Jon’s thoughts on P2P file sharing and the media

There’s been a lot of debate as of lately about file sharing and people downloading pirated material.

Peter Mandelson’s announcement on cracking down on file sharers this week has raised some groups raising opposition in the media, including things on Facebook. I thought I would write some thoughts here.

Firstly it was the Pirate Bay, a Swedish organisation who set up a search engine to find bit torrents (sections of files stored on individuals computers being shared around the world) that were in the news over their arrest.

Some years ago, there used to be a web site called Audio Galaxy, this came shortly after Napster. I got lured into getting free music on the advise off a friend. It was quite simple, it was just a plain web site and if you couldn’t find the artist or song you were looking for, ie: that artist’s record label had set it to be blocked you just deliberately spelt it wrong and you normally find what you were looking for. After a year of court cases or so, the judges decided Audio Galaxy couldn’t protect the rights of the musicians and it was shut down for good.

After this I decided not to download music any more, why? Because as a Christian I felt that it was stealing, it wasnt until a year I deleted all the music I had that I didn’t have on a CD or got from iTunes. Instead when using iTunes I could pay for songs but more often than not I would just go on their to go “window shopping” for music, ie: I could listen to 30 seconds or so of a song, but rather than buy it I preferred to stick to CDs, as sometimes a really great artist can have a album of consistently good songs and its nice to have all of them, and another coloured bit of plastic to stick on a book shelf. Yes my preferred way to get music I like is get second hand CDs of ebay. Why, as someone else probably has what I am looking for paid the full price and got tired of it, so as long as its in good condition, second hand is good for me, especially as probably most of the 50 or so CDs I have bought in the last few years were less than £3.

Also, if you created something for a living, a piece of music, starred in a movie or wrote software, its your bread and butter, you don’t want someone else taking your work for free. If you were doing pencil drawings on the sea front, you wouldn’t be very happy and someone suddenly coming up with a camera and taking pictures of your work, then finding out a copy of that drawing was in a friend’s house above their fireplace as the bought it cheaper from other part of town? I have worked for two software companies, I am not a programmer but I do provide a service of support and providing the tools (good maintained PCs, laptops, etc) to the men and women that write those software applications. If that company’s products ended up on bit torrent I could have no job and can’t pay my bills.

When the Pirate Bay got shut down earlier this year, there were massive rallies of people supporting those folks as the three men all got prison sentences. There’s even political groups called the Pirate party that specifically want to let people carry on downloading whatever they like without threat of legal action. Ok I admit record labels do not always work with good ethics, and the fact that Sony music put malware on music CDs to put stealth software on peoples computers without them knowing really should be illegal and someone ought to be fired and put in prison over that.

Let me get this straight, did the three Swedish guys set up Pirate bay for free as volunteers? Were they the Scandinavian Robin Hoods of the digital age don’t you think they made a bit of money from banner advertising and sponsors, actually quite a bit of money??? But a political party that is based against copyright? Huh? I thought the main priorities political organisations should rally around is improve our health services, schools, police and fire services, get maximum value for money for our taxes, reduce crime, unemployment and poverty, and help the environment not try to keep people fill up the computer hard disks with as much dishonestly obtained media as they can??? This doesn’t make any sense.

Hard disks are getting ridiculously cheap with 1 Terabyte of disk storage available for less than $100 or so, but internet providers are finding even with so called ‘unlimited download’ packages, they don’t have the bandwidth to sustain people 24×7 helping themselves to an inexhaustible supply of entertainment, and may have to sending threatening letters with the hint of cutting people off.

In this digital age, we all want things here and now, its exciting I find that I can hear a song on the radio of something I grew up with but never knew the name of the band, a quick google search of the lyrics and there it is, then listen to it on iTunes, then get it and pay for it there and then. This quick purchase to scheme ought to grow onto more mobile devices now. Getting more abilities to get music on the fly without some maddeningly complex DRM scheme you have to jump hoops through is a must.

