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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2010-10-14

Published October 14, 2010

Links for 2010-10-13

Published October 13, 2010

Aslan’s hard times, from the UPC judgement

Published October 11, 2010

Oh dear. Quoting Mr Justice Charleton’s judgement in favour of UPC vs. EMI, Sony, et al:

‘This scourge of internet piracy strongly affects Irish musicians, most of whom pay tax in Ireland. ‘Aslan’ is a distinguished Irish group which has a loyal fan base; but not all of them believe in paying for music.Previous sales of their albums were excellent, about 35,000 per album, and in respect of one called “Platinum Collection”, a three CD box set, 50,000 copies were sold. More recently, an album called “Uncased” was released and only 6,000 copies were sold.Perhaps, it might be thought, the album was not popular and did not sell well? In contrast, a search was made to see how many illegal downloads had been made on the internet from that album, and 22,000 were traced.’

Aslan, eh?

So, that would be about the same figure as EMI quoted in a press statement in July 2009, which ‘Gambra’ on the thumped.com boards thoroughly debunked at the time:

‘I’ve just been listening to the first minute or two of this and have done a mere 10 minutes of googling to try verify the claim of 25,000 downloads. The EMI press statement mentioned that they’ve tracked that amount of downloads "through Torrents Nova and Pirate Bay alone." The first problem with that is that there’s no such site as Torrents Nova (I presumed they meant mininova but Aslan gets zero hits over there) but never mind, we’ll carry on.

Next I search for ever possible permutation for downloads of the new Aslan album and I kept getting the same result which is "Aslan – Uncase’d (2009) KompletlyWyred Dhz.inc" which was uploaded to thepiratebay. However this file only has a grand total of 9 seeders and 6 leechers and has been alive since the 26th of June. There’s no way of telling how many times it’s been leeched exactly but even if it was 6 new leechers every day it’d be a total of 108 downloads. It is fair to assume that only 9 of these bothered to seed back so I’d say the total is right.

Wondering still where the hell they got their mystical 25,000 total from I just searched for "Aslan Uncased" and was surprised to see 5 links to torrents of the album in the first two pages of results. However 4 of the 5 just link back to the one on TPB with 9 seeders. The 5th is where I think they got their mystical 25,000 total from:

http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/aslan-uncased.html

This is the 7th result you get on google for the album title and when you click it you actually get "No Matches were found" but up at the top are FAKE results that are actually just ad links. You could search for anything and you’ll get those exact same four ad results.

http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/gambra-thumped.html

If you refresh the totals change each time so it’s safe to say they found this link by googling the name, added up the total of listed downloads they got (which is totally random) and are using that to moan about their loss of sales. Incredible.’

Indeed, according to the site, an album called ‘Justin Mason on the nose flute’ has been downloaded 24,752 times — I never knew! Where’s my cheque?

Some quality facts and figures from EMI there, I suspect.

Links for 2010-10-11

Published October 11, 2010

Links for 2010-10-08

Published October 8, 2010

  • NAMAland : ‘At NAMAland we like to look on the bright side. OK, the downside of NAMA is that it’s costing you €54 billion — the upside is that you now own some of the best (and worst) properties in Dublin. So grab your phone, put on your tophat and enjoy your new role as a property tycoon with our augmented reality tour of NAMAland. Remember, we-are-where-we-are, there’s no point playing the blame game, we were all living beyond our means and it was like that when we got here…’ Excellent! a Layar Augmented Reality layer for Layar which lets you see properties in Dublin owned by NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency
    (tags: nama funny ouch augmented-reality layar dublin ireland)

Links for 2010-10-07

Published October 7, 2010

  • Web service – current time zone for a city? – Stack Overflow : ‘a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don’t follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time… I don’t fancy creating own database of the places that don’t follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?’ earthtools.org seems the closest thing
    (tags: dst daylight-savings local timezones iso8601 dates times web-services http)

  • Facebook now does export : ‘we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.’ excellent
    (tags: facebook export data control privacy personal-data)

Links for 2010-10-06

Published October 6, 2010

Links for 2010-10-04

Published October 4, 2010

Links for 2010-09-28

Published September 28, 2010

Links for 2010-09-23

Published September 23, 2010

  • why James Gosling left Oracle : 1. made him take an effective pay cut; 2. removed decision authority on Java; 3. he felt Oracle was “ethically challenged”. also: ‘he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java’; “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” he doesn’t pull any punches. oh dear, this is all adding up…
    (tags: java oracle opensource sun james-gosling larry-ellison gossip)

Links for 2010-09-22

Published September 22, 2010

  • Mongrel2 Says, “Goodbye Python” : Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it’s impossible to rely on recent language features because they won’t be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it’s easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? … or is it Zed?
    (tags: zed-shaw python mongrel distros linux sysadmin packaging)

Links for 2010-09-19

Published September 19, 2010

  • Bunnie Huang on the simulated 6502 : ‘It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!’
    (tags: simulation bunnie-huang 6502 cpu chips emulation hardware)

  • www.Visual6502.org : ‘working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip’s physical components – about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip. This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their ‘high’ or ‘low’ logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the ‘clock’) on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.’ Awesome
    (tags: 6502 emulation physics simulation mos atari-2600 pet commodore c-64 cpu silicon)

Links for 2010-09-13

Published September 13, 2010

Links for 2010-09-07

Published September 7, 2010

  • Game On : exhibition billing itself as “the world’s biggest celebration of games”, arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. ‘Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.’ tix are EUR10
    (tags: games gaming exhibitions dublin)

  • Your Country, Your Call, You’re Doomed : Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC “get Ireland back on track” competition. ‘If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.’
    (tags: ycyc waffle business ireland vision-lock integrity bock-the-robber economy)

Links for 2010-09-06

Published September 6, 2010

Links for 2010-09-02

Published September 2, 2010

Links for 2010-09-01

Published September 1, 2010

Links for 2010-08-30

Published August 30, 2010

Links for 2010-08-27

Published August 27, 2010

Links for 2010-08-26

Published August 26, 2010

Links for 2010-08-24

Published August 24, 2010

Links for 2010-08-23

Published August 23, 2010

Links for 2010-08-17

Published August 17, 2010

  • Books of Adam : stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
    (tags: blog comic funny fp)

  • 100 ways to spend the Anglo €25,000,000,000 : ‘just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland’s taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?’ some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia’s largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People’s Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
    (tags: money omgwtfbbq insane argh funny nama anglo sean-fitzpatrick ireland)

Links for 2010-08-12

Published August 12, 2010