It is time for the SourceForge community choice awards. I have of course nominated Aigaion, my favourite web bibliography tool. Some time ago I wrote about it here.
The nominations close May 29th so you should be quick to nominate your favourite. Voting starts June 22nd and I do of course think you should vote for Aigaion.
Downloading music for charity sounds too good to be true don’t it? It isn’t but well you have to pay for it.
I recently discovered this acoustic version of All within my hands on Youtube. Even though St. Anger has some highlights I must admit that it isn’t my favorite Metallica album (that is of course Master of Puppets). However, I really liked the acoustic All within my hands and I wanted to get it eh … all within my own hands.
It turned out that it was played at the yearly Bridge School Benefit for children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs. I am no big fan of people running after me in the streets or calling me on the phone to ask me to donate money to whatever reason. Even though the causes are good I just don’t like being nagged into doing something. I prefer doing it of my own will. I must admit though that I am not much of a charity giver (shame on me) but when I could get good music and support a good cause I felt it was right.
The solution was of course the live Metallica catalog which I think is a good source for music and a great store. The store sells all (?) live Metallica shows since 2004 and gives you about 20 older shows for free. The music comes without DRM in either MP3 and FLAC. You’ll get the MP3 version of a show for $9.95 and the FLAC version is going at $12.95.
Metallica played at the Bridge School charity both the 27th and the 28th of October 2007. Metallica played only 8 songs each night (some covers and some Metllica songs) so the shows are a bit expensive. However, you have to remember that all net proceeds goes to the Bridge School. The set lists have some variations between the two days. Of the cover songs I really liked I’m only happy when it rains.
This is by far not the first thing I have bought after seeing it on youtube or somewhere else. I just don’t see why people are against it and so afraid of people posting copyright protected material there. I think the exposure it gives an artist and the sales this generates is well worth the potential loss of income. I could have chosed to continue listening to the youtube version but I wanted to have the song and I decided to pay for content of higher quality in the sense that it is Flac and therefore also transportable to other devices but my computer.
I recently removed openjdk to get my BankID working. A change often has consequences and I did not have to wait long.
For some reason I do not bother to dive into, openjdk is hard coded into Vuze as its preferred Java implementation on Ubuntu. When I removed openjdk, Vuze would of course not start. It is apparently a bug (or meta bug) but it is quite simple to fix.
Change one line in /usr/bin/azureus by using “sudo gedit /usr/bin/azureus” and change the line JAVA=’/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java -Xmx1024M’ to JAVA=’/etc/alternatives/java -Xmx1024M’
I previously wrote about how to get the Java-plugin working in Firefox on Ubuntu 8.* on an Intel 32 bit system. After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 on an AMD64 system I had the same problem. Instead of a working Java applet I just got a grey box. I had already installed Sun’s Java implementation and tested the previously suggested solution. This was apparently not enough.
The solution was however quite simple. Some users in the Ubuntu forums suggeste removing IcedTea and OpenJDK and so I did. I used the Synaptic package manager but you may also remove it using apt-get: sudo apt-get remove gcj libgcj-common libgcj7-0 icedtea-gcjwebplugin openjdk-6-jdk openjdk-6-jre opendjdk-6-jre-headless libaccess-bridge-java tzdata-java (I have not tested this myself). After removing the open Java implementation you simply restart your browser and that should be it.
(Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett)
Justice Is Lost
Justice Is Raped
Justice Is Gone
Pulling Your Strings
Justice Is Done
Seeking No Truth
Winning Is All
Find it So Grim
So True
So Real
I must admit that I probably look for the opportunities where I can use Metallica lyrics to express something but this time I think it is quite appropriate. While I am against piracy I must say that I value democracy, freedom of speech, and just legal system over the commercial interests of a reactionary industry. Recently, it seems the commercial values of the movie and music industry is more valuable than a just legal system. Legal companies here in Norway are pushing to get sensitive information (IP, names, addresses etc) from the Internet Service Providers about “suspected” pirates. The attorneys are in other words trying to do the police’s work. Do we really want to privatize the police? I don’t think so.
However, it seems the Norwegian courts are bending over for the movie and music industry. A recent verdict about whether or not a Norwegian ISP has to hand over the identity of a suspected pirate to the attorneys, was today kept secret from the public. I agree with Atle, WTF? How is it possible to keep a verdict which concerns the whole legal system, secret? If private companies are allowed to act as police I would like to know about it.
If the movie and music industry feel the police are not doing enough to solve their cases maybe they have to realize that there are other cirmes (murder, rape, child molestation, trafficing and so on) which are way worse than illegal distribution of music and movies. Second, maybe they should try to deal with this politically like the rest of us. If they are not happy with the way the police is spending their resources maybe should start their own political party and change the way the country is run. Third, why don’t the industry start providing the services we want? How hard can it be? There are plenty of alternatives of people who have understood how to use technology propperly to distribute digital content: NRKbeta, Steam, Metallica (of course), and a whole lot of others.