I am quite a big fan of mainly 1980s-reformed for quite a few years lately-but now defunkt British band New Order, with their most recent album they offered a free MP3 download of a song which had 30 seconds of 5 different tracks of their album melded together, which was enough to convince me that that albums was worth buying. And it was! More of this kind of marketing please record labels. Also make all those nice rare stuff and B sides that impossible to find available buy or obtain as a bonus please!!!

I am big music fan and since passing 30 few year back my musical diet as grown more and more widely, collecting all the missing albums of the artists I like, songs from TV commercials, music from movies (getting quite into John Williams and Ennio Moricconi especially) stuff I group up with and new talent that might not so far have got recognition deserved.

The basic thing I am saying is here, if you live music, movies, games and applications, please pay or them, and keep the people employed in those industries in jobs. You can’t moan that music isn’t like the good old days if you just rip it off of Bit Torrent. Some organisations have sprung to provide better more direct ways for artists to get paid for their work, I have bought two CDs from Cdbaby.com who are good example of this.

Using applications like Limewire or Bit Torrent not only is illegal and hurts jobs, it also is a BIG security risk for your computer, as spyware is usually bundled with Limewire, and you could easily accidentally configure both apps to make some other the folders on your computer shareable to the outside world, possibly compromise a business’s IT security to hackers, or mean (probably not likely) you could be prosecuted. I spend a lot of time removing spyware and malicious apps which convention antivirus software cant always touch and needs specialist tools to remove, even then with modern techniques like root kits, criminals are more determined to find ways to get your computer to deliver spam or find financial information without you knowing. Software on torrents is often poisoned with nasty side effects. Mac users are non immune, the new Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ has been discovered interfered with malware.

When I get back to the UK I want to be able to know that my possible future employers isn’t in danger of having their products being ripped off.

If you cant afford to pay for software, especially things like Microsoft Office or Adobe’s graphics applications, there’s always free open source alternatives which might need a bit of retraining but much of the free software these days is becoming extremely high quality. If anyone feels that Bit Torrent etc does have a legitimate uses for things feel free to comment below.

 

Office Live – A review

Since someone told me about this at work, it sounded interesting.   Microsoft now offer a free template style web site which they host at no charge, a domain name is even thrown in.

When I needed to get an online presence to promote my plans to volunteer in Israel this seemed like a great solution.

Microsoft being the all conquering software mammoth are of course criticised, and using this service wasn’t going to win me respect with my fellow geek peers but I decided to go for it, seeing as free as good, and HTML and web design isn’t my thing and starting learning in this field isn’t on my priority list seeing as there’s other aspects in IT that more relevant to my interests.

During the registration process I was required to be a fee of GBP12 (this computer doesn’t have a pound sign )  for my domain name, ok its not too much money although I would preferred them to be upfront about this though.

Once I started editing the site, there are some premade templates (about XYZ company, contact us, various similar things) that enable to drop pictures into the suggested layouts which is quite nice.  The editing suite uses Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon style interface which works quite well here, the editing functions do seem logical and pleasant to use.

Then I found out the not so good factors.  I was using a mixture of Microsoft Office 2003 and Open Office Writer 3 to write the text in different style and colour text and copy and paste it into the site.  Because of this I think some information got corrupted cause certain pages to hang.   A typical instance of this would be that when bring up the office live site to edit it, I would just get a permanently spinning please wait symbol.   The way to get round this would be to simply delete the specific page and make a new one with the already save text in hand.   On the main page which would be the default.html site though, it was impossible to delete or edit this.

The really bad point came when I showed a church leader about my plans to go away and the web site came up mostly blank on his Vista based PC running IE7.  This was quite embarrassing, although my fault I should of checked it under several browsers in advance.   It seemed using it on different browsers and different screen resolutions would give a very different view, the neatly tiled collection of photos on my home 20” monitor would become an odd mess on a smaller display.

On the forums of Office Live there’s quite a few other people with this issues, the documentation and a response back from a support agent told me about checking for cookies and other browser settings, (which I had already done.)

Unfortunately these issues remain consistent if I change any aspect of the site on my home or work computers using different browsers or versions of Windows.

