Views on Life

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”
– George Orwell

Its a quote from Orwells bloody Scary 1984 and when reading the book it sounds far off. (Actually 1984 isnt all that scary, the scary part is seeing parts of it bleed into our world, from the acceptance of corporate doublespeak to the endless wars on anything – terrorism, drugs and the new, scary but highly fictitious cyberwar.) When first reading the book, I figured there is Too much information floating around, Too much redundancy. No chance of anyone ever being able to influence the global vat of knowledge in this world.

Such a shift in power isnt possible in a day, the people just wouldnt stand for it. And as always, this would have to happen gradually.. Though it does, in the end, still feel like SciFi even while I’m typing this.

Yet reading this Violet Blue article about people dicking around with her article archives sounds exactly like the start of what he was talking about.. Will the last one at SF-Gate / San Francisco Chronicle please turn out the lights

And it might merely be a single newspaper altering their own history; its a wake up call. The wikipedia isnt set in stone and the many separate repositories of knowledge around the interwebs arent even guaranteed to exist next year. We re moving our collective knowlege off the paper into the internet, trusting a plethora of instances with our past; and making the nightmarish image of the Ministry of Truth technically possible.

Another slippery slope, file it together with our rights, our privacy and yeah, why not freedom. And it sounds so much like paranoia; scifi.. yet to paraphrase Baudelaire – la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas! (source)

There, after spending a while figuring out why
if ( something.indexOf(select_groups[i]) == -1 ) {
threw an error; I was finally able to restore IE support. (poor misguided souls needn’t miss out on the Javascript goodies)

Apparently (Try to wrap your brain around this) the javascript version in IE doesnt support Array.indexOf()! All other browsers do, just not The Internet Explorer! (You can explore, but dont go in too far.) And I’m talking about IE8 here, not IE6..

More on that topic on this blog post “JavaScript Support and Array.indexOf in IE” (2008-08-13 – yes, 2008 and still its an issue!) The post also goes into the history; turning Mind boggling “WTF??” into “oh, MS is just being lazy”..

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to futtta’s post, I learnt that the add to any service was doing more than any of us bargained for and he kindly provided a way to fix the problem.

So I added the code to the relevant Wordpress plugin textbox and thats that. They could ve made that disable code a bit easier to read though..

var a2a_config = a2a_config || {};
a2a_config.no_3p = 1;

Hooray for the Opt-Out & thanks for the info!

Google Mail now has Buzz – More about that on http://buzz.google.com/

I have no clue if I want to use it. Though I AM curious.. Dont think it ll replace Identi.ca/Twitter soon.. So far I lack all connectivity with other crap. Im giving it a go though..

Time will tell..

The new technologies bring along a plethora of delightful new options for consumers to sample content. One of those new ways is the music samples some groups put online. A full track or even a full album to build the hype and allow people to sample the tracks and to persuade them to Go out and BUY their newest creative offspring. And we all love it. It works, its Awesome! Embrace Technology.

A pitty though is the fact that many of these fancy previews lack the least of security measures to keep the actual music safe. The previews are on sites with fancy flash based interfaces to enable people to play them from the browser without hassle and instead of building a decent degree of security into that player, some of them just take plain mp3 files from sites. Fully tagged Mp3s that ll just download to any location and Play. Want them? Go trough the source, click on the mp3 links and wait till the goodies have downloaded. You will have to rename the files to the correct names, but since the mp3 files are cleanly tagged, that wont be an issue – and you cant have it all ey.

In a time where a lot of cds are nearly unusable due to draconic DRM measures, where DVDs play only in certain regions and where you re getting fucked in the arse whenever you shell out hard earned money to enjoy music or a movie. (Dont get me started about the modern day Cinema experience!) Its unbelievable that the other end of the line is So under protected. Im not advocating for DRM here, but to be honest .. if I would have put those online, Id at least chosen a method with a bit more protection along the way.

And its not as if these dont exist.. Take the new Gorillaz site for example. Im a big fan of the Murdoc podcasts and I wouldnt mind listening to them in my car. Contrary to other online content, they go trough the effort of using a flash player (so far we re on the same road as the aforementioned) and having that player connect to a streaming server with a bit more protection to the whole, instead of just placing .mp3 download links in their source!!

Now, lets get down to brass tacks here. Talking as an IT and Security professional with a dose of real life common sense. Not everyone will read the source code to see if it contains usable links (im just curious like that) and then proceed to download those instead of just listening to them on the web site as it was initially intended. And as a second, a stream server isnt failsafe either. Take the time to figure out how it wants its url and how to piece it all together; open VLC and stream it to disk and you ve got the music too. And if you re not up to any of the above, you can take the radio style approach and just have some software record whatever your computer outputs. Or go Really low tech and just hang a mic in front of your speakers while playing them and record that. There is ALWAYS a way

All im saying is .. You cant at the same time screw up the cd I just bought to a degree where it wont play on my car radio; and at the same time put the mp3s in a clickable format in the webpage source, ready for free downloading for anyone who can right click a mouse.

That being said.. Thank you for the Music!

Yes Its that time a year again!

• And the list starts of Great with Jamie Lynn! She s hot!
• Ooooh Pornstar at 97 Kudos for Sasha!
• Auch! Angelina at 88! She deserves better
• Yes, Cate Blanchet belongs in the list!
• Jessica Simpson Meh.. I guess thats ok :s No, she belongs in the list, she s attractive..
• Woot! Eva Longoria!
• Nr Six Tricia Helfer belongs!
• Anne Hathaway, pretty woman.
• The list wouldnt be right without  Christina Hendricks after seeing her on Mad men!

