Author: Jim Cofer

Posted on

COOL WEB SITE: pizdaus.com

If you enjoy photography, you’ll probably enjoy Pizdaus.com. It’s a site that lets random strangers upload any picture they want to the site. And, surprisingly, the site works. You’ll see the occasional “goofy pic” you might have gotten via email, but for the most part, the site features hundreds of serious photographs. Some are travel pictures. Some are “artsy” kinds of things. But almost all of them are pretty darn good! Be careful with this site: it’s one of those sites that you could waste hours visiting!

For what it’s worth, I uploaded a pic of my own to the site:

Biltmore House Lion (Thumb)
(Click to enlarge)

This is a picture of the stone lions at the entrance to the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC. I took it with my Canon PowerShot S400, then loaded it into Photoshop, converted it to greyscale and played around with the levels a bit. I hope you like it!

Posted on

SONGS I LOVE: “Fields of Gold”

Eva CassidyOK, between The Last Town Chorus, Mazzy Star and Carla Bruni, you might think that all I ever listen to is mellow music sung by waify chicks. I assure you that that’s not the case… but I did want to turn you on to this tune. It’s a cover of Sting’s “Fields of Gold” by Eva Cassidy.

Eva Cassidy was born in Washington D.C. on February 2, 1963. Although she could sing just about anything – her repertoire included jazz, blues, folk, gospel and pop – Eva had a hard time getting noticed outside the Washington D.C. area. Her first band was called Easy Street, and they performed mainly at weddings, corporate parties and area pubs. She then got a singing gig at Wild World (Six Flags) in Maryland, then went on to sing in D.C.-area bands such as The Honeybees and Characters Without Names (later called Method Actor). During most of the 80s, Eva had to work side jobs to pay the bills, such as being a plant propagator at a nursery and as a furniture painter in Maryland.

Eva’s luck began to change in 1992. D.C. jazz legend Chuck Brown got a hold of a cassette tape of Eva singing and was enchanted. This quickly led to Eva doing a duet album with Brown, and record companies began scrambling to sign her up. Sadly (for us), all these labels wanted to whittle Eva down to a single genre, something she flat-out refused to do. So she recorded a single here, a duet there until January 1996, when she recorded Live at Blues Alley. Eva wasn’t happy with the album, as she had a cold the night the album was recorded.

Sadly, she wouldn’t have time to record much more: in July of 1996, she noticed a pain in her hip, which she attributed to the awkward stances she had to take whilst painting some murals. When the pain didn’t go away and, in fact, got worse, she went to her doctor, who diagnosed her with melanoma. She would be dead in 4 months time. At her final performance in September 1996, Eva took the stage with the aid of a walker, sang “What A Wonderful World”, and was then taken to Johns Hopkins, which she never left. She died on November 2, 1996.

Knowing that makes her version of “Fields of Gold” just that much sadder. It’s a haunting thing, and it exemplifies what was best about Eva Cassidy: the ability to cut through the treacle and get to the heart of a song. If you hate “melismatic masturbation” – the annoying tendency of singers like Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera to run up and down the scales simply because they can – then you’ll love Eva Cassidy. Her music is, in fact, the exact opposite of that. Have a listen:

[audio:fieldsofgold.mp3]

Eva’s posthumous career has been huge in the UK. In 2001, the compilation album Songbird  (from which “Fields of Gold” is taken) reached #1 after the BBC show Top Of The Pops 2 aired a video of Eva performing “Over The Rainbow” at Blues Alley. “Over The Rainbow” became the most requested video ever shown of Top Of The Pops 2 despite the fact it was just a homemade video made by someone in the audience. A book about Eva’s life – also called Songbird – sold over 100,000 copies in the UK. And, in 2003, another compilation album called American Tune became Eva’s third consecutive posthumous #1 album in the UK – a feat that even Elvis Presley or Jimi Hendrix couldn’t do.

God bless, Eva. Your beautiful voice haunts us still!

Posted on

Slipstreaming Office 2007

Back on the old site, I posted this guide to slipstreaming service packs and updates to Office 2003. It was a straightforward, if laborious, process with a lot of potential downfalls. For starters, it required a lot of arcane command-line entries, which a lot of people are uncomfortable with. It also modified the original installation files, and there wasn’t an easy way to tell if one update had already been applied to the installation media. In most cases, you had to try applying a hotfix or patch to the installation point and you’d either get an “installation complete” or “patch already applied” prompt. Lastly, slipstreaming Office 2003 only worked with volume license editions of Office, so folks at home couldn’t join the fun.

