For readers who have been to Beacon Hill Ft CO12…

…otherwise known as “The Dubs”…

It looks like Sealand as a principality is no more, seeing as HavenCo, which owns the place, seems to have rolled up operations, and their servers have come back to UK terra firma.

Which means, Harwich (and by extension, my favourite rave spot) and Felixstowe now belong to the UK again.

(I see lots of “Huh?” in the crowd — Sealand, an oil rig off the coast of Suffolk/Essex, claims 12NM surrounding itself as its territory. Within 12NM falls approx 60% of Clacton-on-Sea, and the entirety of Tendring, Walton on the Naze, Harwich and Felixstowe. Essentially this means that these towns are contested territory. Since Sealand has rolled up, by default they are now exclusively UK territory again. I mention Beacon Hill because it is one of the few places in the mainland UK that with a decent pair of binoculars you can see Sealand (just).)

Egh, enough randomness.

Rant Number Two… feckin’ idiots.

This made me laugh. Hysterically.

From http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/20/1411213:

“Leading Hollywood film studios Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Disney Enterprises are suing Australia’s second largest ISP, iiNet, saying it’s complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material. According to a statement of claim, “the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology.”

*blink*

*blink*

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You might as well sue every ISP in the world while you’re at it!

Wake up and smell the roses, bitches:

• BitTorrent is decentralised. It can be tracked, but not stopped. What part of that don’t these mugs get!?
• Even if ISPs were to block it (many do), that doesn’t account for the use of encryption and IPsec VPNs to hide the traffic.
• If you’re going to go suing ISP’s who allow the transmission of “copyrighted material”, good luck, you will have to sue every transit provider on the way, too. Many of which are much better equipped financially and legally than these studios.
• BitTorrent has (and was intended to be used for) perfectly legitimate uses! Large ISOs… game updates… streaming TV, just to name but a few. Outlaw BitTorrent, and I guarantee the Internet will grind to a halt overnight.

The moral of this story: Media organisations in this day and age have an outdated business model that is being superseded by a far more efficient and most importantly fair one. If, instead of suing every man, woman, dog, schoolkid and corpse like they do now, they were to embrace the Internet as a distribution model this stupid s**t would stop happening.

Seriously – whoever runs these companies cannot possibly be qualified to run a business if they can’t see that…

General Rantings

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually in a fairly good mood, but REALLY PISSED OFF about a few things I need to get off my chest.

1.) Blog spammers – I do not need Viagra or Cialis, I can sustain a perfectly good erection, thank you very much. And there’s always amylnitrite for that extra edge when I want it…

2.) Sun Coolstack. Why, oh WHY, does it’s MySQL installation not come with a client utility of some sort? What the HELL is the point of installing it when I can’t access it…?

3.) Facebook Platform. *SHUDDER*. If you’ve ever done ASP.Net using seperate layout and code-behind, you will feel my pain. FBML is a horrendous, disorganised mess.

4.) Overbearing people who lie a lot and are general assholes. Yes, looking at one person in particular. Naming no names. Somebody.

5.) Netgear. Why do your routers suck? So HARD? *rage* Our DG384G needed three, THREE factory resets after a  soft reboot. The pile of crap didn’t even try to acquire a DHCP lease off our ISP until after the third reboot. =/ Please don’t report “Everything’s working OK!” when it so obviously i-

[Connection reset by peer]

[Uberpipe] New US Sun kit

Back to the tech, nyaha.

We’re trying to get some uber Sun kit colocated in Market Post Tower, San Jose CA so we will soon be extending our hosting services to the US of A.

All running Solaris too, as opposed to our European ops which run RHEL. Eventually we are contemplating getting the whole lot moved over since we’ve found it to be a much more stable platform (even if it is a bit of a pain).

Watch this space!

*Sigh*.

I’m going to deviate again from my usual subjects of posting. Remember when I posted about “life changing in an instant”? I’m going to elaborate.

Read on, if for once you want to see me sickeningly soppy… heh.

Testing Windows Live Writer in Win7

blah blah blah

reaper is a douchebag

Windows 7: KWR Preview

Note this preview is incomplete and I still need to add to/ edit bits of it, lols

I’m going to do something very, very unexpected here.

In contrast to my previous post, I’m going to praise Microsoft.

I finally got round to installing the WinHEC 6801 build of Windows 7 last night, and… well, compared to the same stage in Vista’s dev cycle, it’s a stunner. It’s what I would call “Vista Done Right”.

You heard that right. Keep reading….

There’s bloat, then there’s VS2010

Am I the only one who LOL’d at Microsoft Visual Studio 2010’s frankly quite ridiculous hardware requirements?

First off, the download for the CTP? 7,268MB. No, that’s not a typo, and that’s all in RAR files. I cringe to think how big that expands to when you factor in the decompressed version.

Then, there’s VS2010’s hardware requirements. Hold onto something;

CPU Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz or equilavent
RAM 2GB; 1GB for host OS and 1GB for the VS sandbox VPC itself
HDD 75, you read that right, seventy fricking five gigabytes of hard drive space.

75GB!? *blink blink* What?

To put this in perspective, that’s nearly four HUNDRED times the size of the latest Mono snapshot at the time of this post.

Oh dear.

I think it’s time for me to consider a change of IDE when it comes to .NET development…

Ulteo: the identity-confused operating system

Well, OK, it’s technically Linux on a coLinux base running in Windows. It’s more or less the entire size of a Linux distro, so hiding it as anything else is an excercise in futility. However, the way it’s implemented is done in an awesome way. It’s the first Linux distro I’ve seen (aside from andLinux) that integrates seamlessly into an existing Windows desktop, including sharing of documents and even local I/O between the two (simultaneously running) operating systems.

It’s insane. The claims of it running just as fast as a native, local Windows installation on the same hardware are a little optimistic, since Firefox is having a little bit of trouble keeping up with my typing speed but it’s still pretty impressive that I can open Konsole and hack away without having to mess around with building my own GNU environment (with Cygwin or otherwise), AND have all my stuff synced to remote storage as well.

The other niggle I have is with the Kicker; Xinerama support seems to be a little bit borked since the Kicker spans both my monitors, and the menu ends up split in half down the middle. =| But this is a good step in the right direction if you’re looking to switch but just not sure. Just don’t get the impression that Ulteo is anything close to a local Linux install.

Screenshots coming soon!

How quickly life can turn around in an instant…

A bit of a deviation on my usual tone of posting.

The world can be a wierd place sometimes. One week you’re sad, lonely, depressed and waiting for it all to end, the next, someone comes along, takes your breath away and makes your life worth living.

The first week of September was that week, and things haven’t been the same since.

Bring it on, Life. Hit me.

(Cookies for you if you know where the title of this post is from…)