Monthly Archive for June, 2004

Page 4 of 4

Movielink/Rant

Published on 2004/6/3 in Liberty. 0 Comments

Just saw Movielink (warning: IE required) brandname a few times today–screenshots of it integrated with WMP10 and on this tabletry blog.

On the one hand, I’m glad that the movie industry is actually adopting the online movie model which has been around for a while now, without their participation. On the other, the restrictive Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) stuff sucks. As the blogger I linked to noted, you are allowed to watch up to 30 days after you download…BUT once you start you have to finish in 24hrs. Oops. Double timed. You download the file but despite the fact you paid for it, it will still fizzle after 30 days, even though theres no technical reason to .

Hard DRM, on both occasions which I’ve encounted it on WMP have failed, it looks like Loren had a similiar bombing. Oops. And what if your hard disk dies, yada ya.

I seem to recall every one of these foul DRM systems for music failing until the kinder DRM’d iTunes MS came around. Part of me would love to see the same thing happen for this. Are movies different though? The large files are typically a pita to download if you don’t have a vibrant college campus LAN handy, unlike music. You rent movies, you don’t rent music. People are used to not having rights when it comes to movies.

Hah, I like the college.movielink.com bit, down to the animal house-esque font. They ‘get’ where the people who know all about downloading movies are and that they’re a worthy target, and a harder sell. Still $3.75 for one viewing might be a little high.

Heh, maybe if dormies got together and pooled for it. Oops, thats violating the TOS. Ah well. Walls walls, everywhere.

Misc.

Published on 2004/6/1 in 'log. 1 Comment
  1. Wikipedia gets a nice makeover.

    2. I wonder what took someone so long to come up with a nice skin that had consensus. I also wonder if I should adopt it for my Mediawiki. Maybe a tint to the background like the current version’s icon and header. Is this sleezy? I mean Wikipedia is FDL, the code is GPL so it’s legal at least.

  2. Lots of RSS stuff
    1. I updated Carnage4Life’s .NET Screenscraping code for K5–see here (K5Diary2RSS.cs). Something isn’t quite right with the titles (lots of extra spaces in my reader) but I only read a couple K5 diaries and what I got it to produce is good enough for now. Also, only updated rss v1.0, 0.91 should be same though. I’m sorta doubting anyone else will use it.
      1. Couldn’t get it to run on .26 version of Mono which is the only version which was to be found for Debian Stable. Wonder if a newer version would work or if it’s gliched somehow. The error reporting wasn’t very good.
      2. Ended up having to do a hack were the CLI binary runs on windows with a shortcut under cygwin and rcp’s my feeds up to my serve. Yay hacks.
    2. Also discovered jwz‘s screenscraper-to-rss called cheesegrater and set that up for a few of the feeds it supports.
    3. Found XANGA does RSS afterall even if they don’t have it in their header: http://xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=(username) is the format.
    4. DiaryLand doesn’t appear to after much searching–I can only say: fascists!

    Life itself is good. Calculus isn’t too bad, the new professor–Kullman (we changed at chain rule) reminds me of what Richard Feynman must have been like (only listened to his lectures) . Uses good strategies for lecture–repetitious problems with a main common thread all on the board at once I noticed today. Seemed very effective at reminding me of the content, though none of it is new to me (had Calc in HS).

    Spent less at the amazing Jungle Jim‘s uber-grociery (2-3x Sam Club size with more or less all Int’l foods) than at the local Oxford Kroger on pretty much the same amount of food. This supports the idea that the local Kroger is the third most expensive Kroger in the country.

    PBase (Photography Base) is pretty cool, visited again. Never any shortage of well photographed albums at high resolution suitable for wallpapering. Now that I have a camera and have taken pictures (esp like the Nature 2,3) to use as backgrounds, not so much of a big deal.

    I still can’t get over this rainbow from last years vacation to Denali. Google found it recently and My server’s been treating users of Google Image Search to at least one picture of actual quality.

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