When it comes to Office 2007, there’s good news for slipstreamers! Microsoft has greatly simplified the process, which now works with any version of Office 2007. To slipstream hotfixes and service packs into Office 2007, follow these simple directions:

1) Copy the Office 2007 CD\DVD to a temporary folder on your hard drive (I’ll use g:\Office2007 in this example).

2) Download the service packs\hotfixes you want to apply to the media. You can save them anywhere you want, but in this example I’ll save them to c:\downloads.

3) Click on Start > Run and type the following into the “Run:” box:

C:\Downloads\hotfix.exe /extract:G:\Office2007\Updates\

where “hotfix.exe” is the full name of the Office update file, such as “office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe”.

4) Repeat step 3 with any other hotfix files you wish to apply.

5) Check the g:\Office2007\Updates folder. You should see one (or more) files with the extension .MSP.

If you do, skip to the next step.

If you don’t, repeat step 3 but use only HOTFIX.EXE /EXTRACT (in other words, leave off the destination directory). You will be prompted for a destination directory by a typical Save\Open dialog box; click on g:\Office2007\Updates as the destination.

6) Burn the contents of the g:\Office2007 folder to CD\DVD, or copy to a network share.

That’s it! The Office installer will apply any (and all) MSP files in the “Updates” folder to the installation when you install\reinstall Office on a client computer. This makes things much simpler for administrators, since they only have to look at the date of a hotfix file (such as OUTLFLTR.MSP, Outlook 2007’s Junk Email filter) to figure out which version is being applied to their clients. Unlike “traditional” slipstreaming, administrators can also remove hotfixes from CD\DVD\installation points simply by deleting the MSP file from the “Updates” folder – something that was impossible to do with Office 2003.

Note that this method will run within Office setup as a type of “post-install routine” – in other words, you’re not actually updating the installation files (as with Office 2003 slipstreaming), you’re telling setup to apply these patches during install. It adds a couple of minutes to the installation routine (as opposed to the “old” way, which added no time), but I think it’s worth it for the simplicity of the new method.

Posted on

Ewwwwww!

Check out this picture (click on it to enlarge):

Treeman (Small)

It’s a real picture of an Indonesian man named Dede. He cut his knee as a teenager and as a result became infected with a particularly prolific version of the HPV virus – the virus more commonly associated with genital warts. Locally known as “The Tree Man”, Dede has lost many jobs (as well as his wife) due to the disease. Dr Anthony Gaspari of the University of Maryland says that Dede has a rare genetic fault that keeps his immune system from stopping the spread of the growths, and that he could be treated with a synthetic form of vitamin A.

Posted on

At least get it right!

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the collective name of a bunch of schemes that Big Content uses to try to keep people from listening to music or watching movies as they see fit. “Copy protected” CDs use DRM to keep folks from copying the audio tracks to their computers. Almost every online store uses DRM to keep people from downloading songs from, say, the iTunes Music Store, and uploading those files to a P2P network. DVDs have a DRM scheme called CSS that supposedly keeps people from “ripping” movies to computers – although CSS was broken so long ago that it’s trivial to bypass it.

The problem with DRM is that it doesn’t stop piracy and only inconveniences honest buyers. Pirates will always find a way to pirate content, but people that buy a product with DRM – such as a CD that cannot be ripped to a hard drive, and thus copied to an iPod – are screwed. For this reason, I’m vehemently against DRM in any way, shape or form. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m against accurate reporting too!

My case in point: Western Digital’s new My Book Network Storage System. It’s basically a portable hard drive that uses Ethernet to connect to your computer instead of USB or Firewire. Pretty cool so far, right? However, at the end of the “product features” section on the linked page, you’ll see this disclaimer:

Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access. A list of the non shareable file types can be found here.

In the past couple of days, the Internet has blown up with stories (like this one from the BBC) about how the My Book is “crippled” with DRM and how it “won’t let you share MP3 and movie files!!!!!”. A bunch of “the sky is falling” reports have popped up everywhere, and many blogs are filled with comments from readers like “I’ll never buy a Western Digital product again!” and “I’m going to buy a Seagate and send a copy of the receipt to Western Digital to let them know how much business they’ve lost!”. Even better are huffy comments from “IT professionals” that claim to “order 96,000 hard drives a year through my job” and from now on they’ll “never buy a single Western Digital drive again!”

