How the software giants do it these days

http://dilbert.com/fast/2008-05-10/

Still the best, at least for now

While Digsby remains tied to Windows and non-portable (at least, not truly portable and self contained).

I need portable. I need multi-platform. I need meanwhile (Sametime) support, in addition to jabber (google talk), icq, irc, yahoo and msn.
Pidgin is still the only IM that offers me all these things, with an attractive, easy to use interface, and all for free (unlike Trillian).

PidginPortable is presently at version 2.4. This may or may not be better than previous versions - but assuming you have or will download that version and what to fix the one known bug that matters, or get it working with Sametime, then this is how you can do it.

Buddy List Search Bug:
This is bothersome. You have a huge list of buddies, spread across multiple groups and multiple IM protocols, and you can't be bothered scrolling through the list, expanding groups and visually searching for buddies until your eyes bleed.
Up until PidginPortable 2.4 (true for non-portable flavour too), you just started typing the first few letters of the contacts name and pidgin did the rest. However, since the inclusion of the latest GTK+ libraries, this doesn't work - and pidgin just stops the search after you type the first letter. Downer.

Solution:
Download GTK+ 2.12.6 and copy bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll into PidginPortabl/App/GTK/bin (replacing the one that's already there).
Restart PidginPortable and the problem will be solved.

Sametime support:
So you work for a large blue corporation or some company that buys their IM/collaboration solution from them.
Older versions of Pidgin (Gaim) didn't support Sametime out of the box - you had to install the meanwhile library first. Now, meanwhile is included, but Sametime 7.5 will check your client version and reject Pidgin because it looks like an old Sametime version (3.x).

Here's how to fool Sametime:
Look for accounts.xml (for PidginPortable it's in Data/settings/.purple)
Look the following settings:

<settings>
<setting name='client_major' type='int'>30</setting>
<setting name='server' type='string'>messaging.yourcompany.com</setting>
<setting name='fake_client_id' type='bool'>1</setting>
<setting name='port' type='int'>1533</setting>
<setting name='client_minor' type='int'>6511</setting>
<setting name='force_login' type='bool'>1</setting>
<setting name='client_id_val' type='int'>4098</setting>
</settings>

The 'server' and 'port' lines will be there already from when you added the account, but you'll have to add the 'client_major', 'client_minor' and 'client_id_val' lines.
These three lines will tell the Sametime server what it wants to hear when it queries the pidgin client.
Another problem solved.

Thanks to khaytsus for raising the ticket for the Buddy List Search GTK+ bug and thanks to datallah who took ownership and of course witmaster who posted the downgrade workaround solution.
Thanks to jno and siege for the Sametime workaround.

Kudos to all who work on Pidgin to make it better and keep it relevant, despite stiff competition from the likes of Miranda and Digsby.

Who says ads have no artistic merit?

If, like me, you hate those ads that take over your screen and add to page loading times, you've probably installed an ad blocker, or made some changes to your hosts file.
The Firefox add-on Adblock Plus is particularly good at filtering out content you don't want - it also allows you to enable and disable it for particular pages and it shows tabs on blockable elements of any web page, giving you full control over what ads/nags you want to see and what you don't.
But, it replaces the ads with blank space - which can lead to quite a bit of wasted space on a given web page.

Add-Art (another Firefox add-on) is designed to work with Adblock Plus to replace blocked content with artworks by modern artists. The results can be quite pleasing, and at the very least, that space doesn't go to waste.

Visit the Adblock Plus home page.

XP SP3 and AMD don't mix, apparently

The Inquirer made this revelation earlier today. If, like me, you own a PC running on an AMD chipset - beware! And read the article before you download and install.

Yarr!

Poirates rule, or so a new(ish) book, from author Matt Mason, would have us believe.

"The Pirate's Dilemma"* deals with the movement of anti-capitalist pirates, rebelling against the profit-driven, low value corporations who have made stealing an acceptable - if not honorable - pastime for the average Joe. And there was me thinking we were all just common thieves ;-P

Radiohead's two-fingered salute ( possibly one-fingered) to the music establishment last year, courtesy of their "pay whatever you think it's worth" online offering or their new, erm, offering... and Trent Reznor's most generous new album giveaway seem to me to be a response to the power and purpose of this movement. Surely, someday soon one of these  big corporations will  take the hint and start taking a slightly smaller margin to boost sales. They could sack a few layers of middle-men to compensate.

Read the blog of the book, if ye dare.





