Whoa, pretty sparse here these past two weeks. My bad. I’ll get better I promise.
The SUB crew played some basketball at McLin Gym last night. It was pretty damn pathetic, and I have blisters because I’ve been a big fat couch potato all winter. It was still pretty fun despite all that, but I’m looking forward to some much preferred tennis action once it stays warm and the daylight savings kicks in. Playing indoors on that weird tiled floor with dead spots left much to be desired.
Well, it’s been a rough week without Tone and Jim around, but Luda and I have pressed on, expanding game night into three days of Four Swords… and no turtles. I still can’t believe that game hasn’t arrived yet from Gamefly. I’m going to have to talk with the post office and figure out what’s up with that. In any case, this is a poor first experience with the Gamefly service.
Macmall’s service, however, continues to be excellent. My spiffy new 30 GB ipod photo came wednesday and I’ve enjoyed its sexy click wheel and massive storage capacity since then. The itrip I got for free with it is the icing on the proverbial cake, however. No more cd changing evar!! ^__^
Finally, after massive amounts of research, I think I’ve solved my audio sync issue with my tv tuner. Apparently, trying to compress the video and the audio at the same time is too much for my poor little processor. :’( So I’m currently only compressing the video to 320×240 Xvid and leaving the audio uncompressed. Then I use virualdub to compress the audio and video. I end up with 180MB files for half hour programs, which is 50MB smaller than what I got with my old ati card and slightly better quality. I’d still like to do it all in one step if possible, even if I get larger files (compressing video on the fly doesn’t work as well as the algorithm can’t look ahead). The next best thing would be automating the compression process. :/
Tone is perhaps the only person who will understand the joke, but I still wanted to share this with the world.
Aw geez, not this shit again. I thought we had been over this already with the msn spaces thing. The AOL TOS Jason and half the blogosphere are in a huff about is for their forums/homepages, not their im client, and it’s similar to just about any forum tos/eula/legalese. It states that they have permission to “host” the content you post on the forums. Hosting doesn’t translate well into legalese, hence the “reproduce/display/publish/perform” stuff. The privacy stuff is similar.
In other words, there are plenty of other reasons to avoid AIM like the plague, but this CYA isn’t really one of them. Besides, it doesn’t even apply to you because you’ve had an account since before Feb. of last year, and you haven’t used an updated version of their client since then and couldn’t possibly have signed/clicked on anything.
Anyway, I’m a lazy man Jason. I can’t be bothered to add another account of yours to my buddy list, so if you aren’t on aim, I won’t IM you. Wait, that wasn’t a good argument, was it? Shoot. Well here’s a preemptive t(^_^t)
Got my new tv tuner installed friday, and I’ve been playing with it over the weekend. Don’t feel like writing much so I’ll keep it short: It’s good. Ok, maybe not that short.
Pros:
- Better picture than I ever remember getting with my ati ve card.
- No lag unlike the old ve card. This lets me actually play console games on it and eliminates the annoying echo effect when it’s on the same channel as our main tv.
- Has a remote and it works well (old card didn’t have one, don’t know how much I’ll use this)
- Nice user interface, much better than ati’s mmc, and not just because mmc sucks (which it does).
Cons:
- Audio seems to lag behind the video in recorded files (may be able to fix this)
- EPG not as nicely integrated as gemstar was with my old card, which could tell what program was on when you changed to a new channel and could use the program name in the recorded filename.
- The audio seems to crack every once in awhile on high frequencies. Can’t quite pin it down yet, but it’s no deal breaker.
- No ability to pause recording that I used to use to stop recording during commercials and save precious disk space, but the editing software might make up for that.
In summary, it’s a solid tuner, but I still have some kinks to work out until I’d feel comfortable recommending it to someone else.
Well, someone had to tell them. They’re giving out intermediate information to another company, Apply Yourself, one month before it is to be finished and released to its intended recipients and said company is putting said information on their production webserver’s database, accessible to said recipients, albeit unlinked. So when someone discovers this and posts the “hack” online and applicants use it to see their acceptance/denial letters early, what does Harvard Business School (HBS) do? Well they punish the evil hackers by denying their applications (no big deal to the ones who saw their denial letters obviously, and apparently no one saw acceptance letters, just denials/blank pages). Poweryogi has some keen insights on the resulting mess that I could just reference and be done, but I’d like to add a few thoughts of course.
First it bears repeating that this is NOT hacking in the slightest. If you look at the “exploit”, this is akin to finding your christmas presents early, except that they are purchased a month in advance, are placed in your room unwrapped under your bed, and you have your own room that only you, your parents (HBS), and Santa (Apply Yourself) have access to. Oh, and your clever friend Billy at school told you that he discovered his presents were under his bed. Now who honestly wouldn’t check under his/her own bed after talking with Billy? Hacking would involve taking a denial letter and somehow changing it in the system to an acceptance letter (or vice versa, but that’d be silly).
This brings me to my second problem with this situation. No one is looking at some other person’s information or altering the letters in any way. What’s the harm in seeing your own letter early? I still can’t see the problem with this. It seems ethical enough given that the person isn’t mucking around in Apply Yourself’s databases with priveledges they weren’t granted. As poweryogi points out, it would almost be unethical to not check this ‘exploit’ out. These people gave Apply Yourself credit card information and other personal data. If I learned that a company’s system isn’t secure and I gave them my information, I’d check out this exploit if only to assure myself that it was limited to the acceptance letter thing and bellyache about it if I found out it was worse than that.
Finally, if the people had actually hacked into the computer systems of HBS –or to a lesser extent Apply Yourself given thier lack of security– then it’s all a wash because these people don’t belong in a business school anyway. They should be pursuing a Comp. Sci. degree at MIT or something.