I would recommend that businesses do not use this free application it is too unreliable and not standards compliant (like a lot of Microsoft’s other products) making it not easily manageable.

I am finding since updating this blog, I really like WordPress, I can have a web site in a blog format with easily changeable themes and layouts and where as the dashboard interface takes some getting used to and some menu features are not always where you expect to find them, its perfect for any individual or business for casual writings or any kind web site that revolves round a updateable blog.

If you are curious, you can check out the Office live web site maker here www.officelive.com

read this site in English/French/German/Spanish/Russian/Arabic/Hebrew

You can read my blog in several languages including English

Vous pouvez lire mon blog en plusieurs langues dont le Français

Sie können mein Blog lesen in mehreren Sprachen, darunter Deutsch

Usted puede leer mi blog en varios idiomas incluyendo el Español

Вы можете читать мой блог в том числе несколько Языки Испанский

يمكنك قراءة بلوق بلدي في عدة لغات منها الاسبانية

אתה יכול לקרוא בבלוג שלי במספר שפות כולל ספרדית

Play CDs/DVDs on a netbook or laptop without optical drive

For this you will need to download the following free software:

Infrarecorder (if you don’t already have CD burning software) -  http://infrarecorder.org/

Daemon Tools lite – http://www.disk-tools.com/download/daemon

VLC Player (if you don’t already have DVD playback software) - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Firstly make an ISO image file of the CD or DVD in question.   I use Infrarecorder for this.   If your DVD is copy protected I am not going to tell you how to get round this or break the law, I am using one of my organisation’s promotional DVDs for this purpose.

I am using a nice Dell Latitude X1 laptop, its oldish machine but small light and has an external DVD burner.   I did this as I was setting the computer to play a looped DVD film for a conference.   There is not much space in the booth at the conference on the table to set up the external DVD drive.

I like Infrarecorder as its simple and free & open source.  I don’t care much for Nero as it make images into its own .NRG format rather than more common .ISO file.   Nero comes bundled with all kinds of extra bloated stuff most people don’t want.

Transfer the ISO file onto your laptop via network or USB drive.

I would suggest you copy your ISO file on the the root of C:\ drive of your laptop or make a folder lets say, C:\films or whatever.  This was they can be read by different people if you have multiple log in profiles on the computer.

Install Daemon Tools on the laptop.  When you do this, don’t go through the installation too quickly.   The makers of this application bundled some annoying form of search toolbar, which could be a mild spyware app.  Just make sure you untick this before doing the installation.   Once installed it will need to install some drivers to make it mimic a standard CD or DVD drive.  You will need to reboot.

Once rebooted your PC will show and extra optical drive in My Computer,  I would recommend that you not leave it mapped to D: or E: or whatever as it could get confusing, if you later plug in an external DVD drive.   So, go into Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, on the left hand side click Disk Management.   Here you can rename the drive letter of the pseudo-optical drive.   I have chosen V:for virtual DVD.

Install VLC player if you haven’t already done so.   VLC or Video LAN Player is way better than Windows Media Player, Real Player and Quicktime, and it plays DVDs.   Note it isn’t perfect (although I have been at presentations and see the three above application crash or refuse to play video properly)    Sometimes VLC may start playing the main part of the movie rather than the main film menu.   Having said that, I love VLC’s vast choice of format support, simple non-gimmicky interface and fast start up time, which other mentioned apps do very poorly.   Without hidden extra bundled software VLC is my choice for corporate use and at home.

Ok, you are almost done.   On your Windows task bar (bottom right hand corner near clock) click the silver icon with the lightning flash. From here you can select the ISO file and VLC or whatever your main choice of media player should choose to play the film straight away.  From this icon you can chose to dismount the disc or insert another one.   Windows will think its just a normal CD, it all works totally transparently.  You can even make this pretend DVD drive sharable if you wish over your network.   I have done this with some awkward applications that might not install easily over a network, gives me the advantage I can remote in (using Remote Desktop or VNC viewer) to my own PC to pick and choose the right ISO file.

This is also great if you want to go away somewhere with your laptop and not bring bulky films with you.  Ought to save battery power by not using a real DVD drive too.

