So Long, Sanity

As you can see with my WishList's update, I've already got Scarling.'s "So Long, Scarecrow" (the day before yesterday), and John 5's "Songs for Sanity".

On Scarling.'s release, I have to say I was really surprised, since this CD is quite different from "Sweet Heart Dealer". Which came out to be good: it's more mellow and less agreessive, has nothing of "Jack off Jill", and you don't get those aggressive voices I like in songs suck as "Black Horse, Riding Star" from the previous album, but you get a really more mature album: both technicly and lyricly. Darker then ever, this is a 5 starts album.

But then, we have Songs for Sanity. This album has 12 tracks of this awsome guitar player, John 5. If you are a guitar player or a guitar lover, stop reading this and go fetch this album. Now. Are you still here? This album has Steve Vai appearence. Yes, fanboy, go and fetch it. Now, for those not so "guitar-fans", this is a great album with a BIG MISTAKE. OK, John 5 does lot's of appearences in lot's of other bands CD's, he has his own rock band (Loser, which I don't like), and still this "John 5" projecto, where he puts all his music he does by himself: his one-man-band. So far so good, and I realise that this is lot's of work already, but the big mistake he does is to have one "one-man-band" instead of two. Because you have two albums in one in the "Songs for Sanity": an heavy metal album, with 7 tracks (1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 11, 12) and one non-metal album with 5 tracks (the others). Which makes a non-guitar fan think seriously before buying the album (or not). I really think that Songs of Sanity Metal tracks are awsome, and I would buy the 7-songs CD by itself, but I just don't like the other five tracks. And I'm sure there are people out there with the opposite oppinion. Worse, if the next album comes in the same vein, I won't buy it without listening to all of it. I would rather that that seven tracks in one CD that have all these: making me skip some tracks is the same as making me listen to this CD fewer times than I would if I was only getting the seven metal tracks.

Well, and now that I've ranted about my new musical aquisitions, I'll stop and start eagering for the new Mindless Self Indulgence CD, which import is already in Lisbon, so I guess I'll have it soon...

Coding and Drugs

Here's a funny and great article about the effects of several drugs in your coding. This article compares simple "coding" with "coding under caffeine", "coding under nicottine", "coding under alcohol", "coding under THC (cannabis and such)" and "coding in a non-stressful enviroment with a good night of sleep". I agree with his results, but most of the times you can't control your coding enviroment and having good nights of sleep isn't geeky at all... So I continue to think that one coffee every 4 hours is perfect. Now, I just have to reduce my caffeine dosis...

Robin

Robin is a "Remote Operating System Built in Netscape"... Completely in XUL, this is quite awsome!

Planet to have a release candidate

I'm happy to see that Planet is going to have a release candidate real soon, specially because the so-called "nightly snapshot" is from the 1st of October, 2004...

Fixing Planet

Erich: with python 2.3 it still happens... Anyway, thanks for the fix (I've just applied it on Planet Noori)... I've also sent an e-mail to Planet's Mailing List talking about the issue...

Regarding <br />, W3C tells that nowadays all tags must be closed, so <br > just isn't valid HTML.

NecroSlaughter

NecroSlaughter is the name of one of Devastator's band, being the other two Mordor (a metal band where I am singer and drummer) and ColdBlooded, a Black Metal band. NecroSlaughter doesn't have any releases yet, but, while Devastator is getting his way to get a singer and a drummer for this band, he already has some material that will be released in NecroSlaughter's first demo. I'm happy to be one of the three persons that have a pre-release version on two tracks and - wow - NecroSlaughter is already my favourite Death Metal band! If you're a Metal fan, keep tuned and check out for this upcoming band, because NecroSlaughter is really good!

Jack off Jill

I've just ordered Jack off Jill's complete discography (see my wishlist for details). Since Jack off Jill ended because of (between other things) they were sick of the record industry, I thought I wouldn't want to give money to the ones who made the band end, so I decided to get all their music illegally, which I did. Since Jessicka (Jack off Jill's singer) now has all the rights of their music, so the money will go to her and not to their old publisher, I'll be happy to have the original stuff, supporting Jessicka and her new band, Scarling..

Bashing (again) Sony

Still on Sony sucking real bad, seems that the rootkit is downloaded even if users reject the EULA...

Remember HackerNews?

