Diary of a Bad Golfer

Toshiba continues to improve HD DVD storage capacity. At the HD DVD Promotion Group’s press conference this evening, the company announced it has developed 51GB triple-layer rewritable and ROM media.

This capacity is up from the company’s previous explorations of a higher-capacity 45GB triple-layer disc. Currently, HD DVD maxes out at a 30GB dual-layer disc. This capacity is 1GB greater than rival Blu-ray Disc, which tops out at 50GB.

The company spoke in terms of getting the disc approved as part of the HD DVD spec by the end of 2007.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/003423.html

The RIAA has filed a complaint against Mediaservices, the company that owns AllofMP3.com, on behalf of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music. The lawsuit has been filed in a New York District Court.

The RIAA alleges that in the third quarter of this year alone 11 million songs were illegally downloaded from AllofMP3. They are seeking $150,000 per violation which totals approximately $1.65 trillion.

AllofMP3 argue that they pay royalties through a Russian royalty agency, ROMS. The RIAA does not recognise ROMS. They say the “defendant’s entire business… amounts to nothing more than a massive infringement of plaintiffs’ exclusive rights…”

Found this today - and it’s free. An RSS reader for BlackBerry phones. Works pretty well too.

As you can see I only have the most important RSS feeds in it so far If you want to try it out you can click here. It has an OTA installation and all the feeds can be added from the config page on the web site.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the greyed out link is my friends Flickr RSS feed, let me tell you it’s pretty amazing viewing pictures in RSS feeds on my dual color phone

Just downloaded Windows Live Writer tonight to play around with. Kinda like it so far, worked easily with my WordPress blog - I believe it also works with Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and others.

Doesn’t seem to offer any new features that other software doesn’t already have but it’s free so I will probably continue to use it. One nice thing is the have released an API so hopefully there will be extensions on it’s capabilities soon.

NEW YORK (AP) — Google Inc. has reached a deal with News Corp., owner of MySpace.com, to pay at least $900 million in shared advertising revenue and become the exclusive search provider for the popular online hangout.
The deal, which marries the Internet’s leading search engine with the top social-networking site, means News Corp. will have essentially paid off the bulk of the $1.2 billion it spent last year to acquire both MySpace and the online video-game company IGN Entertainment Inc.
Under the multiyear deal, News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media unit will add Google search boxes to MySpace and other sites, likely by the end of the year, and Google will provide search results and keyword ads targeted to people’s search terms. Google will also get first rights to sell any display ads not sold by Fox directly.
Google’s payments, which are based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other milestones that Google expects Fox to exceed, are expected to start in early 2007 and run through the second quarter of 2010.
Monday’s MySpace deal follows one announced on Sunday under which Google will begin distributing clips from MTV Networks’ shows to other Web sites through its budding video service (Full story).
Word of mouth

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace has rapidly risen to become the second-busiest site in the United States, behind Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. It has about 100 million registered users, about 90 percent in the United States.
“We think it’s important that we move Google to where the users are, and the users are moving to user-generated content and particularly the sites of Fox Interactive,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told analysts and reporters Monday.
MySpace offers a mix of features - message boards, games, Web journals - designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages. Users stay connected by adding others as “friends” and expand their networks by meeting friends of their friends.
Allowing MySpace users to conduct Google searches directly on the site allows it to retain visitors longer and thus boost its advertising potential. Google will also power MySpace’s in-house search, making friends and groups easier to find, said Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media.
Besides MySpace, the deal covers most of Fox’s other sites, including IGN, AmericanIdol.com, Fox.com and Rotten Tomatoes. Fox Sports is not included because News Corp. already has a deal with Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.
News Corp. executives said they had discussions with some of Google’s rivals, which they refused to name, and considered building their own search engine, but quickly concluded that Google was the best partner because the two companies shared similar consumer-centric goals. Negotiators worked nearly round the clock over the past five days.
Both sides said they expected additional deals beyond search, “many of which we can only guess on right now,” Schmidt said.
Similar services

