Rick's World

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Yesterday was a hilarious day.

It hit the news recently that one of the main decryption keys for HDVD was cracked by hackers. A news story was posted to Digg listing the decryption key. Digg then received a DMCA takedown notice from the MPAA. So the article was deleted and the user who posted it was banned from Digg. Then, in protest, another article was posted to Digg containing the code again. This article too was taken down and the user banned. By the end of the day there were many, many more articles listing the code - too many to even remove. People were posting the code everywhere in comments. They were posting it on Slashdot. They were creating domain names with the code. They were posting the code using various simple hiding techniques to comments in articles. They were creating T-Shirts containing the code. It was out of control!

And I was loving every minute of it.

Why? Because it's just this anarchy of the Internet that I love. Once information gets out onto the Internet it can't be taken down. You might be able to take down some sites, but there will always be more sites that will pop up. Since the Internet is so dynamic and so easily modified, you are chasing a moving target. Realistically you can never completely remove something from the Internet, if there is enough interest to keep it available. It will simply move around. This very fact scares the hell out of many oppressive countries. China, for instance has the "Great Firewall of China" which is their attempt to block 'objectionable' material on the Internet from entering their country. The problem is that it's impossible to completely block these stuff. If you hunt hard enough, you will find it.

This free and chaotic exchange of information on the Internet is why I have long believed that the Internet is the more important invention of the last 100 years. It has the potential to change the world (and it already has.)

Last week, one of my coworkers got her hands on a new 8GB Sony VAIO USB 2.0 thumb drive. She got it for a VERY good price (about $62). So naturally when she told us, we are all interested in getting one ourselves. So we all asked her to order us one. She ended up with a good five more of these things being requested. She was due to get them in from her friend this Friday. This morning one of my coworkers mentioned that he had read that some of those 8GB drives are scams and aren't really 8GB. Upon hearing this, I suggested we borrow her 8GB thumb drive and do some tests to make sure it really is 8GB. She agreed and it was brought to me for some testing. Here's what I found:

No Files over 4GB will copy

Apparently, the USB thumb drives are formatted with FAT32 which has a limit of 4GB for each file. I was trying to copy a DVD image that was 4.5GB and I kept getting an error message saying the drive was full. This was odd since it was empty! Apparently this was a bit of a deceptive error message. The drive wasn't full, it was just that you can't copy a file that big to a FAT32 formatted drive. It also appears that you can't format a thumb drive to NTFS, so that idea won't work either. I'm not sure if an external HD based 'thumb drive' will format as NTFS. It really sucks that I can't copy DVD image files to the thumb drive. That is one of the main reasons I wanted one.

One copy window at a time!

I was trying to copy a bunch of files onto the thumb drive, in an attempt to fill up all 8GB of it. I wanted to make sure it could really hold all the 8GB it said it would. I copied a bunch of files over to the thumb drive. Windows brings up the 'copying files' dialog box. I then did this twice more. So now I had three 'copying files' dialogs all copying files at the same time. This is something I've done with hard drives for a long time with no problem. Do NOT do this with thumb drives! This multiple 'copy files' dialog box trick appears to have completely corrupted the file system on the thumb drive! The odd thing was, all the files copied, but the data was corrupted. I couldn't even create an empty folder on the drive. When I did this, I ended up with a brand new empty folder containing garbage files.

Hidden file corruption

While files got corrupted using the multiple 'copying files' dialog trick I mentioned above, this seemed to happen at times even when I only copied files one at a time. After the file corruption problem above, I reformatted the drive and started over. This time I copied files, one by one over and it said it copied them properly. But then once I did a file compare between the files, pretty much EVERY byte was different! This means that even single file copies are getting corrupted. I even tried copying a file from my HD to the thumb drive and then the same file from the thunb drive to a different place on my HD. I then compared the two copies of the files on my HD and they didn't match, as they should.

I'm not sure whether all these problems were a result of a defective thumb drive, or just some kind of problem with 8GB thumb drives in general. Before this drive, the biggest thumb drive I'd used was a 2GB thumb drive. That 2GB space is much smaller than that 4GB FAT32 limitation, so maybe the OS just can't handle drives this big. I don't know.