Do you still rebember HackerNews? That were from L0pht? Those who made L0pht Crack? And then, do you remember L0pht being aquired by @stake?

Symantec recently acquired @stake, which is more bad news. And, to proove it, Symantec is now refusing to sell LC5 (the Windows password cracking tool, previously from @stake) to anyone outside of the USA and Canada, claiming new Homeland Security laws.

Read the full story here.

Fedora

[root@noori ~]# yum upgrade
Setting up Upgrade Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
No Packages marked for Update/Obsoletion

top - 15:01:34 up 17 days, 4:43, 20 users, load average: 0.01, 0.14, 0.34
2938 root 15 0 338m 295m 3656 S 5.0 29.5 343:55.51 X

[root@noori ~]# bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
343 / 24
14

So, it seems that I have my Fedora desktop machine all updated, with an uptime of 14 days for X. It's the bigger X uptime I've managed in a Fedora box so far, and it seems that it won't pass that, since:

• I can't open new apps using kdelibs
• Stuff that uses mozplugger crash mozilla
• This stuff was caused by several "yum upgrade"'s. It's easily fixed with an X reboot

The question is: what if I want to have a stable machine, without having to fucking restart my graphical enviroment every two fucking weeks?

Fucking morons...

PS -> Yes, if you're asking yourself, I'm an happy Debian user.

The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers

Alternet has an article describing the 14 worst corporate evildoers, and why. The list has:

1. Caterpillar
2. Chevron
3. Coca-Cola
4. Dow Chemical
5. DynCorp
6. Ford Motor Company
7. KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root): A Subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation
8. Lockheed Martin
9. Monsanto
10. Nestle USA
11. Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International (a.k.a. The Altria Group Inc.)
12. Pfizer
13. Suez-Lyonnaise Des Eaux (SLDE)
14. Wal-Mart

Planet Noori updated

Seems that Planeta Asterisco's RSS feed isn't easy parsable, so I've replaced that feed with WeBreakStuff's blog to Planet Noori.

Planet Noori

I've just created Planet Noori.

For those willing to know, Planet Noori is a news website that agregates news from a wide range of places, from this blog to Planet Debian.

I'm still only aggregating news from fifteen different sources, but if you like it and want me to add more sources, please tell me which ones and I'll add them... I still want to add some more myself.

Eminem Music Used As U.S. Torture Device?

A human rights group is alleging the United States operated a secret prison near Afghanistan's capital as recently as last year.

The group claims that music by Eminem and Dr. Dre were used as instruments of torture.

I think that this is just insane.

Dumb. dumb, DUMB!

The dumbest person, ever.

An alleged child porn offender in Germany turned himself in to the police after mistaking an e-mail he received from a computer worm for an official warning that he was under investigation, authorities said on Tuesday.

Of course that the "official warning" was the Sober worm...

Netvibes

Well, I still think that a Galaxy would be awsome, but since there's none, and because I don't have time to start creating my own Planet, I've started using this great Web 2.0 WebApp, NetVibes.

NetVibes is something like Google IG, except that it works woth all the feeds I wanted, unlike Google IG, and it has more configurability, more stuff you can do, and is more user friendly.

So, I've created a personalized webpage, setted it as my Mozilla's Home, and am now an happy user of it for my top 14 feeders. Unfortunately if I add more it would lack browseability, and I had more to add... Damn, I really ned to setup a Planet :-P

Spare time

Do you have:

• Some spare time


• a Flash enabled browser


• some headphones or any other type of sound system

?

Then, you need to click here... Laughing is healthy! :-)

PearLyrics: surprising good news

I told you earlier about PearLyrics, a program that grabs on the web the lyrics for the musics you're listening to, and how Warner/Chappell Music Limited made his developer cease to distribute and develop his program.

But now...

The goal of Warner/Chappell's prior letter to pearworks was to gain assurance that pearLyrics operated according to those principles. However, in both tone and substance, that letter was an inappropriate manner in which to convey that inquiry. Warner/Chappell apologizes to Walter Ritter and pearworks.

Our solution will adhere to our shared belief that songwriters must be fairly compensated for their work and that legitimate web sites with accurate lyrics must not be undermined by unlicensed web sites.

We look forward to working together, and to helping to advance the evolution of the music industry cooperatively for the benefit of consumers and artists alike.

