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Revelations...
Feb. 19th, 2008 08:44 pmI weighed myself for the first time in quite a while yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised to see a number that's 2 kilos below what it was for my physical, and lower than any such reading in recent memory. I've been fighting the urge to eat all day as a result, because there's a little voice in the back of my head that says "It's okay. You've lost weight!"
It was warm (relatively speaking) yesterday, and cold today. Work came in, but not much. I've got two short items due tomorrow morning, but am not in the mood to tackle them now.
I mentioned a little while ago the technique of installing DRM-intensive apps on their own machine, so as to limit the effect of any attempt to do Something Stupid™, like delete or modify content, including content the program has no moral claim on (EULAs be tarred and feathered!). The trick works, as long as you have extra machines at hand, but then it hit me: why not install the - in this case - Amazon Unbox software on a virtual machine created by Mojopac, which would allow you to carry around your media without carting around an extra computer.
Well, tonight, en route to implementing this solution, I learned that something in Mojopac had changed to make it impossible to run the software from a mounted TrueCrypt partition, which caused me to have uncharitable thoughts with respect to automatic software updates.
You see, what I had done - way back when - was use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted file on my FreeAgent Go drive that can be decrypted and then mounted as a drive, UNIX-style. The file/drive contains pretty much all the music and podcasts I listen to on my MP3 players.
The value of the encryption in this case is marginal. Anyone stealing the unencrypted files will find a windfall of classical music and podcasts on how to speak Spanish, French, and Italian. Still, it's easy to come up with scenarios - involving, say, accounting data - where it would be advisable to encrypt data that sits on highly portable media (an idea that has yet to catch on at places like, say, some governmental departments in the UK, which seem to lose track of media containing the personal data of literally millions of Her Majesty's subjects on an all-too-routine basis, but I digress...).
Anyway, since I could no longer execute Mojopac from a mounted TrueCrypt partition (a hypothesis I developed from the error message about how the device I was using was not USB 2.0 compliant), I decided to ditch the whole concept by first copying the files in the partition to another drive, and then back to the "native" FreeAgent Go unit with the TrueCrypt file removed. A reboot and a few mouse clicks later, Mojopac ran without a hitch, thereby justifying my suspicions.
Unfortunately, attempting to install the Amazon Unbox software involves, besides installing itself, installing Microsoft's .NET 2.0 along with the Windows Media Player (version 10), the progress of which errored out for reasons I apparently had no need to know about.
It occurred to me, though, that if I downloaded and installed .NET 2.0 and WMP 10 separately, that the Unbox installation process - if it's smart - would not try to download and install those apps again, so that's what I'm doing in the Mojopac session that's running in parallel with my composing this post.
* * * I dropped by a local photo place I've passed for just about ever to get a couple of visa photos. The price was reasonable, but the service left something to be desired. In the end, I left with two photos of different size, which I hope won't be rejected by the embassy.
I don't know if this is a trend or not, but it seems to me that folks up here in the New York area are just sloppier in their work habits than I am accustomed to experiencing.
Yesterday, for example, the kids who changed the oil in the Ford forgot to replace the sticker that tells you when you're due to return for service. Earlier in the day, the guy who sliced a pizza we had ordered made four seemingly random passes with his cutter, creating one piece that was fully 1/4 of the pie, another whose crust was about 2" wide, and a bunch of smaller pieces near the center of the pie.
Truly, three items do not necessarily prove a trend, but they do begin to suggest one. I might also be a bit more vocal about this kind of thing, on a discretionary basis, of course.
* * * A peek at the progress of the installation shows .NET 2.0 has installed successfully. I've launched the installation of WMP 10... which actually turns out to be WMP 11. WGA kicked in, and apparently passed...
I dragged my old man's rowing exercise device out of the basement and tried it out for a few minutes today, in my office. On the one hand, it really didn't feel as if I was doing anything; on the other; I know how deceptively easy that kind of stuff can feel. I'll know better tomorrow morning.
