Jimi Hendrix - Hear my train coming

Looks like the the Hendrix estate have had the above video pulled from youtube. Gosh! the almighty Google finds that Copyright is king after all: shame though, that was a damn fine video.

Courtesy of the wonderful YouTube - and also check out Pali Gap an outtake from a session at Electric Ladyland Studios.

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Warhol and Web 2

As Warhol noted in 1968 "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes".

Andy had the vision but we just lacked the mechanism. TaDa, and 40 years or so later to the rescue comes Web 2.0 with its plethora of wikis, blogs and social networking sites, so now you can exercise your underdeveloped - often white and bourgeois - mini-me from the comfort of Starbucks with your iBook.

Just imagine when the likes of Tesco and those "social sites" you and your "friends" "belong" to start to share data about you; think it won't happen, mugs. We have your mind and soul surrounded and our hands in your wallet. Fait accompli

Oh the price of fame!

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IIS Log Parser

Hey this is useful!

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You can fool some of the e-people some of the time

Just a quickie. We had the inevitable Web 2.0 "conference" recently and as to be expected there was much hoo-ha regarding Facebook by the usual e-vangelistos. I wonder if they have actually read the good old Terms and Conditions in any detail as they pertain to User Content? Here they are:

"grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing"

Basically, as long as you use and have content on Facebook you grant them rights to do whatever they see fit with your, excuse me, your employer's intellectual property. Uh oh - time to get the lawyers in.

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SSL and CFHTTP

One of our CF developers recently noticed that when using CFHTTP against SSL sites they were sometimes getting "Connection Failure".

Turns out that CFMX being a Java application, SSL is implemented using the JSSE specification. The JVM runtime that CFMX ships with has approx. 128 CA certificates pre-registered in its trusted key store of "cacerts", so most commercial SSL sites canbe used with CFHTTP.

However, many sites within our organisation use certificates signed by our own root CA - which of course CFMX/JVM has no knowledge of. The solution is to use the keytool utility supplied in the Java SDK to import the CA cert into the trusted certificate store. This is all documented in an Adobe Technote and is well blogged on by Steven Erat - whose blog entry also has some useful links as well as some batch srcipts to save typing:-)

One other thing you really want to do is change the default certificate store (cacerts) password from its default value to something a little more secure!

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Get a breath of FreshAir

We're broadcasting the student radio station FreshAir over the next semester and their listener numbers coud really do with a lift so if you're reading this get over to their site and hit a stream and give them a listen or you can play the 128Kbps MP3 here. Enjoy!

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Apple targets further mugs

1. Buy a PSP with a 1 or2 GB memory stick. The PSP has a battery life that iPod users can only dream of and is made by Sony so there is a good chance it will last longer than you and will not fail just after the warranty expires. You can replace the battery too!

2. Get a copy of PSP Movie Creator or the like

3. Get your DVDs via one of the many online rental sites

4. Load MPEG4 or H.264 encoded DVD title onto PSP

5. Watch on glorious 16:9 aspect screen

7. Oh and you can browse the web via WiFi and play games and audio too!

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bless the French

We are trialing multcast on our network and currently have a channel showing TV5Monde the world's leading French-language network. I'm probably watching more day-time TV than I ought to right now but surely only the French would have a quiz show in which the contestants have to name varieties of apple - and manage to name over 20! The average Brit would have trouble recognising an apple let alone naming it!

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institutional vandalism

Festival time again here in the city, so part of the 250 year old Georgian gardens close to where I work are once again being turned into a venue replete with bars, toilets and huge generator sets etc. Once this is complete I, my colleagues, and the wildlife will then be subjected to music from live performances throughout the day for the best part of a month.

This and other recent "innovations" derive from the arrival of a new head honcho who has claimed to be running the city's largest hotel (the University's halls of residence): anyway, we all know that Higher Education is a now a business like any other and needs to maximise its assets.

What is really not noticed in this rush to sweat our assets is the incremental damage that is being done to the ecology of these gardens, parts of which now consist of bark chippings and reinstated turf. Of course the advice given to the CEO was that this is precisely what would happen and tha the gardens should not be used in this manner. Will someone please give the vandal a knighthood or lordship so that he can move on to greater things!

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Yet another webcast

OK, so something wicked will come my way for crowing about this but we really have a great "home built" solution for webcasting presentations - in fact anything running on the display - in Windows Media format: judge for yourselves

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Free aacPlus plugin for WM Player

The good people at Orban are now providing a
free aacPlus plugin for Windows Media Player (works with WM Player 11 Beta too). Cool!

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Floss no more

Went for my 6 monthly dental checkup this morning with the ever lovelier Sally Keenan at Bite Dentistry and was introduced to the TePe Interdental brush as an alternative to flossing. Looks promising.

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space station soma

Our good friends at Soma FM have unleashed another cool channel on us. Donate - NOW!

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Bosses, change agendas and claptrap

The organisation that I work in is currenty being "re-aligned" at the instigation of its chief executive who's paper outlining their proposals is an object lesson in using pseudo-management claptrap to justify a wholly vacuous "change agenda"; there's a lot of this nonsense about!

So it was very timely to come across Simon Caulkin's article in last weeks Business Observer entitled "Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies" which provides compelling evidence "that companies are so bad at it (change) that empirically it is change and die." I can't wait to see how our little local tragedy unfolds over the next few months.

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