I think that sums it up nicely. =D

This is pretty rad… live updates from Twitter users, and you can filter by candidate and VP. It's like a stream of politics. [link]

I read a really great white paper on Thursday on this issue from a couple guys at Princeton University, J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten. Excellent work. They seriously tore apart this stuff, and they know what they're talking about. I found it with a Google search, but it was on copyright.gov, and don't ask me what it was doing there. I found a link to it on Wikipedia that was hosted at Princeton: here. And here is the original link I found.

The story goes that Mark Russovich first discovered this, or at least was the first to make it public, when RootkitRevealer turned up evidence of a rootkit. He eventually tracked it back to a protection technology on CD's, which reminded him of a CD he had recently bought that was copy-protected.

If you do accept the license agreement on the program that autoruns, something called active protection software will installed on your system, and a rootkit installed to attempt prevention of defeating the system. The whitepaper goes into detail in this, but it is very well written and clearly worded, so worry not. And, back to the CD, what also autoruns when you insert the CD (of course assuming AutoRun is enabled) is a executable named go.exe (though I have not been able to detect it so far) which is passive protection software.

Since Microsoft added this rootkit to their definitions in the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and I downloaded the September version, and it supposedly runs automatically after downloading, the rootkit should be taken care of. And, assuming everything is the same as mentioned in the whitepaper, it seems to be upon testing. What I did was to prefix the name of a text file with "$sys$" (no quotes). If the rootkit was in effect, that file should have disappeared, as mentioned by Mark Russovich in his blog post. And it didn't. Hmmm. But, much to my chagrin, the rogue drivers that the active protection software put on my system seem to still be in effect, though I cannot find them. Arg. I ran a Symantec tool that would take care of the rootkit, but the tool didn't find it, which confirmed that it wasn't there. The drivers still seem to be having the scrambled-audio effect on protected discs. Or at least this one.

One idea that I have is that I could have a new version of XCP. That would be extremely uncool.

Also something I read; there is evidence that the makers of XCP stole parts of open-source software and illegally put it in the XCP software.

So, this is really getting to be a nasty business. I'll make at least one more post on this.

When you mouse over a music file, it plays! No media player needs to be open.

Not too long ago, I got my Switchfoot CD, Nothing is Sound. It was all good, until I noticed the CD case said that the content was protected. Ummm… hmmm. That made me think of DRM. I popped the disc into my laptop, and sure enough, a program autoran… a nice and shiny Flash app that would let me listen to the CD, burn copies (limited copies, of course), or rip the music to my hard drive. I ended up ripping it. Took long enough. Once it was finally done, it was easy enough to launch Winamp and play the tracks. And the catch? They were in restricted Windows Media Audio format, or WMA DRM. Ok, so that works… I can listen to it, and the MP3 player I had ordered supports WMA DRM. Even so, I found the DRM annoying, especially since I didn't know about it when I ordered the album… and the app would rip the music at a maximum level of 192 Kbps, which is OK, but not the best possible quality.

Time to experiment. And… Winamp won't play the disc as a music CD. The audio files couldn't be found from Explorer. I had heard of DRM being removable, so I looked around online. OK, it could be done, but the programs were not free, and according to a blog post I found, doing it that way is illegal. Supposedly there is a analog loophole as mentioned in the post, but I didn't go that way… I think my sound card might not even support it anyway.

I stuck the thing in my old CD player and hit play. And it played. Ok, so the standard music CD data was there. I booted Ubuntu to see what I could do from there. Sweet! I could access the music data from there. Turns out it had both music and data on it, something I believe is called a multi-mode disc.

OK, so simple enough. Rip the CD to FLAC from Ubuntu, encode into MP3 in Windows, using BonkEnc. Easy as pie… almost. Everything was good, except for the fact that a few minutes of garbage sound were getting tacked onto the last track. The CD played just fine in Ubuntu, but for some reason or another, there was a problem ripping the last track.

I ended up using BonkEnc to transcode the last track to WAV, and then fired up Audacity for a little down and dirty editing. I could get the exact length of the ripped WMA using Winamp, and so I planned to trim the file down to that length. Except, Audacity doesn't seem to have any jump to time function. Arg. I hit Google looking for a plugin or some sort of solution, but didn't turn up anything.

So, I had to do it the hard way: zoom waaaay in. I found the time, put the marker there, highlighted back, and trimmed. Saved the WAV, transcoded back into FLAC. Woot. Transcode into MP3, and it's ready for my MP3 player.

It took long enough, but I got a set of unrestricted FLAC files. Later I read that the band wasn't exactly happy about the copy protection Sparrow Records put on their album. They even posted a workaround online, but Sony took it down, and I haven't found out what it is. I did found out on Wikipedia that this stuff is called Extended Copy Protection. And it's evil… but more on that later… it got enough publicity in 2005 anyway.

Mirror: (direct download, by Zonator.com): a tool for Google Chrome, although it seems to work for Firefox and Internet Explorer, too. What it consists of is an always-on-top box that you can drag links and tabs from Firefox onto and it will open them with your program of choice. From the readme: "While using Chrome, Google's new browser, we found that a lot of sites sites don't work, due to missing plugins for the new platform." OK, and you can open them in another browser with Mirror. Handy. Maybe.

CrossOver Chromium: Can't wait to try Chrome on Mac or Linux? Wine makes it possible. Check it out.

