A Mind @ Play

The Future of File-Sharing

On 5th November 2008

Moses and the Eleventh Commandment

The war against file-sharing that currently rages primarily over the Internet will ultimately be lost. That’s my prediction. I can’t support this argument with any authority, being no expert in the fields of law, politics or technology, but instead make my statement on the basis of many years’ observation from the wilderness. But the trends all point to this being the case. File-sharing has become a mainstay of this new generation, a fact which has forced most corporations and organisations to rethink their strategies and come up with ways to stem the tide. We have already seen many changes in this direction, such as the explosion of digital content that is now available online from legitimate sources. But in addition to this carrot, the war is also being waged with a stick, as organisations set out to have legislation passed to clamp down on file-sharing activities, and new technologies are created to lock down digital content and prevent its spread. So what will the future bring?

New Domain Name

By Fips

On 4th November 2008

In General

After more than two years at a temporary location, and in part to celebrate breaking the hundred post barrier (albeit almost unnoticed), this blog has ‘moved’ to a new location. Whilst the hosting remains the same, the blog can now be found under the new domain name amindatplay.eu. There may be a few broken links around the place, but everything seems to be working well so far. With the amount of work being done to release WordPress 2.7 in November, it might also be time for a bit of a clean before winter hibernation, so perhaps expect a few tweaks and perhaps an experimental new layout or two in the next few of weeks.

Support for Renewables

By Fips

On 31st October 2008

In General, Transport

We’ve had a pellet boiler installed at these premises for a number of years, and whilst generally pretty efficient and reliable, recently there were some problems which couldn’t be solved with the usual panache of just hitting it and telling it to work. The boiler, a 15 kW Künzel PL15, had got stuck in a de-ashing cycle and would only intermittently fire up before returning to this cycle. Unfortunately, the firm which installed the boiler had in the meantime gone out of business, and our only option was to send for an engineer from a neighbouring county, which took several days, before the unit could be looked at. It turned out to be a problem with the microprocessor controller, the piece of kit which maintains the boiler’s high efficiency, though obviously beyond our capabilities to solve without sufficient technical knowledge (even the engineer who appeared on site had to call back to base for instructions that weren’t included in his handbook).

Unfortunately there appears to be precious little information out there on the web. I spent some moments trying to find descriptions of problems similar to ours, or find a support forum for users of equipment such as ours where we could perhaps get some feedback, without success. That could of course come more as a result of my Googling skills than anything else. Do you know of any sites, forums or otherwise which deals with pellet boilers and their ilk? If not, is there enough call for one to be set up?

Juice on Vista

By Fips

On 31st October 2008

In General

Whilst installing the latest version of Juice, a cross-platform podcast receiver on Windows Vista, I came across a rather simple error that prevented the program from functioning correctly on the first load, and then from loading thereafter. The error log generated the following output (where xxx indicates the username):

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\xxx\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'

Fortunately the fix seems to be quite simple and pain free (though a bit of a hassle to implement manually), found courtesy of Randall’s Life.

Change the compatability mode of the application to Windows XP SP2 mode. To do this, right-click the application file, or a shortcut to the program, select properties, click the ‘Compatability’ tab and then tick the box to ‘Run this program in compatability mode for:’ and select the appropriate option from the download menu.
Locate the file Ipodder.cfg (normally found under C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\iPodder) and edit it such that the line reading “download_dir = ‘C:\\Users\\xxx\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'” instead reads “download_dir = ‘C:\\Users\\xxx\\Documents\\My Received Podcasts'”.

After that, the program should run normally.

Rise and Fall of the Blogosphere

By Fips

On 29th October 2008

In General

A recent Wired article has certainly provoked some controversy amongst bloggers. Claiming that blogs are history, and that Twitter, Flickr and Facebook are the future, the post’s author Paul Boutin recommends that anyone who’s thinking of starting a blog should stop, and anyone already writing one should pack it in.

Whilst I wouldn’t normally comment on a post of this ilk (given my feelings about bloggers who blog about blogging) it seems pretty clear that unless Boutin is giving us a tongue-in-cheek excuse for a debate on web trends, he’s essentially wrong in his assessment. After all, it comes as no surprise that Boutin proclaims the fall of the blogosphere from the comfort of a blog entry, nor indeed that he rails against his own ilk in decrying the “tsunami of paid bilge” that ranks highest on the Technorati charts. The idea that blogs should be abandoned on account of the fact that personal blogs rarely garner any extended readership or popularity calls into question why authors set up their blogs in the first place, and why indeed they should switch to other means if popularity is their main objective. Boutin upbraids blogs for being text-only affairs, a charge which I daresay isn’t especially accurate, particularly since it is easily possible these days to integrate precisely those services that are supposed to supercede blogs, such as Flickr or Youtube.

Of course, no one can deny that the nature of the Internet is constantly changing, so much the better, and whilst the blogosphere may start to shrink once the new wave of Web2.0 forms of communication become fully fledged, they will merely overlap and supplement the current crop of technologies available. The continued prominence of email, IRC, Usenet and web forums all point to this fact. So whilst I daresay the number of new blogs appearing on the web will start to slow as new users find outlet to their thoughts on other media, there may always be a place for the humble (and not so humble) blogs that litter the webscape today.

[Via huffenglish.com]