This MIGHT be good news, PearLyrics MIGHT be able to be developed and freely distributed as it was. But this can be other things too, so let's wait and see... I'm slightly afraid that this will mean a better PearLyrics, but a non-free one. And that would really suck.

Thormentor

I've just noticed that Thormentor added a link from his blog to mine... Well, thanks! Thormentor is a good friend of mine, but now that I'm working and living in Lisbon, I don't spend much time with him,... But, Thormentor, I miss our polotical discussions! :-) And for the others, if you're Portuguese you might want to check out his blog, I like it as much as to bookmark it on my daily visits now...

Fuck Christmas

Fuck Christmas is a link you should visit, read, and learn. There's no much to comment on it, the plain truth is there... Here's a quote, but please read it all...

At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties “Terrorists” on national television and no one fires your ass? Enough. Fuck all of you lying little shitheads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up assholes — you’re the cowboys, not the fucking Indians.

[...]

Let’s back up even fucking further, shall we? Can anyone tell me how old Christmas is? Anyone? Two thousand years, give or take, right? Gee, who’s been reading their No Child Left Behind History Textbooks? Try fucking four thousand years. Huh. Twice as fucking long as your little baby king has been around. How could that possibly be, unless. . . waitaminute. . .

Christmas isn’t fucking Christian. Ok, now we’re talking.

That’s right, that Yuletide cheer you’re spreading? What exactly do you think Yule is? It's the fucking Pagan celebration of solstice. And those “Christmas” traditions? They’re not just like Pagan rituals, they fucking are Pagan rituals. Way before your Jesus got all magical with the bread and fishes, the Romans were celebrating the birth of Mithra on . . . guess? Go on – guess. December fucking twenty fifth. What a weird coincidence. Practically the whole thing is ripped off from the fucking Druids and the Romans. Twelve days? Check. Exchanging gifts? Check. Mistletoe? Check. And you’d better fucking believe that those decorated trees that Gibson and Co. are so bent out of shape over are as Pagan as the Rune and Crystal Shack at Pentagramfest 2005. You might as well be building miniature fucking Stonehenges in your den.

And don’t you read your own goddamn Bibles? Jesus was born when? In the middle of winter? Lot of Shepherds out watching their flocks around that time of year in Bethlehem? No, because they’d be freezing their fucking asses off. Tell you what – y’all go figure out which one of the different Bible stories about the birth of Baby Jesus® you want to believe, and then we’ll argue about whether it fucking happened like that or not.

Christians just stole a bunch of traditions from other cultures, slapped them together, stuck a fucking tinfoil star on top and called it the Most Important Holiday of the Year. Modern American Christmas makes Michael Jackson look positively organic.

But you boys at FOX still freak out every year about how everyone's out to get your special trees. This is really the most important thing you have to talk about? Whether Target says Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? Here’s a brainstorm: there’s a fucking war on. Our soldiers are out there dying while you guys do your 14th live feed of the day from WalMart to show us what good little consumers we are. What Would Jesus Do? He’d jump over that newsdesk and kick your ass for that shit. Are you sure you want to hang your journalism credentials on a story about what some guy calls a tree?

Well we’ve fucking had it. You want to play bullshit games and scream about how God’s fucking judgment is gonna come raining down on us if we don't start watching our vocabulary? Go right the fuck ahead. But let me clue you in on something: fire and brimstone ain’t no deterrent for us. We’re not going to hell, assholes, we’re fucking in hell. We live with you.

And fuck Easter too, you fertility–rite–celebrating, whiny, self-righteous, don’t–know–the– history–of–your–own–religion assholes. Fuck off.

Linux 2.6.15-rc6 is out

Linus announced 2.6.15-rc6, finally, and hopes that the final 2.6.15 is out still in 2005.

Unfortunately, this version still lacks the ACPI fix it needs...

2,000-year-old Mayan mural

They didn't want to believe in the old writtings, they said it was talling us religious myths, not history.

But now, an archaeologist stumbled on 2,000-year-old Mayan beautifull mural:

Quoting The Guardian:
The main nine-metre (30ft) wall of the mural shows the son of the Corn God creating the Mayan mythical and physical world. In one scene he offers up a fish and establishes the watery underworld, in another he sacrifices a deer and creates the earth. In a third he floats in the air holding out a turkey to make the sky, while in a fourth he is surrounded by the blooming flowers of paradise. Other sections depict the Corn God's birth, death and resurrection, and establish the principle of divine kingship with the Corn God crowning himself, and the first human king claiming his earthly crown from the surrounding deities.

