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Taking a Page from “McDreamy’s” Book

Poster for the movie “Can’t Buy Me Love”

Can’t Buy Me Love

Twenty years before he would be known as “McDreamy” on the hit television series Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey starred in a better-than-average teen movie called Can’t Buy Me Love (produced under the unfortunate working title Boy Rents Girl). You can probably guess the plot from the title and poster: geeky guy attempts to become popular by paying the head cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend; hilarity (and later, a relationship) ensues.

FakeYourSpace

FakeYourSpace takes the Can’t Buy Me Love approach and applies it to social networking sites. Their service, which is supposed to become available today, lets you pick from their roster to “friends” with head-cheerleader-good-looks to pretend to be your friends on your MySpace, Facebook or Friendster page. For a mere 99 cents a month, these fake friends come with good looks (they’re photos of models) and will post comments on your pages.

Here’s some copy that was on their site earlier this week:

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall.

They ran into a little trouble recently: iStockPhoto.com, the source of the “friends'” photos, objected to their use of their models photos. Apparently there’s an agreement in the iStockPhoto.com license that states that the photos cannot be used in such a way to make people “think that the model endorses” the product, Web site or person for which they are being used. This News.com report says that FakeYourSpace founder Brant Walker was looking for alternate sources of model photos.

As of this writing, FakeYourSpace isn’t up and running. Going to their URL currently takes you to a GoDaddy “coming soon” domain parking page.

FakeYourSapce screenshot

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Outlook 2007 sinking Office?

I (briefly) installed a trial of Office 2007 on my work box, to get a glimpse of the future (since it appears that my business unit is in upgrade Siberia, it’ll be years before we see IT put it on our machines). While the wisdom of completely changing Office’s UI to the new “ribbon” device is debatable, I actually had no show stopping issues with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.

Outlook, on the other hand, was a totally different issue.

I thought it might just be the poky Pentium M in my ThinkPad, but Outlook 2007 was significantly slower than its predecessor. So much so, I cracked about 30 days into the 90 day trial and uninstalled whole suite. It would appear I’m not alone in this experience:

The problem — which is absolutely inexcusable — is that Office 2007 (Outlook, specifically) crawls, even on this superfast machine. The hard-drive is also constantly in motion, slowing things down even more. I’m not alone in these observations. You can read other Office 2007 horror stories here and here. Despite a small .PST file — I reduced mine from close to a gig to less than 150 MB — my Intel Centrino Duo-driven notebook chugs along like a 386 trying to run an application originally written for a mainframe system. Even such tasks as composing a simple email are delayed by a few seconds before my typed words ultimately appear on the screen (and send / receives and related activities take an eternity).

The curious thing is that nothing very significant seems to have changed with Outlook 2007. Certainly nothing of the magnitude of the UI overhaul that the rest of the Office suite got, or the changes that Outlook 2003 delivered (such as the vertical right-hand reading pane). This makes the crummy performance particularly unacceptable.

I open Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to do specific things, but Outlook’s always open. Next to the browser and IM clients, it’s one of the indispensible tools of my workday. If Outlook 2007 really performs this badly for everyone else, Microsoft is going to have a big mess on their hands once customers start rolling this thing out in a big way.

Source: SpendMatters: Vista, Office and Outlook 2007 are a Nightmare

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Oh, the Number of Times Technology Has Made Me Feel Just Like Philippe…

“Achewood” comic for February 23, 2007
Click to see the comic on its original page.

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RAR Trumps ZIP

RAR file iconA number of my (ahem) file sharing enthisiast friends tend to favour the RAR compression format over ZIP, since the “word on the street” is that it makes for smaller files. This is particularly handy for all sorts of uses, from creating archives of version-control repositories of your code to say, passing around copies of the leaked Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible.

