Fri, 29 Jul 2005
Names Matter -- DRM and the Press
While reading the comments at the Digitial
Rights Pledge page I noticed one by D Walker: "Digital Rights"
would too easily be muddled up with "Digital Rights Management", which in
itself should be called "Digital Restrictions Management". It's an
ever so small point but I think it's important; Digital Restrictions
Management is a much better name than "Digital Rights Management". It
pushes the point that it's taking things away from us and is a lot less
media friendly...
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Posted: 2005/07/29 15:54 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fantastic Four -- Quickie Review
Over the last couple of years comic book fans have been spoiled by some
great big-screen adaptations. Spiderman 1 and 2 (which NEED more witty
one-liners from the wall crawler), X-Men 2, HellBoy and Sin City have all
been enjoyable and lived up to the franchises that spawned them. We've also
been witness to some truly dire moments, Catwomen and Electra spring to
mind. So where does Fantastic Four fit?
It's pretty average. Michael Chiklis does a good job as The Thing (although the suit looks dire; that needs to change for the sequel), Ioan Gruffudd is pretty bland, Chris Evans character is badly written and never fleshed out (possibly on purpose but it just gets annoying) so we'll discount him and Jessica Alba... well she looks damn good with blond hair and wearing a cat-suit but the role didn't exactly seem challenging. She was better in Sin City and she had a lot less screen time in that.
While it's not a disaster it's not something you should bother travelling to see. One to rent cheap. 4/10.
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Posted: 2005/07/29 14:51 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Using sudo Without A Password
If you add a NOPASSWD directive in your sudoers file then you can,
as you'd expect from its name, use those commands without a password.
This is a pretty useful trick that allows you to set up sudo entries
that allow commands to be run with different privileges from cron
without requiring the setuid flag. However twice this week I've seen a
similar question asked on mailing lists and I thought I'd stick this
entry up, hope google indexes it and saves me from ever seeing it again.
Yeah right.
When you use sudo and authenticate it sets a short timeout period in which if you use sudo again it won't ask for your password. This is typically a useful feature (for interactive use anyway) but a couple of people seem to follow a series of events that go something like this: sudo visudo (add the NOPASSWD line). sudo "command I want in cron." "Oh look, it worked. Now let me add a cronjob." The next day they (hopefully) notice it didn't work and then ask on a mailing list. Which I'm on.
Now it seems obvious but people don't seem to realise that the trial run is pointless, the timestamp is still valid from when they ran sudo visudo and so sudo WILL NOT PROMPT FOR THE PASSWORD. In order to run a real test you need to use sudo -k to invalidate the timestamp and then rerun the command.
As a closing note adding a sudo -k to your .logout/.bash_logout file can also be a smart thing to do on some systems.
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Posted: 2005/07/29 14:33 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
O'Reilly Want to Connect?
There's something up at connection.oreilly.com... will it
be another jobs site or do they have an ace up their collective, animal
decorated, sleeves?
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Posted: 2005/07/29 00:16 | /sites | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Amazon Wishlists in Perl
For a small play project I needed the ability to pull down all the DVDs
from a given persons Amazon wishlist. After a quick look on CPAN two main
options presented themselves, first up we have WWW::Amazon::Wishlist.
The module has an easy to use interface, doesn't require an Amazon developer token (it's a naughty screen-scraper) and doesn't need any XML modules. Unfortunately while it has no problems getting books I couldn't get it to download any of the DVDs from the wishlist so I moved on.
Net::Amazon on the other hand is a larger, more comprehensive and complete solution but it has one advantage. It actually does what I want it to ;) After reading some perldoc and Data::Dumpering some structures I've managed to get a list of the DVDs from my wishlist in the format I want.
I've put a copy of my DVD Amazon Wishlist retrieving code up on the site in case it's of any use to anyone else. Now I can get on with the harder bits...
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Posted: 2005/07/29 00:09 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