People, people… Relax! And while you’re relaxing, brush up on your reading comprehension skills, too!

This My Book drive comes with access to a service Western Digital offers called “WD Anywhere Access”. The service is somewhat similar to Orb, a free service that lets you access your movie and music files from any computer on the Internet. With Orb, you sign up for an account, then download and install a program on your computer. This program scans your hard drive for various movie and music files. When you’re away from home, all you do then is log in to your Orb account and you can watch the movies or listen to the music on your system. Anywhere Access works much like this, except that you can allow friends and family members to access the files remotely too… except for these types of files, which WD has banned on its network. YOU can access any file on the My Book using Anywhere Access, but you cannot let friends download your MP3s using the service. And locally – that is, on your home network – the device works exactly like any other NAS device.

So all of this anti-DRM hype leveled against Western Digital really is much ado about nothing. So you can’t use their network to share movies and MP3s. Big deal. Maybe WD’s lawyers thought the company could be sued for doing such a thing. Maybe WD doesn’t want to deal with the bandwidth costs of people sharing thousands of 700MB movie files. Whatever the case may be, at home the device works like any other hard drive. It also comes with a service that allows you to access any file on your My Book from any computer with an Internet connection. WD was nice enough to allow you to share certain types of files with others… but not all types.

What’s the big deal? Get over it already!

Posted on

“Harold and Kumar” are back!

Here’s the trailer for the new Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay flick. It looks as funny as the first movie – maybe even funnier! A bit of a warning though: this is a “red band” trailer. Unlike most trailers, which are approved for all audiences and have a “green band” at the beginning, this one’s for restricted audiences and has the rare “red band” at the beginning. There’s also a lot of foul language, drug references and partial nudity in the trailer, so don’t watch it at work!

Posted on

BREAKING NEWS: San Joaquin leaves ECUSA

It’s finally happened: an entire diocese of the Episcopal Church has voted to secede from the national church! The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin, based in Fresno, California voted overwhelmingly to leave the national church on Saturday. Saturday’s vote was 173-22 in favor of secession, far more than the two-thirds majority required for the measure to pass.

Tensions in the Anglican church began back in the 1970s, when the U.S. church approved the ordination of women. This caused something of an exodus from the church, and led to the formation of a patchwork of “affiliated Anglican” churches. However, the national church’s liberal stance in recent years has accelerated the schism – especially after the 2003 consecration of openly-gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire… the first openly-gay bishop in the 500 year history of the Anglican church in particular and 2000 years of the “Church Catholic” in general.

The worldwide Anglican communion – the third largest Christian denomination after Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy – has almost 80 million members. It may come as a surprise to many, but most of these members are in former British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. And these folks tend to hold deeply conservative religious views. Which puts them at odds with the more liberal churches in the US, Canada and the UK. And unlike the Roman church, which is headed by an all-powerful pope and the College of Cardinals, the Anglican communion works by consensus. With the numbers favoring the conservatives in the “Global South”, the US church is stuck between a rock and a hard place. If the ECUSA pushes too far to the left, they risk being voted out of the communion. However, the ECUSA has painted itself into a “liberal corner” with the ordination of Robinson, so it has no way to back down. In recent years, 32 of the ECUSA’s 7,600 congregations had left the communion, and 23 others have voted to leave, but have not yet done so (typically, most congregations vote twice on the issue: once, and then again a year later). San Joaquin’s actions today not only removes 47 churches in 14 counties from the ECUSA, it also removes an entire diocese from ECUSA control.

Expect a lot of court battles in the near future over San Joaquin’s property. The individual churches will claim that they were built using local money, while the ECUSA will claim that it owns the 47 church buildings. Interestingly, two of the oldest Anglican churches in Virginia voted to secede from the ECUSA last year: Truro Church in Fairfax City and The Falls Church in Falls Church. Both churches date from the 1700s and both predate the founding of the ECUSA. While arcane discussions of colonial-era law don’t apply to San Joaquin, it will be interesting to see how these issues are played out, especially next year, when the dioceses of Pittsburgh and Fort Worth vote on similar secession resolutions.

Read more here.

Posted on

Pot… Kettle

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is the movie industry’s trade group. If you’ve been following the “internet piracy” stories of the past few years, you’ll know that the MPAA has done lots of things to protect its “intellectual property”, from lobbying members of Congress for tougher copyright laws, to hiring lawyers to shut down file trading websites, to hiring third-parties (like MediaSentry) to collect data about people trading movies online, to creating “snitch programs” that monetarily reward theatre employees for turning in customers that illicitly tape movies with video cameras.