"It's the equivalent for the Maya of the Biblical account of Genesis, but it's more than that because it provides a link between the gods of creation and the Maya kings," archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the find, told the Los Angeles Times.

Mr Saturno said he guessed the chamber may have functioned as a rehearsal room where Mayan kings could learn the mythology for public ceremonies. The discovery nearby of a royal burial site dated to 150BC fuels the idea that Maya civilisation evolved much earlier.

OpenDocument and Open XML

So, Microsoft thinks that having two standards to the same thing is better than having one. Sorry, but I totally disagree.

Having choice on implementations is good. But having more standards doesn't give you more choices nor competition: as a matter of fact it will only create "bad competition": you'll put competition between implementations, and the best implementation will choose the standard, which may not be the best implementation at all.

As denmarkw00t said, "what happens when two companies develope two pieces of software with identical functionality but one supports OpenStandardA and the other OpenStandardB? To the user, it appears to work and function the same, but then when said user moves from ProductA to ProductB or, lets say, sends a co-worker who uses ProductB an OpenStandardA document, what happens?"...

You should have several companies working on standards, yes, but have all them working for the same standard. And when one standard is considered a standard de facto, then everyone should be free to develop their implementation of that standard, and/or contribute for further versions of the standard. Now, that's valuable competition.

Google Music Search

Google has now another great feature, at least for me that I'm constantly looking for info on some bands (usually looking for the official website): Google Music Search. If you're looking for bands "revelant enough" to be possible that you're looking for a band, a simple query in Google will show you musical results in the begining of the query. If they're not, then you'll probably have to go to the Music Search. Until now, the only problem I've found is that still have a poor artists database, failing to recognize a string as the name of a band even in the title of the second result in a Google search is "string - string lyrics"...

Oh well, this is still great, and they claim that "we plan to expand it to classical music, worldwide artists, and lesser-known performers"... Let's wait and see.

PyGNUnet death and rebirth: FreeServices

So, the idea behing PyGNUnet was to create a set of libraries to make it easy for people to write net applications to run using GNUnet. Now, with the concept of FreeServices, that isn't needed anymore, since FreeServices is an application-independent solution without the need to modify existing protocols and software.

To know more about GNUnet read this, and to know more about FreeServices read this.

Well, this still leaves me with 13 software projects at hand...

Merankorii: Crash Promotion

So, next wednesday, in the Winter's Solistice (21st of December), the 2nd Merankorii's CD, Crash, is going to be released. To appraise you, reader of this site, here's a little promotion: the first ten orders that I recieve via e-mail of the CD will be freely distributed, and you only have to pay the shippent! Order NOW!

Starting at the 26th of December, the CD will be selled at "O Baú Encantado". a store located in "Lugar do Cerrado - Lamego".

I'm still looking for distributors and/or record companies, so if you're interested please contact me.

Portuguese Presidencial Elections (Part 2)

After thinking on whom to vote, I've noticed that pre-candidate Botelho Ribeiro is against the freedom of choice regarding abortion.

That said, I think I'll vote on Manuela Magno, if she gets to be a candidate.

Warner/Chappell Music Limited threats illegally

PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s.

Or was.

The developer said:

As of December 6th, 2005 pearLyrics is no longer available due to a cease and desist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited. As a freeware developer I can not afford to risk a law suit against such a big company, although personally I don't see where pearLyrics should infringe any copyrights handled by them. After all pearLyrics only searches and accesses publicly available websites, displays, and, at the users wish, caches its content. Something that can easily be done with any combination of search engine and webbrowser too. Well, but I'm just a developer and not a lawyer.

I understand him, really. He just don't want to be messed and scared by such idiotic big Co's. But, as for myself, I think that someone should grab the latest available version of it, check it's license, and, if compliant with it's license, fork it and let their users keep on using it.

Actualy, in having the time for it I would do it myself.

If those Warner fuckers mess with the forkers, they sould say something like "there's nothing illegal on redirecting webcontents, if you think that those lyrics shouldn't be publicly available, sue the website owners".

