Now, I’ve had conversations about this kind of stuff with people before. If you were one of the people that I’ve talked to about this, you’ll know that I don’t like the idea nor the current industry implementations of DRM. I’m actually a little proud that I have not bought any music that has DRM attached to it.

Big debate out there on this, but my thought is that DRM does not do what it was created to do.

To quote about.com: “The purpose of DRM is to offer legal downloads to consumers while protecting the rights of the copyright owner. The controls placed on digital music by DRM is intended to prevent the free distribution of a file over the internet without compensation to the artist.”

But the purpose of today’s implementations of DRM as Ken Fisher says here does not match the originial purpose of DRM: “DRM’s sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.”

I will continue to purchase music that is distributed on CDs, so that I don’t have to buy back my rights that have been minimized to maximize revenues. At least then I can play my music on any player I want, whenever I want, and for how ever long I want. After all, I did buy the CD.

I’d also like to say that I like most of what Steve Job’s had to say in this article. I really like how he suggests the removal of the requirement for DRM on music from the major labels, would be a benefit for all. However, I think he is wrong when he talks about the argument of being locked into a specific company by DRM.

“Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true?”

It is true.
If I buy music from the iTunes online store, it WILL NOT play on any other player but iPods.
If I buy music from Sony’s online store, it WILL NOT play on an iPod.
The argument that the majority of the average persons music library is free of DRM fails to address this “locked in” issue. He is implying that when a purchaser goes and buys an iPod or other device, they start their music collection/library at that moment. They fill their iPod with only newly purchased music… no! All people (well most) who buy iPods already own a music library, whether that be mp3s on a computer from ripped CDs or otherwise. So, buying an iPod, or a PDA that has a digital music player, or another device, does not lock you in. It’s purchasing music with DRM on it, that locks you in.

There is obviously a lot to say here, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

—
Update: I revised the package to FileDisk ISO Mounter 1.2.1. The new revision contains a couple fixes for iso filetype support in Windows.

—

Today I was looking for a easy way to mount ISO images to virtual drives. I had tried and really liked Microsoft’s Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel however, it did not have a command line interface that would allow me to automate some of the setup of a virtual drive. I was looking to basically save my valuable mouse clicks.

If you have a large hard disk (as most of us do these days) and you often find yourself shuffling through your stack of CD/DVD discs looking for that software app or back-up disc or whatever, then saving Disc Images (ISOs) to your hard drive is the way to go. And now I’ve got a very small, slick and free virtual disc mounting tool that makes it so easy to access those disc images.

FileDisk ISO Mounter was packaged by me, Jeffothy, but consists of:
FileDisk (a virtual disk driver) by Bo Branten
FileDiskExt.dll (shell extension to handle iso files) by Sherpya
FileDisk.inf (installer) by Bilou Gateux

Download FileDisk ISO Mounter 1.2 FileDisk ISO Mounter 1.2.1 now! It’s pretty sweet.

Note: I have only tested this on Windows XP Professional w/ SP2. Use at your own risk, but also, let me know if you have any issues.

Mounting an ISO images file to a virtual drive is simple.

1. Right click on the ISO file
2. Click Mount via FileDisk and
3. Choose the drive letter to mount

Umounting is just a simple. You can either

1. Right click the ISO file and choose “Umount ISO image from drive…” OR
2. Right click the drive itself (My Computer) and choose “Umount…”

Thanks to all those mentioned above for coding the various components. Hopefully my package helps some people who are looking for a similar solution. Let me know if you use it!

By the way, I have tried ISOBuster, DaemonTools, Alcohol and a few others but they all seem to be bloated for my purposes.

We’ve booked a 4 week trip to South Africa and Madagascar and Tanzania for this Summer. We got a fine deal on flights with Emirates Air, $1900 plus tax each. This will fly us from Calgary through Frankfurt (Germany) and Dubai (UAE) to Johannesburg (South Africa), and then from Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) through Dubai and London (England) back to Calgary. We’ve arranged day or two stopovers in both Frankfurt and London to break up the long flights.

We’ve got the Africa on a shoestring Lonely Planet guide and we are starting to figure out where we want to go and what we want to see. Looks like flights are quite cheap within South Africa, so we’ll probably make a trip down to Cape Town. We both want to check out Ngorongoro Crater and we’re thinking about Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Not sure if you knew, but I (Jeff) got PADI scuba certification lessons for Christmas and Sarah got the same for her birthday, so we’ll be certified scuba divers before we head to Africa. We looking forward to diving with sharks and such off of Madagascar.

Ever been, or heard of someone going to these countries? Please post comments with any suggestions for stuff to do/see.

Also, watch for a new website that I plan on throwing together for our trip.

I want my next digital camera to have GPS technology built-in. It would be cool to have a record of exactly where you were in the world (up to the meter) when you took each photograph. Not that I need a new camera, but I’m just saying.

I haven’t looked too too hard but the integration of these two technologies seems to still be something for the future.

• http://www.geospatialexperts.com/ricoh.html
• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1945433,00.asp
• … (add your own as a comment)


[Wed Oct 11 10:41:04 2006] [notice] SELinux policy enabled; httpd running as context user_u:system_r:httpd_t
[Wed Oct 11 10:41:04 2006] [crit] (28) No space left on device: mod_rewrite: could not create rewrite_log_lock
Configuration Failed


After some troubleshooting with the help of Brenton, I googled the [crit] message and came up with this page: http://www.goldfisch.at/knowledge/224.