So how delicious is it that the MPAA was served a takedown notice earlier this week… for violating someone else’s copyright! The MPAA has been distributing something called a “University Toolkit”. Said toolkit contains the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution along with some popular open-source tools for monitoring networks. The MPAA made the toolkit available free of charge to universities to help them track down illegal content on their networks.

However, as this article at Ars Technica explains, the MPAA did not make the source code of the material available, as is required by the General Public License (GPL) that Linux (and most of the tools included in the download) are published under. In a nutshell, the GPL allows anyone to assemble an operating system and\or software applications as they see fit… as long as they document all of their changes and make the source code available to anyone that asks. In other words, I could take a version of Ubuntu Linux and change every instance of the name “Ubuntu Linux” in the software to “jimcofer.com Linux”… as long as I provide the source code and documentation of what I’ve done to anyone that asks. Or I could take a copy of Ubuntu Linux and make a bootable CD that turns any computer into an “internet kiosk” (like you see in airports)… again, just as long as I provide the source code and document the changes.

The MPAA is (of course) calling the incident a “simple oversight”, but once again it just shows that Big Content is ready and willing to steamroll anyone else’s copyrights in the name of protecting their own.

Posted on

Why We Need “Network Neutrality” (part 1)

“Network neutrality” is concept whereby all data packets (and devices) are treated equally on a computer network. In laymen’s terms, a “network neutral” ISP would not discriminate between basic web surfing, email traffic, streaming video traffic, P2P traffic, VoIP traffic, podcast traffic, instant messaging traffic, and so on. Each and every data packet would be treated exactly the same, regardless of where it comes from or what it contains. If this sounds like the basic definition of “the Internet” to you… well, you’d be right.

As it stands now, most ISPs in the US are running more or less neutral networks. But this might not be the case tomorrow, or the next day. And although a few large US ISPs are currently experimenting with ditching network neutrality as it relates to illicit file trading, these same ISPs have, in the not too distant past, discussed grandiose plans for shattering the Internet as we know it. It’s called “tiered service”.

Basically, ISPs want to charge websites and content providers to allow “guaranteed delivery” of their content. If a content provider can’t (or won’t) pay these “quality of services fees”, then their data will be pushed to “the back of the bus”. While it doesn’t sound like a terribly bad idea at first, the end result of these fees would be a disaster for end users and content providers. Content providers would have to negotiate such fees with any ISP that wished to implement tiered service; although most US Internet users are serviced by a handful of giant ISPs, there are still thousands of small ISPs that content providers would have to negotiate with. Such fees would also cut deeply into the bottom lines of many content providers. So your favorite podcast or streaming audio\video site might simply choose to shut down rather than pay out the nose for something they’ve had for free for years. “Mom and Pop” Internet sites and blogs might cease to exist entirely. Start-up companies developing new and innovative Internet technologies would see their products langish for lack of funds to pay an “ISP tax”. Some companies might choose to leave the U.S. altogether for “network neutral” countries in Europe or Asia. And of course, ISPs could enter into agreements with certain companies that give them kickbacks… so Comcast could have a “preferred online bank” that loads much faster than some other online bank that doesn’t pay the ISP tax or enter into a licensing agreement with Comcast. Imagine a world where Google refuses to enter into such an agreement with an ISP and refuses to pay the ISP tax… now imagine all your Google searches timing out and giving you errors while “Yahoo! Search Brought To You By Comcast” works beautifully. Or imagine if iTunes were to resist jumping on the tiered service bandwagon… suddenly your iTunes purchases take hours to download instead of seconds as they did before, and Comcast’s only solution is for you to sign up for their “ComcasticMusic” site… where tracks cost $2.99 each instead of 99¢ and have more draconian DRM than their Apple counterparts. THAT’S tiered service in a nutshell.

Continue reading “Why We Need “Network Neutrality” (part 1)”

Posted on

“Shudder…”

Ya know, I always considered myself to be 100% heterosexual… but then I saw this pic of Amy Winehouse walking around in just a bra and jeans:

Winehouse

…and then I questioned my sexuality. My God, that girl is UGLY! Pink looks absolutely feminine in comparison! Excuse me while I wash my eyes out with bleach!