PERIOD.

EU adopts Big Brother directive, ignores industry and civil society

The European Parliament today adopted a directive that will create the largest monitoring database in the world, tracking all communications within the EU. "From today, all EU citizens are to be tracked and monitored like common criminals," says Pieter Hintjens, president of the FFII.

The Data Retention Directive was passed by 378 votes to 197, following deals between the Council and the leaders of the two largest parties in Parliament, the EPP-ED (Conservatives) and the PSE (Socialists). The Rapporteur for the directive, Alexander Alvaro (Liberals) had his name removed from the report in protest.

Jonas Maebe of the FFII says: "Among other harsh measures, the directive mandates recording of the source and destination of all emails you send and every call you make, and your location and movement during mobile phone calls. Additionally, the directive says nothing about who has to pay for all this logging, which will significantly distort the internal telecommunications market."

"Moreover, the directive disregards how Internet protocols work. For example, tracking Internet telephony calls is generally impossible without closely watching the content of all data packets. The reason is that such connections are not necessarily set up via a central server which can perform the necessary logging. On top of that you have techniques like tunneling (VPN's) which make it simply impossible to look at the content", he adds.

The gathered data can be made available without special warrants, and without limit to certain types of crime. There will be no independent evaluation, and no extra privacy and no specific security safeguards. The data will be retained for periods ranging from 6 months up to any duration a member state can convince the Commission of.

Hartmut Pilch of the FFII says: "This outcome proves that we have to remain vigilant at all times and work on every relevant directive from the start. Even now, the planned IPRED2 directive, also unanimously condemned by industry and civil society, threatens to turn everyone caught by a patent into a criminal."

Working to an European ISP, my hint is that this won't be implemented, at least not anytime soon. More than all the other stuff it was said about the issue, I wonder who will give ISP's the storage power needed to such a stupid directive.

If you want to know more about this, take a look at FFII's Press Release.

musicunited.org are LIARS

So, RIAA supports musicunited.org, one site making publicity against "piracy". I have nothing against fighting piracy, and even think that instructing people not to steal is a good thing. But being against p2p networks just because you might use it for illegal purposes is the same thing that telling that knifes are evil because you can use it to commit murder. And that's what they say: their site is full of lies like:

The unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is JUST AS ILLEGAL AS SHOPLIFTING A CD.

This is wrong: The unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is illegal because it's copyright infringement; shoplifting a CD is illigal because it's robbery. Those are two quite different kinds of infringements, with quite diferent penalties for the infractors.
But this isn't the worse that you can read there:

Burning CD’s from peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, Morpheus or Gnutella is against the law.

This is deadly false. If you download a Merankorii's CD from a P2P network and burn it, you're not commiting an illegality but making the artist more known, which he likes (and I assure it to you, since Merankorii is my musical project). OK, Merankorii's songs aren't copyrighted, so here's another example. In the same way, if you download from a P2P network this CD, which is copyrighted, you're doing what they want, and they'll enjoy it. OK, this time I didn't gave you music... So, you want copyrighted music? Well, if you download this copyrighted songs from ThanatoSchizO, or this copyrighted songs from Cranes from a P2P network and burn it, your're NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG.

They say

The rules are very simple. Unless you own the copyright, it’s not yours to distribute.

But I say: "You're full of bullshit and lying in an attemp to cause fear on music consumers, which should be what you wanted to treat well and not decieve, if you want them as your clients."

And I could say all this directly to them, but they're surely afraid of people like me, since they don't have their e-mail address on the website. Well, they would probably lie about it too, so...

Portuguese Presidencial Elections

On the next 22nd of January, we'll have Presidencial Elections on Portugal. Being a nonpartisan, I'm really tending to vote on Manuela Magno or Botelho Ribeiro. Until now, this are the only pre-candidats that I feel confortable about, but I haven't read enough to get a good oppinion about any of the two, nor to choose one of them. Oh, and both still lack all the signatures needed to present themselves as candidats.

Use KDE, not Gnome

Seems the the Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, shares the same oppinion on Gnome as myself: Gnome developers think their users are stupid, and, doing so, only stupid people will use Gnome knowing that.

