Duncan Mac-Vicar P. Web

Participating in a opensource community has lot of advantages, you get to know really cool people. You learn lot of new things but also strange anecdotes happen.
Some time ago I was talking with Will, and we both remembered one of the most funniest (now) things ever happened in #kopete irc channel.

We laughed a lot, until Will told me. I still have those logs somewhere . I said Really!

I think it is time to blog them.
April 3, probably 2003 or 2004. I was in Chile by then.

It was sleeping time for Europa. In the channel you can see Sean Egan, GAIM s lead developer, and myself. Until .

The following takes place between 5 am and 6 am Events ocur in real time.
Today, I visited the Yahoo Music Store. Found some artists I like (I already have the album but I was just trying it.

.) I clicked buy, and oh, I can t see what the popup says because it is displayed behind the advertisement. Ok, I can t buy music here.

Close the window.
I have been searching for long time a nice way to buy legal music, because I just don t buy CDs anymore. The online stores I have found:

Are from russia, and other countries claim music bought there is ilegal.

You get files with DRM, so when you want to move your files, backup them, carry them on a device, etc, you can t.

You get files in proprietary formats.

The store decides which player you use.

Any Linux user has tried ? Any experiences? Which other systems do exists?

independant music?
I support of copyright. I do think people should pay for the media they want to see.

But I do think the topic is manipulated:

against peer to peer technologies, by the recording industry, whose managers has been sleeping in terms of innovation and did not see the digital age coming.

RIAA using every trick that the law allows to spread fear, at the expenses of, sometimes, innocent people.

, technology that tries to control what you can play or not.

As every technology has problems, sometimes you will find yourself not being able to play stuff you own.

Artists still the forgotten part of the story.

Conclusion, today, the whole system sucks.

To educate yourself about the topic, some interesting readings:
Napster 2.0 and many services like it provide celestial music jukeboxes, but you d better bring a sack of quarters. Using DRM, they charge extra for many traditionally free uses of your music.

For a monthly subscription fee, the Napster Unlimited music rental service offers you the ability to stream and download as much as you like from its entire catalog. If you miss a monthly payment, the DRM renders the downloaded music unplayable.
Even while your subscription lasts, however, the DRM ensures that you don t get to use the music any way you want.

Want to move your music to a portable player? That ll be an extra five bucks per month for Napster To Go — and you ll still only be able to play it using software or devices licensed to play WMA-protected subscription content, which excludes the iPod and most other portable players. How about burning a song to CD?

Napster s DRM requires you to cough up 99 cents more. What if you want to copy music to more than three computers? Pay another monthly subscription fee, or 99 cents per song.

And what if you want to mix a song snippet with a home movie? Forget it—the DRM forbids that entirely.
Anyone with a good suggestion for a usable blogging tool that also allows adding pictures without clicking hundreds of buttons for each?

This and the fact that some features of the crappy web frontend of Blogger did not work at all were the reasons I did not post recently and why I will make all this here less frequent and shorter.
I use the Firefox addon which is started with a click in Firefox status bar. Is simple, can be configured for multiple blogs, supports WYSIWYG editing (I have that disabled, as I use in my blog), and supports adding images either by url or uploading them to ftp.

Give it a try.
Linux Being an European threat to America [1], caused a disturbance among the GNU European community, as expressed in some European message boards . [2]
The article claimed that Linux was based on Marxist and Communist principles, as well as used by notorious terrorist Osama Bin Laden.

The article also claimed that the Operating System was extremely insecure and vulnerable to security exploits.
The site is a bit exagerated. The writing style is intentionaly intolerant and ignorant, using missinformation like facts and giving stupid and ignorant opinions about topic the writer has no idea about, like Linux.

It could be easily a satire. But as Einstein said:
So another website was created, , which tries to reveal the stupiness of every post in Shelley s blog. But now they report Tristan, one of the writers of Shelley s blog is threatening with suing.

Wait, wasn t it a satire?.
To be honest I dont t know.

I do think it is exagerated and obvious. Hackers are communists, Punks ans Gothics are satan fans. Linux is a treat to the USA economy.

Google is evil. Linux is stolen (from SCO) and ilegal code. Of course she does not know the 2 most important Linux companies are american.

She doesn t know also about the SCO case or the Linux source code license. An ignorant with opinion, that s the easy way to make the complete world angry, hehe.
Don t waste your time, man!

Seriously!
Shelley s blog is too exaggerated to be real. It is so obvious they make small little mistakes (like saying In Flames is a Finnish instead of a Swedish band) to provoke people so they vent all their anger.

Really, I think Shelley is 20 year old computer geek from Germany that listens to Heavy Metal and spits on the church who makes a laugh about people like you who take it all serious and start a critical blog about it. You are doing them a favor with this. I do not think that you are peeve in Shelley s eyes which is probably your intention.

Reaction like yours is exactly what they are seeking for.
Do you really think she would have allowed a link in her comments if this wasn t all a fake? When I first read Shelley s blog I was just like you.

I was about to start in which I would tell her that she is nothin but a stupid bi***. I did some research and found there is another Shelley at http://shelleytherepublican.blogspot.

com/ who is stupid Republican as well but who is less provoking. I guess this Shelley is the Original, the one you are complaining about is a parody, it is irony.
It is up to you what you do in your leasure time but just consider my words for a moment.

Don t belive these people who say it s a satire I ve been doing some research too and Shelley is on all kind of serious Republican web rings.
She even has a GOP site: http://shelley.gop.

com/ and appears to be on the Republican National Committee: http://www.gop.com/Blog/BlogProfile.

aspx?nickname=shelley
Just because her opinions are unpalatable, that doesn t mean that they aren t real. And just because they get facts wrong that doesn t mean they aren t in earnest.

i mean, look at George Bush. When has he ever got his research right, but we take him serious enough.
So, what is this?

However I wanted to mix my old KDE blog, with this one, and provide feeds to planet-like aggregators based on categories. Yes, I don t like the idea of my weekend photos to appear in a tech-aggregator. And blogger does not yet support categories, and every day it seems to suck more.

After playing with wordpress and the plugin, it became confortable enough to switch. And with the help of I found in the net I was able to convert most pages to the simplistic markdown. I was sick of using html to write posts.

Not because WYSIWYG editor are not good, but I want to store my posts in a more human readable format.
Let s see how it goes.
It has been long time since I blogged.

Mostly because I was not at home and when I was I did not feel like doing something in the computer other than listening music.
I had to do a quick visit to the States because work, and then my brother came from Paris to my place to spend Christmas together. I showed him Nürnberg and then quick trips to Prag (my 2nd time, and the third is coming ) and Berlin for new year.

I got a . The cool thing is that it can play and also works as a standard usb-storage device.
It has its problem though.

Like most player, the jukebox database is completely proprietary. Emailing the company did not work as it was a rebranded product. Emailing the original makers resulted only in getting ignored.

After playing with for a while I was able to figure the simple fixed field length format of the binary database. I wrote a test program using Qt and Taglib (thanks Scott, it rocks, so simple ) to recreate the database for my collection. I haven t however yet figured the index files.

Also, I have no idea how to read the FAT short names so I have to mount has VFAT to copy and keep the nice names, but as MSDOS to generate the database and see the shortnames the player stores in the database. Once I figure out the indexes, it should work. If it does, I plan to write an media device plugin (no idea how to resolve the mount issue here).