So after running the following command apache started up:
ipcs -s | grep apache | perl -e 'while () { @a=split(/\s+/); print `ipcrm sem $a[1]`}'

I supposed I should try and figure out what cause the problem in the first place… maybe some application or script has a memory leak.

I just found a trick that allows a script to have delay time between executed statements, without needing extra .exe’s. It uses the ping command which is found on every windows operating system.

@ECHO OFF
SETLOCAL

ECHO.Closing in 5 Seconds
ECHO .....
CALL :sleep 1
ECHO ....
CALL :sleep 1
ECHO ...
CALL :sleep 1
ECHO ..
CALL :sleep 1
ECHO .
CALL :sleep 1
ENDLOCAL
GOTO :EOF

:sleep
:: sleep for x number of seconds
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 2 -w 1000 > NUL
ping 127.0.0.1 -n %1 -w 1000 > NUL
GOTO :EOF


Hope you find this handy!

Click the link below to add a PHP function list search to your Search Engine List in Firefox:
PHP Manual (EN)

I found this at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

Enjoy!

Hills of Japan

I’m still putting the finishing touches on the Hillsofjapan.com site adminstration web app that I built. I spent some good time on it last week and I want to get it running/to production very very shortly.

Server Rebuild

I still haven’t loaded all of my MySQL databases from my backup, to the newly built Fedora Core 5 install.

Primus VOIP Extension

I’m hacking at some JS and XUL to get an extension for firefox to work in conjunction with my phone provider’s (Primus’) portal. It will eventually detect phone numbers on web pages, and make them clickable. When I click on a phone number, my phone would ring, and when I picked up my phone, the phone number I clicked would be dialed (it would be ringing already).
The hard part is done, but I basically have to work out the https logging in, and URL requests. Make sure that it is ll behind the scenes, seemless and transparent to the user.

Slipstream

A while back, I spent a bunch of time making a slipstreamed XP disc for my parents PC. Yes yes, I’ve done many rebuilds recently, but I got the slipstreamed disc updated, so my parents machine was easy.

MSN Spaces Integration

I set up a blog at MSN Spaces. Why? So that my MSN user icon would get a little star by it when I posted to my blog. I use wordpress installed on my own server… so I set up a MSN sync plugin to allow my wordpress blog to ping (XML-RPC) the MSN Spaces blog when I post new entries… works!

Apache 2

If you change your DocumentRoot you have to make sure that you give permission to apache to access that new directory. I know it seems obvious but this is 10 minutes I don’t want to waste again.

I left apache’s user/group as apache/apache.
I created a user named wxyz with a group wxyz.
I added the user apache to the wxyz group.
I wanted the web root to be /home/wxyz/web but since the directory /home/wxyz did not have group execute permissions (rwx------) apache was throwing 403′s (Permission Denied).
CHMODing the directory /home/wxyz to rwx--x--- allowed apache to read the directory structure below and bingo.

phpMyAdmin

I had to install the mbstring package in order for phpMyAdmin/MySQL to support utf8 (multibyte strings) character set formats. There was a warning message that was shown in phpMyAdmin.

# yum install php-mbstring

The newest version aparently had some newer dependencies, so php-pdo, php-ldap, php-mysql, php-odbc, php-pdsql, php-mbstring and php were all updated to 5.1.4-1.

Note: yum makes things so simple!

PHP4

Uh Oh, some of my Gallery installs aren’t working with PHP5!
I almost went ahead and downgraded to php4 using this page as reference: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-php4.html
BUT, the newer Gallery versions support php5… so that’s easy! I just upgraded the Gallery version where applicable.

RPM files

Just for reference, to find what files an rpm installed and where try the following:
rpm -qa --filesbypkg | grep PaCkAgEnAmE

NetPBM

NetPBM (yum install netpbm) isn’t installing the binaries I want, like pnmtojpeg etc. Not sure why, so I manually downloaded and placed them in /usr/bin/netpbm (for Gallery1).

As many of you probably know, at our house we use a VOIP solution (from Primus Canada) for our home phone. The reason for this is simple. Telus charges $26/month for a residential phone line with no long distance, no options/features, just a plain phone that works for local calling. Primus charges $15/month for their TalkBroadband service which allows us to have our same home phone number. It utilizes the internet to make phone calls, so since we have Shaw’s Highspeed Internet, we get to pay $9 less for our phone. We pay an extra $8/month for 300 minutes of long distance (North America) and ALL the calling features you can think of. (see the Ultimate Bundle)

You should also know that I run my own server at my house. Running both my server and the phone gateway on my internet connection has not been an issue, however, lately we’ve experienced some LAN-based quality issues with our phone. Specifically, the outgoing voice (what the other people hear) gets choppy when other computers are using the upstream from our house (for example, a user downloading a file from my webserver, or someone using a Peer to Peer (P2P) program to upload a shared file). The main issue is that my current network configuration does not take Quality of Service (QoS) into consideration. Basically, our outgoing voice traffic does not get prioritized above the other traffic, so the voice packets sit on the outgoing queue of my router before they can be sent to the internet through my cable modem.

There are a few solutions here:

1. go buy a QoS compatible router
2. build a firewall/router out of an old computer using linux
3. OR combine 1 and 2

For a while now, Linksys has build consumer level routers/switches/etc that are quite popular. In fact, a couple years ago, Linksys released the WRT54G with source code under the GPL. There boxes allow an embedded linux OS to run on them. Out of that, OpenWRT comes building up a fresh linux platform that runs on a bunch cheap router hardware.

I plan on buying a WRT54G/S very shortly. It should be a fun little project. I think it will probably cost more time than the money saved on cheaper hardware, but the time spent to make it work will be the fun part!