Here is Linus oppinion... And, if you're somewhat confused about all this, you might want to read this message too.

libextractor 0.5.8 released

libextractor is a library used to extract meta-data from files of arbitrary type. It is designed to use helper-libraries to perform the actual extraction, and to be trivially extendable by linking against external extractors for additional file types.

Version 0.5.8 of libextractor has been released. This release fixes a security problem in the PDF extractor.

Selva updated

Selva, my Portuguese Talker, has been updated to PyTalker v0.1.5, which means that you can now register yourself there!

PyTalker v0.1.5 finally out

For those thinking that, because I've created Mamnuts, I wasn't interested in keeping the development of PyTalker... You were damn wrong.

Version 0.1.5 of PyTalker is out, and you should feel free to try it...

After several months of having the project stalled, it's maintainers have no real time to develop it but me, which am now the Project Leader, Main Coder and Website maintainer.

This release adds user registration and autentication. Passwords are stored in plaintext at the moment, but v0.1.6 will have them encrypted as they should be and a .password command to change the password. Keep on checking, because v0.1.6 won't take as long (I hope) to be released as this version was...

For those clueless about what's PyTalker, PyTalker is a free open-source implementation of a talker environment, in the command-driven style of NUTS, and written in Object-Oriented Python.

BTW, making this post made me be really surprised to see that Wikipedia's talker description was quite improoved, and it's now quite better than it was... Great job!

Fight against the Dystopic EU

As I talked about earlier, on the 13th of December (next Tuesday) the European Parliament will vote on a Data Retention Directive, which is completely stupid.

So, if you agree with me and want to know what can you do to fight against such a stupid directive, you may want to read the Open Rights Group suggestions.

Shove that EULA up your ass

First Sony wrote illegal software.
Then, Sony buldled illegal software with an illegal EULA, in illegal CD's.
Then, Sony sold you those CD's telling you that it was "art".
Then, Sony got their ass kicked.
Then, Sony told you "we'll fix it".

Here's what they call a fix:


Insert the CD and you'll read a quite fuckabulastic piece of shit EULA:

Please note that uninstalling from your computer the XCP software and associated content protection files loaded from an XCP-protected CD will NOT delete or affect your use of any audio files that you have previously transferred from an XCP-protected CD. Such files remain subject to the digital rights management rules in the End User License Agreement: namely that you may rip the audio into the secure formats provided on the disc, move these tracks to compatible portable devices, and make up to three copies of each track on to CD-Rs.

Please be advised that this program is protected by all applicable intellectual property and unfair competition laws, including patent, copyright and trade secret laws, and that all uses, including reverse engineering, in violation thereof are prohibited.

Sony: shove that EULA up your ass.

So, we'll uninstall the software, except we're not really giving you back control over your computer and if you try to understand what we're actually doing, technologically, you're in violation of a bunch of scary made-up lawyerese crap.

Oh, BTW, YOUR FUCKING PATCH HAS THE SAME VULNERABILITY AS THE FUCKING CD!

Sony: you suck.

One more security hole in Sony's DRM

So, it seems that Sony's DRM has one more security hole!

Bahing Micro$oft

WARNING: In this post I bash Micro$osft, since they suck, and, besides, they really really suck. Oh, they SO suck!

• Microsoft has pushed back the beta Test of their upcoming Internet Explorer 7, which was expected to be released today.


• The XBox 360 apparently has heat issues and is crashing a lot for some users.


• Microsoft is losing quite some money with each XBox 360 unit sold - they are aggressively trying to obtain market share.


• "Vista" was stripped of all the interesting features, apparently all that is left is a prettier UI with tons of effects (and requring a DirectX 9 capable graphics board).


• "Windows Live" and "Office Live" (which are neither Windows nor Office) don't live up to their names either: They are just web-based add-ons, even supporting Firefox, and offering pretty much the same as Yahoo and other portals do as well as an online version of SharePoint.


• The new office version of Microsoft fancies again mostly a new UI, that will be very different and probably confuse users a lot (especially if they have to alternate between office versions); Microsoft also has the reputation of breaking it's own file format again and again; the new office will use an incompatible file format again. The UI also doesn't help people to give their documents a more semantic meaning (for efficient processing by automatic tools such as desktop search engines), but will be more visually-oriented than ever (i.e. styles such as "headline" which do add a semantic meaning are degraded as "quick styles", whereas the bold- and underline buttons are more prominent than ever - good bye, corporate design!)


