English Over The Sleeve

I can’t log into gmail. Waaaaaa waaaaaa waaaaa!

Robert S. commented on a two-year-old post of mine, about Radio Free Colorado. Now, as I’m pretty sure that none of youactually read comments left two years after the event, I thought I’d reprint it here :

Radio Free Colorado is back on the air since January 2007!

RFC sounds *better than ever* and has an excellent new Song Request feature, you can browse Radio Free Colorado’s entire music library and request the DJ to play any song you like.

Also, there is a 192 kbps MP3 channel on RFC which is streaming now. Wonderful sounds!

Radio Free Colorado - http://www.radiofreecolorado.net

So there you have it. Let me remind everybody that streams can be played in vlc (for Windows and Linux) and of course in Amarok (by the way, did you know that Amarok has its own page in Facebook?)

I have been (very intermittently) trying to make a script add a prefix to a filename for about 18 months now. With very little success.

But today, I can finally say “All your basename are belong to us!” Or is that “All your `basename` are belong to us”?

So here’s jpgshrink3 - the logical continuation of my previous efforts. jpgshrink3  actually does a bit more than just shrink jpg files - it also moves them to a user-specified folder and creates a thumbnail in a thumbnail folder for each jpg. Very useful for phpwebgallery, that I use here.

The Script page.

That’s what I need. Shopping time. Also a longer bus trip if I want to blog…

Blogged on bus 128.

• For some time now, I’ve been looking (in my professional capacity) for a chess set supplier who doesn’t actually demand the payment of an arm and a leg for 32 pieces of injected plastic (and your first-born for an industrially printed vinyl ‘board’). I think I’ve found one. If I have, I’ll let you know. If you are a chess set supplier and want to do business with me, let me know in the comments!
• Warehouses are complicated to build and furnish. This, in conjunction with a heavy workload, gastro-enteritis and the discovery of facebook (I know, only a few years late!) may explain the recent absence of posts here. So sue me.
• Who does quite small (less than a hundred) runs of thermomoulded plastic parts, working from a model (and preferably in Europe)? Answers in comments, please. (Please note that 42 is not an accepted answer to this question.)
• I rented a Renault Clio the other day, for a week. But when I got to the agency, they apologised and gave me a Ford S-Max. You probably don’t care - but hey! I’m telling everyone!
• I’ve got a new phone, of the sort that would theoretically allow me to BoB - Blog on the Bus (TM). Don’t hold your breath for that… but the phone itself is pretty cool.
• Christmas leave is coming up waaaaay too fast. When can I find the time to go christmas shopping?

In future, don’t do anything involving the command ‘rm’ and a mounted disk in the morning. This will avoid you commanding ‘rm -r /dev/’, as root, instead of ‘rm -r /dev/sdb1/dcim’

Doh! I wonder what I’ve done?

… maybe you should be. Or maybe not, of course.

IPv4 is what actually makes the internet run. It’s basically your machine’s phone number, and it’s a 12 digit number, of which a lot are reserved. So the 2-to-the-power-of-32 addresses are a lot less (280-odd million adresses are reserved for private networks alone !) Keep in mind the fact that the 21st century is the one in which your microwave can connect to the internet (I’m not sure why it should, but hey - and I would love to tell my kettle to switch on while I’m sitting on the bus).

(Here’s a fun fact: Assuming that the first IPv4 addresses were doled out chronologically, and that the internet map is reliable, two UK government agencies were allocated full class A networks: the MOD (Ministry of Defence), and… Social Security. Education smeducation - give us the Dole !)

In 2010, all other things being equal, there won’t be any numbers left.

So there’s a ‘new’ standard: IPv6. Briefly, 2^128 addresses, or “5,000 addresses for every square micrometer of the Earth’s surface“.

But there’s a problem. People aren’t actually switching.

The problem is not computers, it’s humans, (in French) of course. You can hear the dreaded words “if it was good enough for my grandparents, it’s good enough for me”, all over the place. (Actually, this being the internet we’re talking about, that sentence should probably read “if it was good enough for my older sibling,…”.

The embedded video, which I found funny, is the real point of this post, of course.

According to the story here (in Fench), a guy bought a laptop preloaded with Windows and several other non-free programs. Althought he asked Acer, the seller, to not sell him the software, they refused - so he took them to court. The company was found guilty of forced sales and had to pay the guy nearly €400.00 - the public price of the software (plus costs and damages…)

So there you have it. Does this mean that we will eventually be able to buy PCs in France without paying the Redmond tax?

I registered for my ISP on Good Friday, 2 weeks ago. Then I moved in. Then I went to the UK for a camp. On the day of my return, I got an e-mail telling me that UPS had tried to deliver my modem (the wondrous Freebox) and failed (probably because I was returning…). The very next day, I got them to deliver it to the office, where I received it. That evening, I plugged it all in - to the computer, the wall, the tv and the stereo.
Now I have ADSL 2+, a 24 meg connection to the ‘net, more TV channels than I know what to do with, a time-shift recorder (with a 40G internal HD and a plug for an external USB drive), a remote control with more buttons than a NASA prototype (seriously, there are more than 40 of them, and you can turn it on its side so it looks like a game pad…) and free phone calls to more countries than the Commonwealth. I can reasonably expect to have FTTH within the year, and if I had any sort of wifi application, it would work anywhere in the building, thanks to MIMO and the 6 antennae that come with the set up. I can also stream content from my PC to the TV (and vice-versa), or to the stereo for that matter.
How much? €29,99; that’s how much (that includes everything, from taxes to TV).
Best of all, it all Just Works(TM) (on Linux, of course).

What’s more important, electricity or internet?

Because I’m moving at the moment, and I called my ISP 24 hrs before I did my electricity company… That probably says something about the state of the world.
(Actually, I think that that says something about internet - I could subscribe online to my ISP, but I had to call the electricity company. I can’t see why I had to call, but I did…)

My ISP (should be offering to install FTTH within the next few months, for no extra money… Here’s hoping!