Okay... Unbox is installed, but!... it's complaining about DRM. I tell it to go repair stuff, it tells me:
Cheers...
It was warm (relatively speaking) yesterday, and cold today. Work came in, but not much. I've got two short items due tomorrow morning, but am not in the mood to tackle them now.
I mentioned a little while ago the technique of installing DRM-intensive apps on their own machine, so as to limit the effect of any attempt to do Something Stupid™, like delete or modify content, including content the program has no moral claim on (EULAs be tarred and feathered!). The trick works, as long as you have extra machines at hand, but then it hit me: why not install the - in this case - Amazon Unbox software on a virtual machine created by Mojopac, which would allow you to carry around your media without carting around an extra computer.
Well, tonight, en route to implementing this solution, I learned that something in Mojopac had changed to make it impossible to run the software from a mounted TrueCrypt partition, which caused me to have uncharitable thoughts with respect to automatic software updates.
You see, what I had done - way back when - was use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted file on my FreeAgent Go drive that can be decrypted and then mounted as a drive, UNIX-style. The file/drive contains pretty much all the music and podcasts I listen to on my MP3 players.
The value of the encryption in this case is marginal. Anyone stealing the unencrypted files will find a windfall of classical music and podcasts on how to speak Spanish, French, and Italian. Still, it's easy to come up with scenarios - involving, say, accounting data - where it would be advisable to encrypt data that sits on highly portable media (an idea that has yet to catch on at places like, say, some governmental departments in the UK, which seem to lose track of media containing the personal data of literally millions of Her Majesty's subjects on an all-too-routine basis, but I digress...).
Anyway, since I could no longer execute Mojopac from a mounted TrueCrypt partition (a hypothesis I developed from the error message about how the device I was using was not USB 2.0 compliant), I decided to ditch the whole concept by first copying the files in the partition to another drive, and then back to the "native" FreeAgent Go unit with the TrueCrypt file removed. A reboot and a few mouse clicks later, Mojopac ran without a hitch, thereby justifying my suspicions.
Unfortunately, attempting to install the Amazon Unbox software involves, besides installing itself, installing Microsoft's .NET 2.0 along with the Windows Media Player (version 10), the progress of which errored out for reasons I apparently had no need to know about.
It occurred to me, though, that if I downloaded and installed .NET 2.0 and WMP 10 separately, that the Unbox installation process - if it's smart - would not try to download and install those apps again, so that's what I'm doing in the Mojopac session that's running in parallel with my composing this post.
I don't know if this is a trend or not, but it seems to me that folks up here in the New York area are just sloppier in their work habits than I am accustomed to experiencing.
Yesterday, for example, the kids who changed the oil in the Ford forgot to replace the sticker that tells you when you're due to return for service. Earlier in the day, the guy who sliced a pizza we had ordered made four seemingly random passes with his cutter, creating one piece that was fully 1/4 of the pie, another whose crust was about 2" wide, and a bunch of smaller pieces near the center of the pie.
Truly, three items do not necessarily prove a trend, but they do begin to suggest one. I might also be a bit more vocal about this kind of thing, on a discretionary basis, of course.
I dragged my old man's rowing exercise device out of the basement and tried it out for a few minutes today, in my office. On the one hand, it really didn't feel as if I was doing anything; on the other; I know how deceptively easy that kind of stuff can feel. I'll know better tomorrow morning.
Okay... Unbox is installed, but!... it's complaining about DRM. I tell it to go repair stuff, it tells me:
Checking network: OK (0.047 seconds)Oh, well.
Checking internet connection: OK (0.719 seconds)
Checking Unbox notification service: OK (0.078 seconds)
Checking Unbox messaging service: OK (1.203 seconds)
Checking file download: OK (3.156 seconds)
Download speed: 6889 Kbps
Checking DRM:
Individualizing...
Downloading DRM Patch...
Patching DRM...
DRM Repair: FAILED
Troubleshooting was unable to fix the problem with the digital rights management (DRM) components on this PC. Please contact customer service.
Cheers...