• The WiFi network at Microsoft is now powered by Linux

Thanks Eric.

On France wanting to ban OSS

If you are French and against the proposal of France banning Open Source Software, please sign this petition.

The world as you see it sucks when...

...most of your last posts are bitching about something.

So, yeah, the world as I see it sucks really bad.

OK Go criticizes DRM and Sony

I dodn't know OK Go, and now that I'm listening to them with their audio stream in their website, I don't really like their sound... But I surely like their points of view: New York Times has piece on them, where they say stuff like

The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. This is not just our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records and promptly shelve them; we need them to fall in love with our songs and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to your iPod is a record you're less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about.

Quite interesting reading.

Cellphone bug

OK, this is by far the worst bug I've found on my Motorola C650 cellphone.

I've already found some, but on the other hand I really like the phone, and Motorola phones in general. But this... this... I've just got mad. I really thought that my cell phone was broken. Hey, Motorola, IF I WANTED TO REBOOT MY FUCKING CELLPHONE, I WOULD BUY SOMETHING WITH WINDOWS! Damn you!

So, it seems that, with this cellphone, once your mobile phone has all messages memory completely full, it stops recieving messages. Now, since he tells you you have memory full, what do you do? Delete some messages until the memory is far from full. Of course that, if you only do that, you end up with a big headache, and, if your week is already being a pain in the ass, you'll start feeling like shooting anyone, or everybody. Why? Because until you don't restart your cellphone (I don't have a fucking clue why), you won't be able to send or recieve messages. Furthermore, you'll loose all messages sent to you in that period. EVERY GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING MESSAGE!

I'm PISSED OFF. And I'll buy another cellphone soon.

This week officially sucks

This week officially sucks: and yes, I know it's only tuesday yet. But I can't think of anything good that happened until now, and the latest thing is that my cell phone is refusing to send or recieve SMS messages, and seems that I've missed some messages I just couldn't miss. DAMN, DAMN, DAMN!

Please, give me something good, now, or... or... just leave me alone.

SUCKS!

TOTAL Fan Service

This is totally fucking unbelivable. I was shocking while watching a video of the game, here's a screenshot:



This is a sreenshot taken from the greatest fucking genious way of fan service I've ever heard of. Really. It's not fanboys creating hentai to their favourite manga characters, no...

A doujin soft group calling themselves “Game Programming Study Club” has created the most Japanese fighting game EVER. 行殺! Spirits (”Line-Kill Spirits”) is a 3D fighting game that features little girls beating up on each other; nothing new there. The kicker, however, is that any damage you do to your opponent will slowly regenerate unless… wait for it… you take a picture of her panties. Yes. A fighting game where panty-shots are the core mechanic.

Oracle packages for Debian

Seems that xerakko is planning to do some Oracle .deb packages: I'm glad! For those wanting to install Oracle on Debian now, here's a almost painless HowTo. But it's painful to see that Oracle really is meant to run only on RedHat boxes... Having to do stuff like adding a file that says

Red Hat Linux release 2.1 (drupal)

just sucks.

Particles and Waves

So, it seems that Cranes' "Particles and Waves" CD edition with a Live DVD is being sold to Europe since the 1st of this month. And it is already sold out! Well, my wishlist is already updated, and since Amazon is selling it, I think It will be soon ordered...

For those who doesn't know how good Cranes is (and it IS really good ;-)), check their audio section with free, legal, mp3's.

Fujitsu Siemens

Well, I just have to say that I'm more and more happy with my decision to work to Sonaecom and NOT to Siemens.

Why?

Let's just take a look to the latest saga:
Mathew Garrett just poseted some examples of bad code and license violations.

He ends with:

Thanks, Fujitsu Siemens. You COPYRIGHT INFRINGING INCOMPETENT FUCKMONKIES.

I mean, christ.

CHRIST.

UNBELIEVABLE HOLY CHRIST ON A FUCKING BIG STICK.

I totally agree.

Dystopic EU

Folks from FFII say:

The EU is passing a "Big Brother" law to track every electronic communication, warns the FFII, an international information rights group based in Munich.