It should be noted that ISO files get very big (DVDs are ~4.7Gb) so make sure you have enough hard disk space.   Recent netbook computers like Dell’s Mini 10 which might have a small SSD hard disks of 16Gb or so should definitely bear this in mind.

Enjoy watching movies whilst in bed/whilst camping/on a plane!

Put Hebrew support on Windows XP

Put Hebrew support on Windows XP

(and Arabic and Persian and any other right-to-left language)

Have been doing this in my current job and also when I was at the UK branch of NICE Systems, an Israel based VOIP telecoms recording software company, mainly as one of the proprietary web based databases had to have the Hebrew support to operate.

These tips will come in handy if you want to set up a computer to Hebrew speaking staff or for someone learning languages at home.

To start with you will need your XP CD handy as Windows will need to fetch some files off it, if you have a computer like a Sony Viao/E machines/Packard Bell etc PC which don’t provide you with CDs to restore your operating system you will need to check your C: drive for a folder called i386.

Go to Control panel and Region and Language Options.   Tick the box that says “install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)”

Click Apply and ok.   Windows will now ask you for your Windows CD, if you don’t have it, choose a path where your i386 folder is, ie: C:\i386.   Once done, you can go back to the “languages” tab and click Details and then choose Hebrew.

You can test now this by going to www.google.co.il

If you live in Israel don’t forget to set your time zone to Jerusalem GMT+2 hours.   To do this double click the clock in the bottom right hand corner and then click on time zones.

Don’t forget if you are or your users have two or more languages and you don’t want to use the little blue square language control icon on the taskbar, you can use Alt + Caps lock to switch keyboard layouts.  Some of my users need Russian as well as about 10-15% of Israelis originate from the ex-Soviet Union countries.

If you need a Hebrew keyboard, take a look on ebay, you can get sticker sets very cheap to give you the necessary symbols to type in Hebrew.

Browser wars and customer’s data

Blogging some regular geek stuff today.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/08/orange_and_ie6/

Just read this article on the register on IT techs working for Orange are getting into trouble for using Firefox at work.   Now I understand that you should follow company’s procedures for using software that’s approved, but for a lot of big companies still sticking with using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (the browser that comes with Windows XP)  really need to start getting upto speed with their security.

Its well known the IE6 is incredibly insecure even with all latest updates and patches on, businesses must start moving on from using dangerously flawed legacy applications.

I went into my bank (Lloyds TSB) before I went away, and my records are being stored on a PC with IE6 with some kind of web based customer relations software.

Word up to Orange and Lloyds TSB and any other business using IE6 to keep my data, start looking at your security procedures.  I am not happy you could be putting me, the customer’s data at risk on such an obsolete poor excuse for a web browser.  If you are not interested, I don’t want to be a customer of you any more.

Firefox really actually should be an easy app to support and use in the work place.  True, some finicky apps will insist on ActiveX plug ins and wont work on anything but IE6, but this can easily be solved with a Firefox extension called IETab which can automatically render certain sites with URL filtering.

The ActiveX system in IE 6 (and 7&8) can let all kinds of uninvited nasties in your machine.  Firefox’s main security advantage is it doesn’t support ActiveX, but is easily scalable and can be customised by add on extensions, these can be locked out by making sure the user doesn’t have Admin rights of course.  Of course, no browser is completely secure but from supporting people in business and at home using Firefox, users generally take to it without much training and generally don’t tend to break their computer’s set up or get security problems really at all, plus you can use it under Mac and Linux as well.

God and work part II

….continued

After the contract at the hospital finished I started to wonder at the great opportunities God has given me in the last few years and what would happen next, I was determined to stick to a contract and not a permanent role due to some other projects I was looking at later that year.

My current employer as of April 2009 is Tandberg Television. The company is round the corner from Nice Systems who I was at last year, TTV are makers of television broadcasting solutions and were acquired recently by Swedish telecoms giants Ericsson. Its a great place to work and I have 9 other Christians who I meet with on tuesday lunch breaks. Things are good.