Jeff Atwood, author of the “you must read this if you code” blog Coding Horror, has gone beyond accepting the prevailing wisdom and done the legwork. He took the data from a page benchmarking a large number of file compression tools, fed the data into Excel and produced some charts which make it easier to interpret. The practical upshot of all this is that your best bang-for-the-buck compression tools in terms of output size (smaller is better) and speed (faster is better) are WinRAR and SBC (which neither he nor I had heard of before). He writes:

RAR offers a nearly perfect blend of compression efficiency and speed across all modern compression formats. And WinRAR is an exemplary GUI implementation of RAR. It’s almost a no-brainer. Except in cases where backwards compatibility trumps all other concerns, we should abandon the archaic ZIP format– and switch to the power and flexibility of WinRAR.

(Before you start complaining that recipients won’t be able to uncompress RAR files: you can create self-extracting RAR file for Windows with a sub-100K overhead, StuffIt Expander does just fine uncompressing them on the Mac, and if you’re on Linux, you should have the chops to locate the RAR unarchiver for your particular distro.)

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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Fill in the Blanks

Don’t you think that the photo below screams “Caption contest!”?

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at dinner.

More photos here.

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Screencasting: Where Windows Clearly Spanks Mac OS X

Camtasia Studio box.

(I was strongly tempted to reference the Pussycat Dolls song and give this post the title Don’t You Wish Your Mac Did Screencasts Like the PC?. That damned song seems to have crept into every movie or trailer I’ve seen in the past week.)

You’d think that with its serious “creative cred” that someone would’ve developed a killer screencasting application for the Mac, but I agree with the folks over at 37 Signals: there just isn’t one. The 37 Signals folk are pretty hard-core Mac fans — it’s reflected in both their design aesthetic as well as the preferred platform of Ruby on Rails developers (RoR was developed by 37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson) — so it’s pretty safe to assume that they’ve hunted high and low for a reasonable scrrencasting app that runs on their platform of choice.

The closest candidate is Snapz Pro, written by Ambrosia Software, creator of some really great Mac games and utilities. I use Snapz, which is probably the best screen-grabbing utility I’ve ever used as well as WireTap Pro, which is equally excellent as an audio capture tool.

The pro version of Snapz does a decent job of capturing screen movies, but therein lies the problem: there’s a difference between “capturing movies of the screen” and “producing a screencast”. When it comes to producing a screencast, the editing process tends to take up far more time than the recording prcoess, and that’s where Snapz Pro falls short. To do editing, you’ve got to go to iMovie, and to produce title cards, you’ve got to fire up your favorite image-editing software, and so on. There’s a lot of “legwork” involved. As the 37 Signals people put it:

Here’s what I’d like to see. Basic screen video capture with a few simple compression options, audio recording, caption/graphic overlay support, simple video editing (cut, duplicate, slow down, just the basics), and export to Quicktime or Flash. All wrapped up in a nice UI too, of course. The biggest downfall of the current options is editing — there’s no way to preview the screencast you just created, overlay some captions, intro and outro text, and cut out some of the dead video).

Can I get an amen? Better yet, can I get a product?

I’ll agree that using separate tools is probably the better way to go if you’re producing a film, but if you’re trying to quickly produce a screencast (or several screencasts) demonstrating a UI for your customers with voice-over narration that also lets me do a little editing, make titles and throw in some transitions, I want a tool that’s a little more monolithic, a tool that — dare I say it? — takes a more “Microsoft Office-y” approach like the 37 Signals people suggest. That tool is Camtasia Studio.

Camtasia Studio supports all sorts of output formats, from QuickTime and Windows Media to what seems to be the preferred format these days — Flash video with an integrated player, a la YouTube. Adding titles, transisitons and text captioning is easy, and there’s a pretty decent edit suite in there too. For the videos you output in Flash, there’s the option of adding interactive “call-outs” (highlighted areas of the movie) and “hot spots” which when clicked take the user to a predetermined point in the movie or a web page. I’ve already used it to create a couple of screencasts for use by Tucows’ sales team, and they love the results. I’ve already committed to creating some screencast tutorials for end users for some of our Tucows services. And yes, they’ve got a version that runs under Vista — I run it on “The Taint”, the Acer laptop sent to me as part of a Vista promo. Call me a happy (and completely unsolicited) user of Camtasia Studio.