"Imagine a world in which the state follows everything you do. A world where computers watch every step you make. A world in which privacy is dead and the machines can track down every dissident in minutes. A world ruled by unelected agencies, working hand-in-hand with powerful commercial interests. A world in which citizens have no rights except to consume. Science fiction? The Age of the Machines? No, this is Europe, coming to you in 2006."

So warns Pieter Hintjens, president of the FFII. He says, "the EU is about to pass a directive to track every communication you make. This law makes the old Soviet spy states look like amateurs."

He continues "This law goes against our European traditions of civil liberty. It appears to break Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It will destroy small ISPs and raise prices. To enforce it, the EU will have to shut or monitor every cybercafe, web mail access, and wifi hotspot. Such a regime would be more authoritarian even than China. Even the US, after 9/11, does not have such oppressive laws. The EU does not need this law: it is a bad law, pushed through without respect for the democratic process."

Erik Josefsson of the FFII says: "We are entering into an era of 'I don't have time' legislation. With the expanded competence of the Commission (see consequences of the ECJ Judgement September 13, case c-176/03 Commission v. Council), the underarmed and weakened Parliament stands no chance to do its job properly. The 'sausage machine' is far too easy to abuse."

The Big Brother "data retention directive" makes Internet and telephony providers record "communications traffic data" for up to several years. These huge amounts of detailed personal data can be easily leaked, stolen, and abused. The forces - mainly the UK government - pushing the Big Brother law claim it will prevent terrorism. The FFII does not accept this simplistic argument. The real targets, it appears, are ordinary citizens, going about their daily business.

The FFII president points out, "almost everyone carries a mobile phone. With this law, your mobile phone and web browser becomes Big Brother's way of watching you. You will never be alone again. If you do not like this idea, contact your MEP today, urgently, and explain why it worries you. On 13 December 2005, personal privacy becomes history."

As usual, I totally agree with FFII's points of view on the issue. So, if you agree with it too, and want to do something about it by contacting your MEP, you might want to know how.

Mamnuts: Mamnuts 1.2 is out!

Mamnuts: Mamnuts 1.2 is out! For those who don't know, Mamnuts is a talker base.

GPLv3 news

So, the GPL v3 process officialy started, and it's Process Definition is being sanely debated.

The FSF will release the first discussion draft of the new license for comment at the International Public Conference for GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on January 16 and 17, 2006.

Still on France banning OSS

As I've told earlier, the French Government is being lobbied to ban free software.

If you want to follow the issue, I've found where you can be updated on news and oppinions on the issue: the FSF Europe Mailing List.

Merankorii: On Artwork and Distribution

Merankorii: On Artwork and Distribution is a link to the latest news on my musical project Merankorii.

French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

From FSF France:

Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture, SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department" bill proposal pass in the Parliament.

It appears that publishing Free Software giving access to culture is about to become a counterfeiting criminal offence. Will SACEM sue France Télécom R&D research labs for having published Maay and Solipsis (P2P pieces of software used to exchange data)?

Up to this point, the rather technical debate surrounding the issues addressed by DADVSI bill (copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society) makes one ask: Just how much control do the Big Players in the field of culture want to seize? It now looks like years of quibbling have put an end to compromises.

What should have been the last meeting of CSPLA Sirinelli Commission turned into an arranged battle dealing with the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department" bill. EUCD.INFO cofounder Christophe Espern, representing Creative Commons France, had to argue for 13 hours to defend the right of Free Software to exist, but he lost the argument. The preliminary conclusions seem to regret that the bill "cannot be proposed by CSPLA in before the deadline." Maybe the new meeting scheduled today, November 25th, 2005, at 6:30pm, in the offices of the French Department of Culture, aims to impose the text ?

"Havoc is breaking loose," says Christophe Espern. "How can people possibly both pretend to defend culture and then want to ban the only software giving universal access to it? Actually, the contradiction may be only superficial: I think what they are truly after is the control of the public... culture is just a excuse."

Absurd as it may seem, the DADVSI bill will bring an indifferent public a surprise gift for Christmas nothing less than complete Orwellian control of digital culture.

We could avoid this disaster if the cabinet of Prime Minister started by declaring the DADVSI bill a non emergency issue. This would give the democratic debate a chance.

I think that this is completely nuts. Seems that this will be discussed at the 7th. More info about this on wikipedia.

Berlin Wall v2.0

Here's the explanation.