St0rY oF uNpReDiCtAbLe LiFe II

Well, I got the news from The Star online today saying that Microsoft will take a step further to combat piracy on its products by implementing some sort of dark/black/blank (or they prefer to use the word “Blackouts”) screen for users of pirated Windows XP Pro.

PETALING JAYA: Starting Wednesday, users with pirated copies of Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP Professional operating system (OS) on machines that are Internet-capable could find their computer displays going black and with no screen icons visible.

There are 8.6 million users of Win XP Pro in Malaysia and about three million are expected to suffer the “blackouts,” according to Microsoft Malaysia.

To continue working, the user would need to reset the machine’s desktop background. Everything will return to normal. But when 60 minutes are up, the black screen will reappear and the user must go through the whole process again.

Source: TheStar Online

My Take

Well, I don’t know if this step only apply to Malaysian user but I have little doubt Microsoft will even stop there. Expect another fuss coming from either Microsoft or the *ehem* *ehem* community. You can read the full article by following the given url and evaluate everything yourself. I suddenly remembered a quote from Jurassic Park movie which sound something like “Nature will find it’s way” and seeing how Windows XP is still very popular, I kinda can see Microsoft latest move will end in vain (remember WGA¹ anyone?). I’m not praying it to happen though; just predicting

Owh….don’t make that gloomy face ; isn’t this the best time to jump to Linux?

WAMP is an acronym that derived from the first letter of the following components; Windows (Microsoft’s Operating System), Apache (a web server), MySQL (a RDBMS), and php (a server side script for producing a dynamic web pages). Basically, it’s a combination of software packages to make your Windows machine capable of running as a server; serving web pages with php as the scripting language and MySQL as the database engine. There’s a time that you want to mimic your actual server on your local PC (eg: testing the update that you make on your site) and to do that, assuming you’re using Microsoft Windows, I’ll show you how.

Read More

I’m always searching for media player that will let me watch my video files hassle free; meaning that I don’t have to worry about codec installation/setup and having different player for different file types. Before this, whether on Windows or Ubuntu, I often end up needing a different media player due to some problems that occurred. Mainly the problem consist of a bloated codec and its’ compatibility with my media player. At that time I used K-Lite Codec Pack as my main codec pack. Time passed by and I realized that I must change to other codec pack to rectify my problem; and doing some search on the net I’ve encountered with CCCP. It solve most of my problem thank GOD, but I realize how do I install CCCP in my Ubuntu machine?

Don’t get me wrong, the codec that I’ve downloaded from Ubuntu’s repositories provide me with no major problem at all but still I feel that it can become much better. Then through some of my acquaintances, I tried VLC media player. But it seems some of my *.mkv files will not play properly using this player. Some times the screen goes blank or when viewing videos with external subtitle files, there’s some kind of green line been drawn at the bottom of the screen. My searching at the net again had resulted in the discovery of another media player that share some of the greatness of VLC media player, SMPlayer. Read More

Okay, imagine a situation like this; you downloaded a files, in the end you notice that the file is corrupted and you have to redownload the files again. But there are certain scenarios that even though it’s corrupted, it’s still can be executed. For example video files. But due to the file corrupt problem, there are some glitches in the video. In some cases, it’s nice to know whether our downloaded files contains error or not as soon as possible. There are many ways or tools to use to check the files integrity. This kind of tools or techniques involved the usage of cryptographic hash functions (eg: SHA1, md5) and redundancy check functions (among others). Among the most popular method been used is Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC).

All right, we’ll look into a practical part and for that purpose I’ll use “[Shinsen-Subs]_Le_Chevalier_D’Eon_-_01_[6BD7BF33].avi” filename as an example. On a side notes, the example file is a video files (an anime to be exact) and as most fansubbers, they tend to include the CRC value at the end of their releases file name (the CRC value of that file is ‘6BD7BF33′). So basically, to check the file integrity, we will compute the CRC value of the file and compare it with the given CRC value. If it’s the same, safe to say that there are nothing wrong with the file and vice versa. For a little of howto demonstration, I will classify it into two different platform; Linux and Windows. Read More