*Available now in paperback and hardback from stinking corporate swines Amazon. If anyone wants a free copy in PDF format, I'll PM you my Rapidshare link :-P LOL.

Microsoft promises to support the Open Document Format by next year

However, this has done little to impress interoperability watchdogs ECIS, who are still itching to file a plethora of anti-trust lawsuits against them.

Brave Google shops Indian slanderer to authorities while Internet Cafés install keyloggers

Don't go thinking the Internet is a place you can say whatever you want about whoever you want to say it about - especially not if Google has anything to do with it.

Next time you're in a Mumbai Cyber Café you might want to check for keyloggers before you start typing.
How would you go about doing that? By looking under the keyboard, perhaps?

Lotus Symphony - do I hear a bum note?

Back when I tried OpenOffice 1.1 (my first encounter with it), I thought it was pretty decent. It was the one and only time I blue-screened a Win XP system, but I forgave it for being new(ish) and open source. Since OpenOffice got to 2.2 and later versions it has been rock solid and more useful than ever. With the exception of Excel, I don't think that Microsoft can justify the price of its Office suite anymore. So when IBM announced that they'd be creating their own open source office alternative to replace their aging (to put it mildly) Smartsuite package, I got interested.

Along came Symphony - which I started using towards the end of summer '07. I also stopped using it around that time too. Why? As a test run, I created a text document, and then tried to convert it to PDF. Symphony crashed... Hard. When I tried to restart it, it wouldn't. I realised that this was because the Eclipse javaw.exe process it was wrapped up in had hung on after the rest of Symphony had terminated, so I had to kill it. Then, lo and behold, I managed to get the application started again - and what did I find? A recovered unsaved document? No.

So, my first experience with Symphony was not entirely a success. You could even say it was a dismal failure, but that would be too lenient. The truth is that, although it didn't crash on me again since (mostly because I've barely used it), it doesn't offer a single advantage over OpenOffice 2.x. In fact, it seems to have less going for it in any respect that, in my opinion, counts. Firstly, Eclipse is a pig, so Symphony has a very large footprint - and this extra application tier just means that there's more that can go wrong. Secondly, Symphony is only based on the 1.1.x engine of OpenOffice - so it's not as stable and not as functional as OO 2.4.

All things considered, it's not so much a symphony as a dirge.

Read the linuxjournal article
and then here's a slightly less scathing review (thanks to muglatte)

Swedish file-sharer gets convicted

From Afterdawn...

This morning, a 31 year old man from Sweden was found guilty in Sweden's largest ever P2P case but escaped any jail time for his actions.

The man was initially accused of uploading 23,000 music tracks to the popular filesharing application Direct Connect but Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency’s (APB) "use of questionable investigative techniques forced the prosecutor to withdraw some of the charges", down to about 4500 tracks. The man was also accused of uploading 30 movies.

Instead of jail time, the man received a suspended sentence and a "heavy fine." The prosecutors were asking for jail time for the man, but the judge had this to say, “this is a task for the government, that by legislative means or in other ways take the necessary actions” to come to a solution to the problem.

More interestingly, the court even implied that the music industry needs to take some responsibility for the current situation they are in, where piracy is rampant, and many have little respect for copyright laws.

The fine however, is decently large and comes out to about 54670 kronor ($10,000 USD) including court fees he must pay back.

Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, commented on the trial:

“A consequence of the court having increased the sanctions in this case is that it will be easier to make ISPs give out information on IP addresses [in the future]. This of course affects the possibilities to act against these kinds of crimes.”

Morgan Gerdin, the defense lawyer, still feels her client was innocent. “The District Court hasn’t observed the technical evidence. It is not possible from that evidence to conclude that my client has been filesharing. He should have been found not guilty.”

Magnus Eriksson, spokesperson for Piratbyrån, sees the verdict as insignificant however and tells filesharers to continue their hobby without risking prosecution. “The outcome of the verdict is based on the amount of files shared by this person. With more modern filesharing software [BitTorrent], it isn’t possible to see all the files that one person is sharing.”

Permalink to the original article.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of DRM

Just when we thought DRM was dead, buried (and that the last of its muffled
screams had subsided), David Hughes, some RIAA technology unit bigwig tells us it isn't.

Why can't they all just FOAD (and take their poxy DRM with them)?