So c’mon, Mac developers — where’s the Mac equivalent of Camtasia?

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Kiss Your Open WiFi Goodbye if the RIAA Gets Their Way

“When you pirate MP3s, you’re downloading communism” posterBack in July 2003, someone who read the Wired article titled Giving Sharers Ears Without Faces wrote to our pal (and former boss) Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing:

One issue that I have not seen addressed in the RIAA vs. P2P front relates to the potential for an unsupecting home PC user who just happens to have an open WiFi router being used by a neighbor to share files to get sued by the RIAA when their IP address shows up on the RIAA’s list. From the surveys I’ve done, there are a lot of open WiFi routers a file swapper could easily use to both serve and download files. So, is the RIAA going to have to shut down open WiFi to get its way?

A year later, Boing Boing ran an article titled Open WiFi for plausible deniability, which cover’s Micah Joel’s running of “an open WiFi network in order to give himself plausible deniability for bad acts that can be traced to his IP address”:

I’ve already composed my reply in case I receive one of these letters someday. “Dear Comcast, I am so sorry. I had no idea that copyrighted works were being downloaded via my IP address; I have a wireless router at home and it’s possible that someone may have been using my connection at the time. I will do my best to secure this notoriously vulnerable technology, but I can make no guarantee that hackers will not exploit my network in the future.” If it ever comes down to a lawsuit, who can be certain that I was the offender? And can the victim of hacking be held responsible for the hacker’s crimes? If that were the case, we’d all be liable for the Blaster worm’s denial of service attacks against Microsoft last year.

Well, we’re now a few years and two generations of 802.11 down the road, and the RIAA has finally done it. Cory writes:

The RIAA is asking a judge to rule that anyone who provides bandwidth should be responsible for all the activities of his users. This would doom open WiFi — and all other public networking efforts. But who needs anonymous speech, anyway? After all anonymity fuels irresponsible behavior, like founding the United States.

The RIAA just wants to stand up for freedom. First they convinced Russia to force licensing and 24-hour inspection of presses, now they want to eliminate anonymous speech here at home.

Record companies are quick to cite the First Amendment when someone suggests banning music with “suggestive” lyrics, but they’re not so big on free presses and anonymous speech. It’s like they love free speech, but not enough to share it with the rest of us.

It’s all part of their “rabbit hunting with Howitzers” legal strategy. It stems from the case of Debbie Foster, who was being sued by Capitol Records, a part of the RIAA cartel, for allegedly sharing copyrighted material on a P2P network. It turned out that she wasn’t the culprit; it was someone else using her account. The case was dismissed last year with a filing that gets pretty damned close to calling out the RIAA as extortionists — or at least as close as you can get outside of a TV or movie courtroom drama. Foster didn’t stop there; she filed a motion asking the court to make the RIAA compensate her for her legal fees and got that compensation in the form of a $50,000 award earlier this month.

This award creates a legal headache for the RIAA. As Listening Post puts it: “If the ruling stands, the RIAA will have to be much more careful about who it sues going forward, adjusting its scatter-shot approach to filing such lawsuits in order to avoid suing the wrong people”.

Hence the RIAA’s latest move: filing a motion for reconsideration that forces them to pay Foster’s legal fees, a key point of which is that they’d like a ruling that the owner of an ISP account is responsible for all activity on that account.

James “Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants” Robertson makes a couple of interesting observations:

  • He points to an Ars Technica story that says that the RIAA, in their motion, “lay out their disagreement with the judge’s reasoning while taking time to point out that the fees awarded far exceed any damages they could have recovered should their suit have been successful”, to which he quips “What, you mean there are risks in this strategy?”
  • He points out that it’s not just the individual running an open node at home or the small cafe running an open node to get customers who are in trouble:

    …any entity that offered a net connection – Starbucks, a hotel, a municipality (etc) – would have a huge potential liability on their hands. They might well decide to just discontinue in order to not expose themselves. Yeah, there’s a world I want to live in.

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