Christmas Advertising Already?!
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
What the hell man, its not even Thanksgiving yet and I find the local mall is set for Christmas, as are the TV stations pumping out store commericals advertising Christmas sales. For crying out loud I like the holiday as much as everyone else, but do we really need to start this stuff so early? I swear its going to get to a point where Christmas advertising is going to begin after the 4th of July.
Pastebin On RSN
Posted by voice | Filed under Site, Techie
Thats right, I have setup a pastebin on this server. For those who do not know, Pastebin is a PHP webapp created by Paul Dixon that allows you to post your code on the website and the website will display the code in a highlighted format depending on which language you select. The pastebin is available here. Here is the list of currently supported languages:
- Bash Script
- C
- C++
- C#
- ASM(NASM)
- M68K ASM
- Z80 ASM
- HTML
- PHP
- Perl
- Python
- CSS
- TCL
- SQL
- MySQL
- Java
- Javascript
- Objective C
- XML
So, if you wish to use the pastebin then by all means go ahead, however if it is abused I will have to restrict access to it.
Obama Won
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Just felt like saying it. What a wonderful start to the month! By the way, if you didn’t see last night’s Comedy Central’s Indecision ‘08: America’s Choice coverage of the election, try to find a video of it online, it was epic!
A Slow October
Posted by voice | Filed under RSN2.O
Yeah, its been a rather slow month but I do have some news. I am still actively working on RSN2.0 as well as some other PHP related projects. Eventually I’m going to need some people to help test RSN2.0 so keep checking here as I’ll first ask on the blog before going to message boards.
It’s Log!
Posted by voice | Filed under Humor
This’ll take some of you back down memory lane:
A Meaningless Post
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Basically just a little post to make it look like I still try to keep this blog active, but since I’m writing I might as well say how terribly fun my unreliable Ford Windstar is, one day the transmission decides to stay stuck in first gear (Ford says nothing is wrong, at least the past few times we’ve had them take a look at the transmission), the brakes that make a wonderful thumping sound (though they still work as Dan and Denver can attest to), and just recently the rough running engine thats the cause of my van being in the shop this weekend, go Ford!
Done With Sonic Retro
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
In case any of you are wondering why I’m banned from Sonic Retro, you can rest easy, no one flew off the handle or anything like that. I’ve actually decided due to my lack of going there (Yes, I was unbanned but I’ve never felt an overwhelming need to go back to the site), and just my general feelings towards the site, I made a request to have my account deleted from the site. I haven’t been back there since posting the topic to see if anything came of it, but I have been told my account has been banned rather than deleted.
Disregard that, lulz.
Sony’s Playstation Network DRM of Doom
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Been a while so its time for another fun rant from me. Back in June of this year I decided to bite the bullet and buy a PS3, 40GB model ofcourse, I ain’t paying an extra $100 for 40GBs more of space and at the time 40GB was $399, guess I should have waited a few months eh? Since getting the PS3 I haven’t had too many problems with the console, its done what its advertised and while I don’t own any blu-ray titles I’m set for the future when I finally do begin buying them. So why am I going to write a rant then? Well the title of this post should be a fairly good indication. I know Sony has a horrible track record with DRMs, there was the grand rootkit debacle with audio CDs, and the recent waves of complaints against SecuROM. I firmly believe that WE the consumers bought the CD/DVD, therefore we OWN the content on the discs, we are not just “buying the rights to use the content” as media companies love to claim.
Anyways, recently I decided to give PSN’s video store a try out and purchased two tv show downloads at $2 a piece. Should have read the fine print because as per usual I got to thinking “ok, how do I put this on my NAS so I can watch this stuff on my other PCs”. Well of course, I begin searching the web and find a variety of websites discussing the many problems with content downloaded over the PSN network, and one stuck out to me, claims that once you downloaded a video thats it, you only get one download, if the drive dies and you don’t have a backup then too bad. “There has to be some spin to this” I thought to myself and went to Sony’s only Playstation website to verify, and there it was in Section 9, Paragraph 5 of the PSN Terms of Use and User Agreement..
Downloading will be not permitted outside the Authorized Term. In addition, once the Video Content has been downloaded from PSN, you will not be able to download it again for any reason without purchase of another copy.
Wow…just one download? I paid money to get the file just once? I’m sorry Sony, but I’m going to have to use a Internet meme to sum this all up: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!!!!! Seriously, how do you screw something like this up? Valve seems to be the only content publishing company that can get DRM done the right way with Steam, at least with Steam once I purchase something I can download it as many times as I want as long as I’m logged into my Steam account. You can’t tell me its impossible to at least say “well this guys account is linked to this PS3 serial number, so as long as hes logged into his account and using THAT PS3 then he can download to his hearts content”, or, I don’t know, give me 50 downloads, I can’t see any reason for needing to download a TV episode that many times. “Well you can back your stuff up to a external storage drive”, yeah how many people are really smart enough to do that on a regular basis, Sony?
This DRM scheme is unacceptable and is a complete rip-off to the consumers, if this had been maybe a free download I could understand, limit 1 per customer, but for me to have to pay for the privilage of downloading my paid-for content just once….just..no, no thats not acceptable at all Sony, what were you guys thinking? No wait, don’t tell me, I already know, “$$$”. Well, this is one PS3 user that will be advising people NOT to download off of the PSN store, at least not until utilities become available to break the PS3 DRM system, you’d be better off going to the pirate bay or mininova to grab this stuff. Oh, and Sony, since I told you here, I won’t feel bad about using said utilities to break your DRM :3
Mount Samba Shares Based On WiFi Networks
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
This is probably a common occurance amongst Linux users like me, you have a share you want to mount every time your computer or laptop starts up on a WiFi network (my desktop connects via WiFi), you write a handy little script to do for you at start up only to find the script is trying to mount your Samba share on every network you connect to, needless to say this can cause security problems, espcially when you’re broadcasting passwords over a wireless network. I ended up doing some googling and found a way to modify my script so it would only try to mount the shares when the script knew it was on my home network, heres what the script looks like:
#!/bin/sh
sleep 20 #Hold here, allows for the wireless to connect.
ESSID=`/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 | grep ESSID | cut -d ‘”‘ -f 2` #Get the ESSID.
case $ESSID in
“yournetwork”)
gksudo “mount -t cifs -o credentials=/path/to/cred //ip/share /mnt/dir”
;;
*)
exit
;;
esac
Obviously you get to fill in your own details, but with this, and adding it to the start up list in Gnome’s sessions this script will automatically wait 20 seconds before checking what wifi network it is on, if its on your network then it will mount the share, if not it will just exit. There is also a handy forum post here to solve shutdown issues related to CIFS.
RSN 2.0 Is Underway
Posted by voice | Filed under RSN2.O
So, its finally begun, the construction of RSN 2.0. Actually, I’ve been working on it for a few days now, but its finally starting to take shape. As of right now all thats done is the user registration system (though disabled at the moment), the user login system, and most of the user control panel.
One of the new features on this site will be the optional Censored mode. This mode is primarily aimed towards the younger crowd and all it essentially does is take swear words and other “inappropriate” words and replaces them with the well loved asterisk (*). There are other advantages to it for normal members which will come around as the site nears completeion.
