• Universal Pictures Nordic AB
• Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Atari Nordic AB
• Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
• Ubisoft Sweden AB
• Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

Stay tuned for updates. -- TPB blog, 2007/09/21

Blogged with Flock

Only 34 shopping days left!

Well, TV Turn Off Week is almost over, and as the weekend draws near and part two of Doctor Who (2005) "The Daleks Take Manhattan" readies itself to be ripped and shared across the internet (thank you, TPB!), it's time once again to remind all ya'll to get out and vote for the Java Developer's Journal 2007 Reader's Choice Awards. Yes, I said 'all ya'll'. I've been taking some online classes in Southern as a Second Language at the Hacker T. Tech Public School.

EMF sits firmly as the #3 Java Modeling Tool, and though it briefly enjoyed the #1 Java Component spot, it's now down by a mere 9 votes. C'mon, people, we can win this!