Here is an insightful article by which talks about the recording industry’s (The *AA’s) inability to adapt to the Internet age and the destructive solution that is DRM. I am glad the mainstream media is shining some light in the issue that us geeks have been ranting about for years.
As we all know, Vista was released last week with big events all over the globe. With these events also came huge wall size ads announcing Vista’s “WOW” to the world. These ads can be seen all over subway stations in Toronto. This morning on my way to class, I spotted this “modified” ad:
Now, while I’m all for Linux exposure, I’m not too sure about the negative image this may bring to Linux. Most people walking by most likely have not clue what “Linux” is and may now equate it as some graffiti tag cut-out that some delinquent kids made on top of some Vista thing ad. Hopefully I’m wrong. Regardless of what the general population may think of this, I have to say that as a Linux user, it gave me a good laugh.
Edit: The pictures are from Finch station.
Edit [2007-02-06 09:59 am]: It has now been removed. After closer inspection and more caffeine this morning, it is safe to say that I may stand corrected (It looks like it was a cut out). They removed it by cutting off the paint around the letters. It is now mostly a big square cut-out on top of the windows logo.
This is the story of George Vaccaro, a Verizon customer who recently had a very interesting encounter with Verizon’s billing department.
The bulk of the story is that George was quoted 0.002 cents per KB for data charges he would incur during a trip to Canada. After getting confirmation of this value from several Verizon reps, George made sure that this quote was saved within his file. Fast forward to a couple of days ago, George received a bill of 100 times what he was quoted for. Now, you might be thinking, hey, 100 times?, maybe they meant to say 0.002 dollars per KB instead of cents per KB? and you would be right, that is what George thought as well. However, as this humorous phone conversation with supervisors and managers at Verizon shows, they did not mean 0.002 dollars, they meant 0.002 cents per KB. So what is going on here? Is Verizon hiring people without elementary level education to do their billing? Is it really a “difference of opinion” as Verizon’s floor manager so insightfully put it (not!)?
After yet another confirmation of their quote through e-mail and their “generous” offering of halving his bill (I’m surprised they knew how to divide by 2), one can only guess what else is going on in that organization’s billing department. As of right now, Verizon has yet to admit their mistake and its employees do not know what the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents is.
I have had my share of interaction with incompetence corporations like Verizon and it is time that their studpidy and blatant disrespect for the customers by upper management when they put scripted drones in the front is brought to light.
That is why kids, pay attention to your grade 4 teacher when she goes over decimals and fractions, specially when she uses currency as an example! It may come in handy one day.
Sad.
Edit:
A friend of mine just sent me a link to Songbird. From the website..
Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and
skinsfeathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.
After a quick test on my main Ubuntu desktop, I have to say that I’m pleasantly impressed with what they’ve accomplished. I’m not one to jump on a new media player bandwagon as they all seem bloated and mostly useless to me but the simple fact that Songbird runs on XUL via XULRunner sparked my interest. At first glance it appears to me like a well done mix of ITunes/Rhythmbox/Winamp. I will save any further judgment until 1.0 is released but from a quick glance, it has great potential.
Anyone actually considering upgrading to this OS? Read this article. As it wasn’t enough with all the DRM mess they expect us to swallow, they announce this. There are few words that can describe my thoughts towards this decision by our Redmond friends. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess how many F’s and S’s my thoughts include.
Bye bye Windows.
I’ve released lget 0.3. You can get it from addons.mozilla.org. This version is verified to work with Firefox 2.0 RC-1.
After almost four years of graduating from Seneca College, I am now back in school. This time I am enrolled in Ryerson University working towards a B.Sc in Computer Science. Due to my academic and professional history, I managed to get a little more than a year’s worth of credits. Therefore if everything goes well (ie: I don’t fail), I should be able to wrap up the degree in three years. As expected, I won’t be taking any subjects directly related to programming or technology for the next few semesters as I have been granted credits for almost all required programming courses, however, I am having fun in all the non-programming courses such as: Physics, Calculus, Discrete Mathematics, Management, and French. I have the feeling my coffee drinking days will be coming back soon. I am still working as a contractor at Commercial Design, although in a more isolated and less time consuming role. All in all I’m very happy to be back at school working towards this goal I’ve wanted to achieve for a while now.
After many years of using eXTReMe tracking as a quick, and convenient way of tracking visitors, I have decided to stop using it. The main reason for my decision is the suspension of my account (without prior notification) for the simple fact of not having the link on their button. While I understand their interest in having a link and realize that it is part of their TOS, I no longer see the point in using them given that there are various others equal or better free alternatives one can use without the need for silly restrictions such as this. Bye bye eXTReMe Tracking, it’s been good but no thanks.
An interesting way of fetching for the browser history (at least part of it) has been posted by Jeremiah Grossman. More than a security flaw with the browser itself, it is more of a clever exploitation (hack) of some of the DOM functionality offered by most modern browsers. The trick involves going thorugh a predefined list of commonly visited URLs (ie: www.google.com, www.microsoft.com, etc), writing them out to the document as anchor elements with their :visited class modified to a predefined value, then traversing the list of anchors checking to see which ones have their css values altered. Whichever anchor has the altered :visited properties can be assumed to be a URL in the browser history.
Here is sample code that should work in Firefox. There are versions that work for IE as well.
So i finally decided to upgrade wordpress. It has come a long way and I’m very impressed with the new admin tools. Nifty upgrades. Additionally, I’ve redone the theme of the page and will continue working on it during the next few days, hopefully adding the remaining pages that are missing right now. I’ve also added a spam image protection to the comments’ forms in hopes of getting rid of those annoying daily couple dozen spam entries.