Archive for October, 2009

GiveWell does a pretty unique job of finding out which charities it is worth donating to. Looks like it's hard to get enough information of various charities to assess their effectiveness because most of them aren't very open.

Apple has recently made some countermeasures to block users who are not using the official QuickTime player to watch their movie trailers, such as Linux users. This bothered me deeply since I watch those trailers for more than a year and would like to do so in the future.

I presumed that correctly downloading movies required some user agent related masturbation and Wireshark proved me right when monitoring HTTP on a Windows host. After that it wasn't a big deal to play an Apple trailer:

mplayer -cache 4048 -user-agent QuickTime/7.5 http://movies.apple.com/movies/disney/achristmascarol/achristmascarol-fte1_480p.mov

This is really nice but I wanted to make it work out of the box. Though adding the user-agent option to an MPlayer or mplayerplug-in config file seemed like a viable option, unfortunately mplayerplug-in didn't respect this option in any config files.

Fortunately I realized that the Quicktime user agent string is hardcoded in mplayerplug-in for apple.com as of 2009-09-23 CVS.

Since the latest official release is very old, one has to build it from the CVS:

sudo apt-get remove mozilla-mplayer
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerplug-in.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mplayerplug-in co -P mplayerplug-in
cd mplayerplug-in
sudo apt-get install libxul-dev
GECKO_XPIDL=/usr/lib/xulrunner/xpidl ./configure
make
sudo cp mplayerplug-in*.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/components
sudo cp mplayerplug-in*.xpt /usr/lib/mozilla/components

You also need to set the cache size of MPlayer so you won't only see the first few secs of the movies but the rest also.  Have this line in /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf :

cachesize=4092

Now restart Firefox and use my Greasemonkey script to make the Apple Trailer pages work with mplayerplug-in.

Enjoy the movies and have fun!

It's a very cool seminar on the topic.

Normally I don't put anything overly twisted on my blog but I'll do an exception this time because it made me roll on the floor.

This lovely movie certainly represents the ultimate level of pervert humour.

Thanks for sharing, Dömi!

Dr. Kevin Gurey has made a fabulous lecture on the topic.  It's very informative, it's full of statistical informations and has ideas to present the problem to the general public.

I think carbon emission trading is a good motivator which is necessary seeing the effects of global warming.

I saw the above mentioned movie about two months ago and it had a profound effect on me.  If you wanna know why is there corn in our hair, how is it possible that we spend half of the money for food as our ancestors and why diabetes rised dramatically during the last decades then you should watch this movie.

The creators of this movie were inspired by the work of Michael Pollan who seems to be a very wise man and I want to read some of his books in the future.

I've tried to let the Siemens Gigaset team know about some software problems through their customer care form:

Dear Sir / Madam,

I've noticed several problems with the Gigaset S685 IP model which I'd
like you let you know about to be able to fix them.

First, the messenger disconnects after about a week or inactivity.  I
haven't monitored the exact timespan and it may not be a fixed
timespan but it happens from time to time.  I don't know whether it's
caused by the inactivity in the messenger or ISP / Jabber service
outage but it's surely disturbing.  I'd expect the messenger to
reconnect automatically as soon as possible without needing to
explicitly restarting it on the phone.

The other problem is that the web administration interface of the base
station is not accessible from the gateway.  I'd like to connect to
the web interface through VPN from my router and it seems that it's
possible to connect from every IP, except the gateway IP.

Please let me know whether you know about these issues and when will
you fix them.

Thanks in advance,
László Monda

First I specified Hungary as my country and my Hungarian email address.  They redirected my email to a Hungarian company who didn't know shit about the issue and couldn't forward it to the engineers.

Then I specified Germany as my country and used my GMail email address.  This time I haven't got any responses.

I always try to avoid buying any closed source devices exactly because of such experiences.  I needed a cordless SIP phone which supports bluetooth headsets so I haven't had much options.  Maybe a smart phone with a SIP softphone would be a better choice, but that'd be more expensive.

I'm absolutely blown away by near-space balloon photography!

On a related note, it's also good to know about the CHDK firmware and HDR imaging.  I won't think much about the brand of my future digicam.

I've just bought two pendrives. There is a shiny decal on them with the title "artisjus" in their center. Seems like I've just payed their tax, so thanks for remembering me. (In case you don't know, artisjus is the Hungarian equivalent of the RIAA.)

Do you expect me to buy any music albums after such an incident? Go figure.

Aki hozzám hasonlóan egyetért ezzel a kezdeményezéssel, azt kérem, hogy töltse ki, illetve töltesse ki az aláí­rásgy?jt? í­vet minél több emberrel.

Beküldeni pedig november közepéig kellene a szokásos cí­mre: Seres Mária, 1426 Budapest, Pf.: 122.