Needless to say, though, we all cancelled our 'orders' for those 8GB thumb drives after this failed experiment.

On April 27, 2001, I bought my first home. That was six years ago today. It's amazing how fast time goes by. In those 6 years I've worked at several companies, paid off 2 different cars, lost a lot of weight (and gained some of it back), had my salary go down, had my salary go up, adopted 2 pets, done various upgrades to the house, etc.

Home ownership is an absolutely amazing experience. I lived for a good 6 years before I bought this place in various apartments. I never really felt at home in those apartments though. They were just a place to stay. I never knew my neighbors, I never really much cared about the condition of the apartment (it wasn't mine after all). I found it interesting that whenever I talked about my apartment at the time, I never refered to it as 'home'. I just called it 'the apartment'.

Now that I am a homeowner, for the first time since moving out of my parents house, this place truly feels like 'home' to me. Do I miss the house I grew up in? Very much so. That place will always be the very definition of home to me. I still at times wish I could buy that house and move back in. Of course since it's currently located in a fairly bad neighborhood, I won't do that! :) Despite the fact that this place isn't the house I grew up in, it feels very much like my home. I am confortable here. I'm happy here. I have no desire to move. Is it huge? No. But then again, I don't really need that much space. I'm just one guy (and 2 cats). My little 3 bedroom townhouse is perfect for me. Plus, I bought it before real estate prices in Florida went completely insane, so I'm sitting on a nice little investment that isn't too outrageous on the mortgage payments.

I love being a homeowner. Is it expensive? Yes. Is it a hassle? At times, yes. Once you've lived as a homeowner though, there is no going back. I never want to live in an apartment again. It just wouldn't 'feel right'.

The linked article is takes an interesting approach towards software piracy - it can be a good thing! I have to say that I agree with a lot of what this guy says. Give it a read.

This is cool. The rock band band Nine Inch Nails has released 3 of the songs from their newest album 'Year Zero' as GarageBand files. They did this with a couple of songs for their last album. I really like that they are doing this. It gives you a good look into how professionally produced music is made. Because they are GarageBand files, you can also go in and edit them as you like. It's rare to see a rock band that 'gets it' like this...

You can find a large collection of great wallpaper images for your computer here. They are all 1600x1200 so if you have a large monitor, like me, these are great... Check them out...

I just made the final payment on my Accord! After 2 years and 1 month, I paid off over $20,000 worth of a car loan, and about $15,000 of that was paid in the last eight months or so.

God, it feels great to have that thing paid off!

WOOHOO!!!

(Can you tell I'm happy?)

Ok, I've just made a couple of changes to my site to better 'Google-ify' it.

First, and likely most noticeable is that there is now a small Google AdSense ad over on the right, just above the search box. I've never had any ads on my site before and I'm honestly not much inclined to add them. I'm just adding this for a while to see if my pathetic little site manages to get enough traffic for me to bother with it. If after a while, I see nothing coming of that little ad, I'll get rid of it.

The other change, that is not noticeable is that I've finally updated my site's Google Sitemap. This is an XML file located on the main web site that contains a link to every single article on the site. This better allows Google to index the important articles on my site and hopefully drive more traffic my way.

I was able to pull a few more interesting shots of Venom from the latest trailer for 'Spiderman 3'. Here they are!

Topher Grace as Venom

Notice the sharp, pointy teeth? That's a Venom trait that apparently 'bleeds' through to his human appearance. He also looks pretty nuts!

Venom Jumping

Here we see a shot of Venom jumping. We get another good look at those sharp teeth!

Spidey vs. Venom

Here we see a shot of Spiderman, without the mask, fighting Venom. Spiderman's face looks pretty CGI-ish in this admitting very brief shot. I'm sure that won't be noticable at full speed. I'm happy to see this because it's clear we are going to see a big Venom vs. Spiderman fight.

Update: You can find my other Spiderman 3 entries here and here...

For anyone who is interested how I added Youtube to my blog, you can find a link to the plugin here.