Chrome themes: Hack your Chrome! Also, check out this blog post for instructions on installing the themes.

Cheers!

Yes, despite being sick, I shall put up some posts. =)

I recently tried out the Avant Browser again. It is actually a shell to Internet Explorer, something I already knew, but a very impressive shell at that. The interface seem fairly cluttered, but it is brimming with features. Useful features, at that. Some of them are: mouse gestures, an ad blocker (which seems to have a preloaded list! woot!), add-ons and IE add-ons support, and an online browser data storage service (Bookmarks, RSS Feeds, AutoFills). Also interesting and kind of cool is the ability to display multiple web pages at once; in windows inside the browser, really. I remember someone saying a browser that could display multiple pages at once would win them over. Well, there you go. Pretty easy, too, just cascade or tile horizontally or vertically.

The reason I uninstalled it again this time (though I reinstalled it to write this)? It kept setting IE as my default browser. But it doesn't seem to be doing that now… hmmm.

I have blown my nose what seems to be a numberless amount of times today (depleting the school tissue supply a bit) and sneezed enough times to expect to have to go chasing after my head the next time. I hate having a cold.

I could say it's not as bad as the post title sounds... but... well... it is. I don't claim to be an expert, in fact Matthew took Economics class in high school, whereas I haven't, but in any case, the US economy is starting to bend, or rather snap, under the load of debt. This debt has been blamed on people not being able to pay back housing loans, and lending companies going broke because of it. Lehmanns went bust, but the US government bailed out AIG out with a $85 million loan, I think. They've also bailed out a bunch of other companies, too... to be honest, I'm not quite sure what's happening right now, but I do know huge package (like $700 billion) to support the companies that are going broke is being hashed out in the government.

Sorry.... this post is a little scrambled... but oh well, maybe I can write more and better later... feel free to help out, Matthew. :p

Edit by Nathaniel; December 11, 2008: I found out this is pirated. Phooey. So... link removed and you can buy it here in hard copy, PDF, or both.

Check this [link removed] out if you want an in-depth explanation of TCP/IP.

Edit by Nathaniel; September 23: Just warning you, this is a 12.7 megabyte PDF, so if you have a slow internet connection like me... now you know. Ta!

Google's released the first beta of their browser, Chrome, on September 2. Of course, it might be in beta for years, but anyway... the browser's features and some of what's under the hood were known the day before from a comic that was leaked onto the internet. The comic has since been released by Google. Google then released the browser a day early.

Chrome gained usage share quickly, surpassing Opera, in fact. At least for a while. It's currently at 0.68%, according to Net Applications. Check out their Chrome tracking for updated info.

And my opinion....

It's pretty sweet. The browser is lightweight and very usable. It feels like an awesome minamilist meld of Safari and Firefox. I really like the UI. And... add feed management, and then really nobody should use IE!

Of course, the browser is having it's share of troubles, such as being affected by the 2 second stop Flash bug like Firefox, or getting Hotmail's gander up because of the browser's user agent, which, interestingly enough, includes Safari and Mozilla.

So... I like Chrome. But it's not replacing Firefox for me. Except for one thing. Gmail. I use Gmail in Chrome as an application, which works much like Prism in Firefox. It's pretty speedy with Gmail, and the cache keeps loading time pretty quick, which is great because I'm on dial-up. And I don't have to reload Gmail if I have to restart Firefox or it crashes.

And... some links.

Wikipedia article for the technical rundown.

Grand Stream Dreams has two good posts on Chrome, here, where he shares a bunch of links, and here, where he pokes Chrome with a stick; reccomended reading, as he points out the real installer of Chrome (since the installer downloads Chrome from the internet) and also points out a sweet way to get the nightly builds.

September 19, 2008 Edit: Hmm, I forgot to post a link to Chrome. Lol. Download Chrome.

I got this camera at a yard sale in Moscow, ID for $15. It's a Canon Rebel EOS Ti 35mm. Here is the camera, and the User Manual, which was nice since it didn't come with the camera. I don't mind that it's not digital, and it is quite nice, so I'm looking forward to experimenting! =)

Art: Check this, this, this, and this out. Karmann Ghias are so photogenic. =)
Theology: If you ever find yourself saying, "I'm bored," (I never do, but I've heard some people say it) you should read through this. It will challenge your thoughts.
Tech: This is pretty funny for those of you Linux nerds.
Politics: We're doomed. America is doomed. Waaauuuuggghhhhhhh.

Hmmm, so I got the template uploaded yesterday. It was working, but then suddenly the images were not loading. Lo and behold, it turned out that the Google Pages site where the images were hosted (aborregate.googlepages.com) had hit the bandwidth limit. Fortuneately, data was loading again that night, so I snagged the images. Except for one I didn't know about, a bullet that evidently was referenced in the template but wasn't in use on the blog at the moment.

So today I uploaded the images for our template, Subtlebeauty, to ImageShack and edited the template to point to those images. Everything seems to be working. Wootness.

If you want to use this template (but then you would look like us :p), here are the image links, hosted at ImageShack. I also listed files hosted on the Google Pages site, but use the ImageShack files, because you may experience bandwidth limitation issues with the Google Pages site. ImageShack files on the left.

subtlebullet.gif (Google Pages)
subtlebg.gif (Google Pages)
subtleheader.gif (Google Pages)
subtledate.gif (Google Pages)

Ok... there. Second post. Phew.

Our first post... and it's only for reference!