First 50 past. Some weird ones (Rhiana???) in there, but the most important is that there were a lot of Really pretty women in there too..

• 49 is a full hit with Olivia Wilde! Hot damn!
• Grace park? Higher than Tricia??? Damn :s
• Kim Kardashian? Because of the Ks? Because I cant see another reason :s
• Emma Stone??? This is getting worse by the click
• Hooray, Save us, Salma Hayek (34)!! I was getting desperate. Its always good to be saved by Salma
• Mia Kunis at 32. Not my fav, but she s pretty I guess..
• Heidi! Heidi Klum still deserves nr 1, but I guess 28 is ok too.. Still, she deservers first place..
• Jessica Biel at 27.
• Malin Akerman at 26. She s pretty; she s cute. Pitty we havent seen more of her after Watchmen..
• Scarlett at 23. I just read the black dahlia. I d have definitely pegged her for a top 10 position. Getting scared about that top 10..

Again some people I wouldnt consider. but no shocking ones..

• Nathalie Portman (17)!
• Megan Fox at 11 (It says she “openly has a crush on House M.D. actress Olivia Wilde“, our nr 49.. Who doesnt )

Considering who passed the list so far, the top 10 HAS to be GORGEOUS! Im bracing for dissapointment..

Lets do the countdown..

• 10. Miranda Kerr – she looks 14 :/ Probably even is .. nope, vital stats say 1983! damn
• 9. Eva Mendes – Each year I repeat .. she belongs in the list, but not in the top 10 :/
• 8. Cheryl Cole – Who? Why :s
• 7. Penelope Cruz – Same as Eva Mendes.
• 6. Beyonce – ok, maybe
• 5.  Jessica Alba – Ok I guess..
• 4. Alessandra Ambrosio – No. Her mouth and nose look weird
• 3. Kate Beckinsale? Yes in the list, not the top10 for gods sake
• 2. Marisa Miller – Maybe in some photos, but generally no. And certainly not for the 2nd place. Puhleeaase!
• 1. Emanuelle Chriqui. I dont even know her. Bluh

Im starting to wonder who chooses the rating. Guess I should be happy that the prevailing taste is not mine, or whatever :s

Thats 2010. Another fine tradition, see you next year

Excited as a little kid on XMass, I went scouting the interwebs for the chrome presentation vid. Apparently its being streamed on some obscure site that offers .wmv and the other crappy format. I am speechless at the fact that I need to watch the new google os being announced on some stream that cant even handle the load its getting tonight. That for an OS by the company that owns Youtube??? I am amazed and appalled. Luckilly totem to the rescue and I can at least surpass the annoying resizing browser popup crap.

I have to admit, I had very low expectations for the chrome. But thats good. Amaze me, oh lil peoples in the crappy wmv stream.

Sadly, I am not impressed after the almost 80 minutes of Chrome info. There will be a lot of opinions, stirring over the web like a drunken man’s puke disturbing a peaceful puddle after a night of cheap booze. And needless to say this wont be my last chrome post either. Not today though, I need to take in the data and sleep on it. I doubt that I will wake up Impressed tomorrow.

One point that really struck me in the whole presentation and that set a certain tone to the whole project, is the fact that “[Chrome] will only be available on hardware that meets Google’s specifications.” (Hastilly mumbled, but afterwards confirmed by the interwebs) Thats what Apple does. Yes, the os will be open and I heard somewhere that its a stripped down linux kernel.. but still. People will not be able to download the compiled OS on a convienient install disk. They will have to get the specific hardware with the preinstalled chrome. And offcourse there will be a Cyanogen (Kudos to Cyanogen and all the other peeps for their massive Android efforts) type of guy who ll roll the chromeOS into a neat little ubuntu based ball as to offer it to everyone, but I was hoping that google would do that for us. As finally I hoped they would do for Android too. But they re not, they re going the other direction and taking the OS down that irksome road. I have a slight twinge of Angst rising to my throat. Like bile.

But as I said, I need to take the data in before I’ll be able to write anything meaningful. But I see a rather negative piece coming up about how the Google approaching their new software projects.

They re off to a bad start with ChromeOS as far as Im concerned. They left me unimpressed after the presentation and disappointed me with their hardware notice.

We re trying a Picture of the Day effort with some of the Open-Future peeps..

Post one picture each day. Of Anything.

* Take a picture using your phone. (No recycling, a fresh picture each day!)
* Post it to twitter/Identica
* Mention the #PictureOfTheDay tag in the message.

Picture of the Day

Feel free to join in!

Everyone posting Koalas on their blogs..

Who am I not to..

Mozilla Firefox has a Great plug-in (One amongst many) called Mobile Barcoder 0.2.0.

Its basically the solution for that moment when you find an article you want to read, but want to read it on your mobile instead of your laptop. But dont want to type that long URL. Simple solution.. Make a QR code out if it

Simple mouse over thingy, generates a QR on the go; scan it & walk away

Im looking to get some of that functionality on my blog, mouse over style. I might ‘ve found the right plugin, but have yet to test it..

Disclaimer: This is not a screenshot of my machine, screenshot courtesy of the plugin developer!