Explorer Aumentation - bigger really is better

http://www.bizzntech.com/2008/04/21/12-essential-windows-explorer-addons

The problem with USB pen drives

USB pen drives are great - all that storage in your pocket and for a low cost too. I used to have a 128MB drive a couple of years back - I thought it was the dogs - I carried around a whole heap of stuff I never could dream of way back when all I had was floppy disks. Then I got a 256MB drive, then 1GB, then 2GB and recently I picked up an 8GB drive that is less than 5cm long (MyMemory.com) for peanuts. Cheap peanuts at that.

Back when I got the 1GB pen drive, I started running lots of Portable Apps on it: portable versions of Thunderbird; Firefox; Sunbird; Toucan; Abiword; Gaim (now Pidgin); Foxit and many more. Then I started to worry about what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands - all my email, my calendar, IM contacts and personal documents would be there for anyone to see. So I decided that I needed to encrypt as much of this personal / application data as possible

After a fairly thorough search, I found two freeware / open source applications that appeared to fit the bill (there were a load of slower, more cumbersome ones):

- Dekart Private Disk (only Lite is free)
- TrueCrypt

Both applications allow create a virtual drive of a predetermined size from a single file. To activate the private disk, you simply start the program, point it at the encrypted file and open it - the file appears as a virtual drive with a pre-assigned (fixed) drive letter, e.g. O:\.
You can then drag all the files and folders you want to encrypt into this drive and when you click on disconnect in the program the drive disappears and the file is encrypted. The encryption type is 256-bit AES - more than strong enough for most purposes - and the speed with which fairly large amounts of data are encrypted and decrypted is quite amazing. I tested with 512MB and 1GB of data. Once you create the initial file for encryption, you set the size - so this file takes up that space from the start, and you can never fill it up data totaling more than that value - so think very carefully about how much space you need before you start - it can take a while to initially create or finally delete one of these virtual drives.

Back when I was testing this out originally (sometime back last August/September), I found Dekart to be better. It could be stored and run from the USB pen drive itself, and ran very smoothly. I found TrueCrypt performed not quite so well.

However, recently, I moved all my portable apps into the virtual drive and found performance to be terrible - Thunderbird was so slow opening up and working with email proved to be unbearable. With a new version of TrueCrypt now available, I find myself curious as to whether or not it has improved and perhaps overtaken Dekart Private Disk.

For now, my email and other data from portable apps remains unencrypted, and I have to remember to disconnect my pen drive every time I leave my desk :(

I hope that TrueCrypt, or a future offering from Dekart will change things.

A Modern Design Classic

The Office of Government Commerce got more than they bargained for when they commissioned a new logo

Who said my MacBook was tacky?

Gold-plated MacBook Air breaks Steve Jobs' heart



I don't know why anyone would think this was done in anything less than the best possible taste...

Be careful what you blog about

Record TV using NGrab, an idiot's guide (made by idiots, for idiots)

Dreambox and Dreambox-like-device users will probably have tried NFS already, but NGrab offers a more robust stream capturing alternative.

What you will need:

1. A Dreambox (or a poor imitation)
   
2. NGrab
   
3. A PC to install it on
   
4. Some disk space

I'm assuming for this part that you have added your Dreambox to your home network

Browse to the following location on your Dreambox menu:
Setup > Expert Setup > Ngrab Streaming Setup

• for "Srv IP address" enter the IP of the PC where you will be setting up NGrab
  
• then click on detect MAC address
  

Install NGrab on your PC, anywhere you like. You can download NGrab (for Windows) from here
You can run it as a normal program, or start it as a service (I can't be bothered running it as a service). To configure NGrab, start the program (or service), then right click its icon in your system tray

From there, go to:

• "Einstellungen", "dBox Einstellungen" and enter the IP address of your Dreambox
• make sure the port matches the port settings in Ngrab Streaming Setup on the Dreambox
• in "Dateisystem Einstellung", browse to the folder where you want to store your recordings
• Click OK when done

There are many other options you can play about with, but this is the bare minimum you need to get your first TV stream down on disk.

Finally, browse your EPG on your Dreambox, choose a program you want to record, hit menu, Timer, and add a timed event. Set the event type to NGrab, hit OK and off you go.

Recordings will cost you about 1GB per 40 minutes of recording.
The default format is m2p, but you can change that. I record directly onto an 8GB flash drive, so I can take it with me.
I have yet to detect a single flaw in the recordings I've made, and I don't have the latest hardware by any means.

