Welcome to My World

· nerf (nur·f) v. – to make soft or useless something that was once useful.

Nerfing items comes from online gaming and specifically MMORPGs.

Macrovision seems to have ‘nerfed’ my Windows Media Center Edition 2005 PC by making me unable to record a show and watch it later.

Worse yet, FOX has been reported to randomly fire Digital Rights Management Signals into it’s shows without the required licence to do so. It is usually the content creator’s decision to set a show to ‘copy always’, ‘copy once’ (sometimes meaning delete soon), and ‘copy never’ protection schemes.

Try to set your PVR of any kind that supports Macrovision (TiVo included) to record some shows on FOX and it will fail about 5 or 6 minutes into the show. Even if you legitemately want to watch a show later, now you can’t.

I think I’ll try installing an Ubuntu MCE system and see if I can avoid this mess and enjoy the MCE PC experience the way it was meant to be enjoyed. I don’t watch much TV but the shows I do watch should be viewable when I want them.

I had never thought I’d run out of space on my server but I have.

The great thing is that even though the daemons had no space left to write to their log files for days my webserver seemed to keep on ticking.

Somehow…

Very soon I’ll have to remedy this situation so you may see my server go on and off for a bit some day soon.

Thanks for your patience.

It seems that now and then when you’re developing a project for someone you lose sight of an important principle.

Don’t complicate their life.

People want you to work for them because they have a problem. This problem complicates their lives. If the solution you propose further complicates their lives, then why are they even getting you to help them in the first place?

This article by Bleek of DivisionTwo is either a big joke or one of the best case-in-point examples of what I’m talking about I could have ever found.

The author intends to build a machine that their 89 year old grandmother can use. This grandmother has little to no experience with computers at all other than writing the odd letter.

What the author provides is the most “feature rich” (read complicated) convoluted setup I could possibly fathom.

He might have made it harder on her if he decided to include a few more flavours of linux on the same box and make the boot loader display in Chinese in case she was studying that language.

Obviously, he didn’t even follow up and all he knows is that his mother called saying that grandma can’t get past the boot loader and needs some instruction.

Wow…

In my opinion the first place he went wrong was deciding that more choices is always a good thing. In general, people who are in unfamilliar territory want to know the best choice (whether it’s your best choice or whatever), if they’re inquisitive MAYBE they’ll ask why it’s the best choice, and they’ll want to know how to get there.

As well, don’t put someone in unfamilliar territory if at all possible. Why would you have a computer randomly change things around on someone who barely knows how to use it? Even seasoned veterans of the computer world get annoyed when someone moves around the navigation on them.

I have serious trouble believing this is real but I also know full well people make these mistakes all the time. I guess I’ll chalk it up to a joke and one of the best usability case studies ever written.

Cheers

This is too funny.

Apparently a template design company created a “design” using a picture of the grim reaper from someone’s website and instead of copying the file, hot-linked directly to the file on their webserver.

Well the owner of this website simply moved the old file and put up the Goatse.cx image instead. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of bad(�) myspace.com websites were displaying a horrifying image instead of the grim reaper.

Read the story, it’s eye-openingly funny.

Someone keeps spamming my Shoutbox with links and it’s getting quite irritating.

I’ll have to invesitgate further to find out how they’re getting through my filters but for now I’m going to make my filters more exclusive to see if I stop the morons from making my webpage look disgusting with code all over the place.

Being hacked is always an interesting double-edged sword. On one hand it’s very irritating and on the other it forces me, although I’m quite a busy person, to think more about security. Being a computer scientist, that mindset is paramount.

Well, we’ll see how things go.

[EDIT]

Not a single bad post in a month is a good sign to me.