Button Pusher

Great for a Linux install (Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04)

I was looking for an attractive netbook with a good screen and good performance whose hardware would work with Linux. I chose the Samsung N220 because of its long battery life (about six hours), lovely matte screen (no reflections from a glossy one), good set of connections for wired and wireless communication, and its large hard drive.

A First Glance and Build Quality

The candy apple red of the N220's top looks really great. I don't like to attract too much attention with my electronics, but I've been forced into it.

The case feels quite solid. It doesn't have anything that creaks or rattles when putting pressure on the case to flex it slightly. The screen hinge is solid and looks like it will perform well for quite some time.

This is a comment on the BBC news article "All dogs to be insured in proposals on dangerous breeds"

Once again we see misguided breed-specific legislation that further restricts the rights of the majority of dog owners who act responsibly with their pets. There is no such thing as a 'dangerous' breed of dog--all dogs can be dangerous if their owner makes them that way. The frequent perception that certain breeds of dogs are dangerous is a result of the popularity of certain breeds among owners who want their dogs to be aggressive to humans and other dogs.

It should be a self-evident truth that the problem is the owner, not the dog.

It would be a similar injustice to ban ownership of dogs among certain classes of people, such as 12-20 year-old males living in cities, but at least it would reflect more accurately the actual source of the 'problem'.

I just noticed that the currency exchange trading data on the Yahoo Finance site under "Last Trade" is off by 1000%, while the currency trading chart on the same page has the correct values. For example, the Last Trade for Danish Kroner is 11.66, which is 0.1166 on the chart. The chart has the correct value. It's the same for Swedish Kroner (SEK)--and it's off by exactly the same percentage as well.

Someone ought to fix that.

I took a few photos that evening and, on a whim, recorded some video on my phone.

So this morning, I performed my usual checks on various projects we have running. One of the things I do is check up on sites where we've found links to illegal downloads of our music and see if anything has changed. (I'm in the process of fully automating this.) Anyway, it turns out that one "blogger" didn't get the message when I sent takedown notices to all the sites he had hosting downloads. This one is particularly pernicious because he's not only uploaded one of our new releases, but he's uploaded an ultra-limited new release from a series we just don't make much money on at all (because it's limited and because the pricing is quite low), but still do because we love it. Anyway, he's now gone and uploaded the release again and I've had to re-issue takedown notices for everything.

It's not like the poster even reviewed the release or created anything of his own. He just copied the release text that I wrote, pasted it into his blog, and linked to the actual release he uploaded elsewhere.

I get really angry about this because it ruins the limited nature of the release, and makes it harder for us to be able to afford doing the series. I know that people look for the illegal downloads first because on our last release from this series, the first searches that landed on our site were all "release +filesharingsite" searches. So before many people even look for a legitimate way of getting the music (which in this case, they've very, very likely heard live), they're looking to download it for "free".

Earlier today I was reviewing the statistics from the our web shop and noticed that quite a few people/sites have been linking to our shop release images directly (so-called "hotlinking"). This is an irritant because it means that our bandwidth gets used for things that don't really have anything to do with the shop and that costs us some money if it happens a lot, and worse yet, at least one of the hotlinks was from a blog that is used to distribute illegal downloads.

It's hard to get statistics about how much illegal downloading actually takes place, but since they linked to our image, our server faithfully kept track of how many times someone loaded that image on the blog. In the month of October, that image was downloaded 31,000 times and so far in November, it's at 12,300 hits. That's a lot of hits for one release on a small independent label.

As an aside, I've since taken steps to make sure that hotlinking on our site doesn't work very well. I'm sure they'll be surprised to see the images have changed.

So, when I returned home from the shop, there was a confused Virgin Media installer standing outside my house. Apparently he was there to repair a problem with our neighbour's cable modem. I didn't think anything of him being there until I turned on my television an hour or so later and found out that our V+ box wasn't receiving any signal, or at least not enough of one for it to display an image.

I immediately called Virgin Media and spoke to someone in their Scottish call centre, using the "thinking about canceling my service option" because I'd rather speak to a Scottish drone than an outsourced one in the Third World somewhere (no offense, but I believe in local call centres). That person listened to my problem and said she was going to transfer me to someone who would help. It turns out that her "transfer" involved dropping me into a queue for the Virgin Media call centre in, er, India, I guess. So I go through the motions and find out that the next appointment they are offering me is on Monday, i.e. in six days. At this point I said that if I don't get an appointment tomorrow, I will cancel. (It seems like if their installer is responsible for ruining my service, they should be a little more responsive.) The drone wasn't budging, so I hung up.

I called the cancellation service again and got a message saying they're open from 8am to 8pm, and I'm too late to speak to them. It looks like it was getting late for the first person I spoke to, and she just decided to get rid of me.

I'm now looking at what Sky are offering these days. Virgin seems less and less of a deal since they hiked their prices and since their customer service is just as bad as Sky's.

They will rue the day. Don't they know who I am?

If any Perl hackers out there are looking for a small project, you might want to take a look at a module I've been working on to talk to the NPR API that was opened up last year. I'm a really big fan of NPR--at times its been my only regular connection to the US--and having the ability to access all their content since 1995 is a pretty cool thing.

The current implementation of my module is a class that will help you do keyword searches for NPR content and delivers a list back with article IDs, titles and links. This is still a toy. Once I get the query and response classes sorted out (i.e. written), you should be able to do things like ask for content in a certain date range on a certain programme, and query the API for its various content lists, which show, for example, all the music artists that have appeared on various NPR programmes, or all NPR contributors.

I'd be happy to get some help with this since this is a project I'm only able to work on in my spare time, and I don't have much of that.

http://allolex.github.com/Net-NPR-Query/