Google and MySpace have been developing similar services, including Web journals, video and instant messaging. MySpace is planning to develop a browser toolbar that will integrate Google searches.
MySpace currently uses search results from Yahoo Inc. under a smaller deal reached before News Corp. bought MySpace and Yahoo acquired search-ad company Overture Services.
In a statement, Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said the Google deal was great for Fox but wasn’t one in which Yahoo had an interest.
“We did not see this opportunity as financially prudent or in the best interest of our advertisers,” she said.
Danny Sullivan, editor of the industry newsletter Search Engine Watch, said the deal lets Google use its abundant cash reserves to block Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN from getting a piece of MySpace.
Google also made the most sense as a partner, he said, because both Yahoo and MSN have competing social-networking services. (Google runs Orkut but does not aggressively promote it. It has a 5 percent ownership in Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, but AOL officials have said they weren’t trying to unseat MySpace with its new AIM Pages service.)
Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales, said Fox sales representatives will likely target large companies, while Google focuses on small and medium-sized businesses. He said advertisers will have a choice of targeting MySpace specifically or reach Google’s broader ad network.
Shares of Google increased $4.10, or 1.1 percent, to $377.95 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while shares of News Corp. rose 2 cents to close at $19.76 on the New York Stock Exchange. In late-session trade, Google added 1 percent, while News Corp. gained 1.2 percent.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Sure, you could use encryption on your wireless connection, but why not have some fun with them instead?  I’m sure everyone has browsed admin shares, printed 100’s of goatse/tubgirl/lemon party pictures to printers and other random immature things - but this is way more clever.

Make all their images load upside down…

The first thing to do is divide the network into 2 parts - trusted and untrusted.  Use the DHCP server to identify MAC’s and give out relevant ip’s.

/etc/dhcpd.conf

ddns-updates off;
ddns-update-style interim;
authoritative;

shared-network local {

subnet *.*.*.* netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range *.*.*.* *.*.*.*;
option routers *.*.*.*;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "XXXXX";
option domain-name-servers *.*.*.*;
deny unknown-clients;

host trusted1 {
hardware ethernet *:*:*:*:*:*;
fixed-address *.*.*.*;
}
}

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.10;
option routers 192.168.0.1;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
allow unknown-clients;

}
}

Now, set iptables to farward everything to a transparent squid proxy running on port 80.

/sbin/iptables -A PREROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.1

The machine runs squid with a redirector that downloads images, uses mogrify to turn them upside down and then serves them out of it’s local web server.

The redirection script

#!/usr/bin/perl
$|=1;
$count = 0;
$pid = $$;
while (<>) {
chomp $_;
if ($_ =~ /(.*\.jpg)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.jpg", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.jpg");
print "http://127.0.0.1/images/$pid-$count.jpg\n";
}
elsif ($_ =~ /(.*\.gif)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.gif", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/space/WebPages/images/$pid-$count.gif");
print "http://127.0.0.1/images/$pid-$count.gif\n";

}
else {
print "$_\n";;
}
$count++;

}

End Result:

Click for full sized image.

100 freakin million videos per day….unbelivable - not bad for a site that started in early 2005.  60% of videos watched online are now served by YouTube.  In April when YouTube was receiving 12.9 million uniques per month Forbes estimated that bandwidth costs were approaching $1 million per month, 3 months later they are approaching 20 million uniques…

Source

Google Trends

Kind of neat, you can see search history by keyword over time, some examples…

MySpace outta friggin nowhere

Chuck Norris peaked early 2006

Nothin says Christmas 2005 like Goatse

Internet Explorer? Old and busted, Firefox? Ok I still use it, but Flock seems pretty sweet so far.  Right now there is a pre-beta release out, which is based on the Firefox code base.  The layout is very similar expect that Flock is labeled as a “social browser” - it can integrate with weblogs, phone sharing and other services on the web.

Some of the benefits that I like are:

• Integrates with del.icio.us to manage bookmarks - they can be browsed directly from Flock without having to visit your del.icio.us page
• Ability to have “collections” of favorites - if you are like me you have a crapload of favorites, being able to have collections for Work, Home etc is nice
• Has support for publishing to WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad and Blogger blogs using a built in blog editor.  If you are browsing a page you want to blog about - Flock has a “Blog This” button
• Built in Search - similar to Firefox but with more options - including IMDB
• Automatically detects RSS feeds in your favorites
• Supports extensions

In my opinion, it’s worth checking out - Click for a tour of Flock

Download Flock

Currently Listening to: Theory of a Deadman - Nothing Could Come Between Us

I’ve always browsed DeviantArt in the past for windows themes, background, winamp skins etc but I never realized they had a few MySpace themes on there - and they are actually pretty nice.  This is now the second post I’ve made about pimping MySpace and I don’t even have a profile anymore - I deleted mine around a year ago…maybe it’s time to create one again