Sony backtrack on DRM policy

Finally, Sony admit that they may have gone too far with the whole DRM thing.
Blu-Ray is comprehensively beaten into second place by HD-DVD.
AV-comparatives blows the lid on the hidden spyware that ships with the PS3.
Sam Palmisano confuses Bill Gates with beef jerky and eats him.
Vista SP1 is actually quite good.

Beyond Civilisation

It's getting harder and harder to find an online store that will ship to this outpost.

For reasons unknown (to me at least), I'm finding all too often these days that I visit, say, Amazon.co.uk, find something I like at a good price, get to the checkout and only then discover that they cannot ship to my destination (which, incidentally, is Ireland).
Why is this getting to be more of a problem?
Technology (of all types) is far cheaper from the UK, France, Germany and elsewhere in the EU. We might be a small market, but surely it's no skin off their noses to ship to anyone, anywhere - provided we'll pay the delivery charge?
Computer hardware, software, musical equipment, cameras - pretty much everything I make big savings on by shopping online - is getting harder to find and the Irish online sellers just don't provide the same value as their foreign counterparts.

I wonder are there any other such blackspots elsewhere in Western Europe?

---

On the same theme:
Post any bargains you find for computer / electronic hardware, software and gadgets of all kinds - but please check if they can be shipped to Ireland first.

---

DVDVideoSoft News

DVDVideoSoft released Free Video to Flash Converter v3.2 Posted: 16 Mar 2008 11:51 AM CDT Last week we released the new version. If you have not downloaded it yet, just do it know. Here is the direct link: Free Video to Flash Converter. Now there are more than 40 player skins. We added two new basic skins and each of them have six different colors themes. Also we disclosed the player source codes. So if you are experienced in Macromedia Flash, you can download the sources (size: 1.7 Mb, requirements: Macromedia Flash 8), modify them and use by yourself or share it with others. If you want to, just contact us and we will publish your new skin on our site: support@dvdvideosoft.com. There is a new guide, if you host your site or blog on a Windows server, sometimes after embedding video into your webpage, uploading to a Microsoft Windows 2003 server and then viewing in a browser the player says that the "specified file is missing". Learn how to fix this problem. Keep up watching our site. Next version will include a preset editor, so you will have more control over the output video. You will be able to change such parameters as picture size, frame rate and bitrate. And thank you for the continuous support!!!

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DVDVideoSoft News

Major updates Posted: 05 Mar 2008 03:14 PM CST Hi Everybody, we have updated all our products yesterday! Now you can use batch mode, download video and extract audio from Google Video, Download all updated programs from our freeware page.

Batch mode in Free YouTube Download and Free YouTube Uploader Posted: 05 Mar 2008 03:13 PM CST Finally Free YouTube Download and Free YouTube Uploader have a batch mode. It means that you can save you time by downloading or uploading several video files during one session.

Download from Google Video Posted: 05 Mar 2008 03:13 PM CST Now all our YouTube Download software, including Free Online Service, downloads video and extracts MP3s from Google Video too. Usually we give our products names which describe their functionality. But now in spite of the fact that our software downloads video and extracts audio from both YouTube and Google Video services, we decided not to rename our tools. So for example Free YouTube to MP3 Converter is still called Free YouTube to MP3 Converter.

Free Video Dub supports more files now Posted: 05 Mar 2008 03:13 PM CST Thanks to everyone who sent us “bugy files” Free Video Dub became more stable and supports more video files now. This is the critical update. We worked hard and fixed lots of bugs. We strongly recommend to download and use the latest version version.

More supported languages Posted: 05 Mar 2008 03:12 PM CST Thanks to Wesley Fernando da Silva Sarmento, Mohammed Al-Foulad, Zityi (http://zityi33.fw.hu), HIXXBO, Zafiria Kostopoulou, Javier Alvarez Tello, Udo Staack, Thomas Hermann aka Tjhbk (Http://virtual-Liebe.de), Dr. Peter Posse (http://www.physoft.de), Gabriele Luizi from Brazil, Benny Beat (Catalan) and many other people our tools become better and better! New languages are Manager: Slovensky, Arabic, Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Estonian, Danish, Hungarian YouTube Download: Arabic, Greek, Thai YouTube to iPod: Danish YouTube to Mp3: Portuguese (Brazil) Video Dub: French, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil) Video to iPod: Spanish !!! And almost all our programs are available in German now. It is rather amazing fact, but now we have more visitors from German than from USA. It seems that it is a good time to translate our entire site to German. If German is your native language, you are experienced PC user and interested in a freelance job, please write us to support@dvdvideosoft.com.

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