These Things Matter To Me

Most of the 311-so-far comments on the this post on the NBC-Universal/Newscorp we-don’t-need-YouTube collabo are extremely negative/disappointed about the lack of portability and accessibility of the Hulu content (many non-U.S. people wondering why the site is going out of its way to recreate a completely artificial international restriction on Internet stuff!)
Anyway, so it’s negative comment after negative comment, only to be interspersed by the occasional suspiciously positive but hollow atta-boy, something pointed out by commenter Chris Coleman:

Wow, this is so groundbreaking! I am truly thrilled by such great NBC original programming! Just FYI, it’s strikingly obvious which comments are planted by NBC. Don’t you have anything better for your interns to spend their time doing?

Here’s another good one:

Hmmm…. I can only watch these shows while chained to a browser, and in the country the shows air in anyway. Effectively, the only advantage is that I can watch the when I want. As long as I am in front of my computer at the time, and as long as I don’t mind a tiny window. Why is this better than recording the shows on a PVR and watching that whenever I want? On a bigger screen? With the ability to skip commercials? With my family? There appears to be no benefit to this whatsoever. If I can’t carry it away on an external device, it is actually a step backwards from the TV. The only benefit I can see is if I am overseas and want to keep up on shows. But of course that doesn’t work, does it.

And another:

By the time your shows are shown in Europe, I’ve already seen them through a torrent. Your business distribution model is dead. And now you’re trying to perpetuate this model online as well? This is a different world.

And so on.

Linux/UNIX has a nice little utility called called time.

Time lets you put it before any other command, and will tell you how long it took to run stuff.
I find it very handy for benchmarking. And as a sysadmin, whenever anybody says something seems “slow,” you can keep it real with time:

# time cp bigfile bigfile.copy

Bam! You’ll show them slow. Run it on a baseline system. Run it on the “slow” system. That’s what’s up, thanks, time!

But what do you do on Windows? I had no idea. But the Internet is filled with people like me wondering, “is there something like the time command… for Windows?”

There is my friend! ntimer.exe:

# ntimer.exe [command]

Ntimer.exe unfortunately does not come included with XP. You can download it for free from microsoft.com in a bundle called “Windows 2003 resource kit.” It’s 11MB, and comes with a bunch of other stuff. The binary for ntimer.exe works fine on XP Professional.

• UC Berkeley posts entire course lectures on YouTube. Your move, MIT OpenCourseWare
• If your Drupal site is on the Internet, you can publish from Google Docs
• Notes from a DrupalCon Barcelona attendee
• Ubuntero.org is a social network for Ubunteros and their admirers

• 43 Folders switched over to Drupal
• New DrupalCamp alert: BADCamp ‘07, taking place in the Bay Area (northern California) early November 2007
• new episodes of LUG radio are noteworthy enough on their own, but this one has an interview with Miguel de Icaza
• most of this summer 2007’s WordCamp (WordPress un-conference) talks have videos up
• (video) If Morgan Stanley can get social networking inside their business and present on Enterprise 2.0, there’s hope for you. “Who knows who, and who knows what.”

(art from Andrei Robu via FFFFound!)

Gutsy’s so close I can feel it.
This weekend I installed the beta of Ubuntu Linux 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon.
A few notes to myself, and just one bug:

• Bug: no matter how many Firefox windows I have open, they never begin to “stack up,” instead spreading infinitely across the bottom GNOME panel. I never realized this before, but the act of stacking Windows up after a certain point keeps the the title of each window legible. I’m sorry I never appreciated you before, mister/miss Firefox-stacking-window situation.
  You don’t know what you got, ’till it’s gone.
• after install via upgrade, sound comes back muted. Not a big deal, but after you install Linux, you’re paranoid about hardware not working, so for a minute I thought sound support got worse with Gutsy. You really had me going there, Gutsy Gibbon! But you merely muted me. Not funny, Gutsy. This isn’t Punk’d.
• gnome-setup has crashed a couple of times. I don’t know. I can’t reproduce it at will, but it happens.
• (not a bug) but I still have to install a special driver to get graphics to work right on a Dell 700m.

(phone from keetra)