pecosdave

So I stopped by the burrito place today, which is on a bike path in a trendy area right across from the space center. It's bike month, ride your bike to work week, etc... This of course is a bit of a follow up on my previous post.

I decided to take some pictures.


Bet they don't put any bike racks here either.



I chained my bike to a freaking trash can that wasn't bolted down, but at least it made it harder to steal. Notice the two bikes from other customers unchained in the background. I'm obviously not the only person who bikes here.




Looks like there's no place to put racks to me. I mean Coffee Oasis has a bike rack with less than half that sidewalk width....



I could put a small repair shop complete with inventory and a few bikes to sale on this slab. It would be hot and the parts would get rained on, but meh, at least there's burritos near by.

I'm picking on them because they're new construction and they have no excuse. Seriously, the nearby Fuddruckers could use a rack, so could the shopping center with the China Star and NASA Fast Food, not to mention the one with a Star Bucks a little West of that since bikers do tend to pile up there, but they're old construction. Once I get a victory here I'll slowly move on to the others. I'm going to have to get people to join me, and I don't think it will be hard.

On October 19th 2011 I emailed all the contacts at the Griffin Properties website regarding Nassau Bay Town Square. I think I had a very legitimate concern, but not one of the people I emailed responded in the least. I'm going to start being a jerk and hash tagging them to this post elsewhere. Then I may eventually picket or something, because my concern is legitimate, simple to fix, shouldn't be an issue, and above all they ignored me.

I've got a question about your Nassau Bay Town Square property.

Your property is located right across the street from a major
employer, the Johnson Space Center, next to a large apartment complex
which I believe may be owned by your firm as well, and an older
neighborhood of single family homes. On NASA Parkway there is a
designated dedicated bicycle lane.

I want to know why your brand new beautiful upper end property in a
trendy and upwardly mobile area on a bicycle route doesn't have a
single bicycle rack on it, especially when bike use in the area is on
the upswing, due in no small part to NASA actively encouraging it.

I love going to Bullritos for lunch when I'm either on the day or
evening shift at the space center and I often take one of my bikes.
Not only do you not have bicycle racks, all of the light poles on your
property have a very thick and rough concrete base that's about three
feet high. This necessitates my lock going around the pole high off
the ground, not passing through parts of my bike that it should and
scratching the heck out of the frame.

Space is not at a premium at this location, there's a nice big area in
front of the bank, plenty of wide sidewalks, and even a large grassy
area near the corner or near the sidewalk, as well as an area "behind"
the building that would work. Racks are not expensive, I've often
seen purpose made ones for under $100 and it's an opportunity to put
some iron art work on your site if you talk to a college art
department with functional artwork in mind.

Thank you for reading my rant/request, I wish you the best.

I hit reply to all, sent it to the again with this attached:

I've received nothing, no acknowledgement what-so-ever I sent my original email.

I'm going to start getting noisy about this.
http://pecosdave.livejournal.com/321784.html

That's nothing, but it will expand. Eventually I'm going to start picketing on the road side with signs saying you hate bikers and filthy bikers go elsewhere.

Perhaps if you had the human decency to respond in the slightest I would treat you with decency also.

Honestly, these things don't cost much, it will draw customers, especially if someone puts in a coffee shop, though the burrito joint is almost good enough as is.

http://amzn.com/B004W5WUAW
http://amzn.com/B001250N9U
http://amzn.com/B005KOKFFQ

If you do decide to respond, but it's with some sort of bullshit safety, liability, whatever cop-out that isn't real but is designed to get rid of me I'll get louder faster, and get more people involved.

Griffin Properties hates cyclist.

My Romney gallery for your viewing pleasure.

Paramount's implementation of Ultraviolet wasn't way to painful. At first I thought I was actually going to like it, I was able to log into the website, register my movie and overall it was rather painless. Then they pulled out the Silverlight trap. To Microsofts credit they re-directed me to Novell and their moonlight plugin, however the moonlight plugin was too old to work with my version of Linux, I don't know if they're updating it or not.

The workaround through Flixster that I found for Sony titles doesn't work with Paramount, they insist on streaming from their site.

I'm putting it ahead of Sony due to intent but at the bottom of the barrel due to usefulness.

There was a survey on their website and I responded with this:

Silverlight is a very bad choice. It is a proprietary Microsoft product, is full of security holes and is not open source friendly in the least. Replace Silverlight with something better, Java, Flash, an SSH tunnel SOMETHING but asking for web content and handing it to me through Silverlight is like asking for a drink and having someone hand you a soaked dish sponge.

Among the questions in the questionnaire they asked how important the Apple digital copy was to me. I responded not at all. This bothered me since they were so mono-culturally Apple in the question and didn't ask about the other options, such as Universal giving me the Amazon option and I think some of the other guys give Vudu and Netflix options, both useless to me for the time being but at least it's not Apple exclusively like Paramounts mindset.

On the whole Flixster seems to be the best thing going for Ultraviolet in general. It's mostly company neutral, they report on all movies equally. They are absolutely platform neutral, Flixster doesn't care what OS I visit with and they'll stream just about any movie for me the uvvu.com site will and then some. A shining example of making DRM work both for the consumer and the media companies. Following Flixsters model would "fix" both the piracy and availability issues for otherwise honest people while guaranteeing income for the media companies. This is why I foresee Flixster getting sued into crappifying their service eventually. Taking care of the consumer seems to be the thing many media companies hate the most.

I've seen more people bash Warner Brothers for their digital copy implementation than any other. I decided to check it out.

Long story short, not quite as nice as Universal, far, far, far better than Sony.

I needed a Flixster account to make it happen, one of the biggest things most people complain about. I already had one so I logged in, redemption was painless.

The movie refused to play.

The support pages mentioned needing the latest Flash player from Adobe, I don't have problems with anything else, but what the heck, I got the latest one directly from Adobe. Interestingly enough instead of giving me a .deb they added a repository by clicking the link. I'm fine with this.

The movie played back looking a bit crappy and blocky, I'm assuming it's that fact I'm streaming to my desktop via two routers through WiFi, I could be wrong, it could be so DRM laden they don't leave enough room for the actual movie - sort of like Hulu does.

I noticed they used their own player. Out of curiosity I clicked on the Smurfs, since UltraViolet movie info is shared through the main site, I'm sure you remember what a fiasco that was. It worked! The fix for watching Sony Ultra Violet movies is to use the Warner Brothers method....

Now that I've posted this I'm sure Sony will go and "correct" their "error" - damned Linux hippies getting in anyways!

I wrote the below as my personal comment on a re-share on Goggle Plus. When I was done I thought it was worthy of a more permanent home here.

As a side note let's take a look at things that might cause people to want to pirate and see if the content owners will address a few of these:

1. Obnoxiously long copyright terms. We once had a nice path for creative works to eventually pass into the public domain. Thanks mostly to Hollywood lobbyist getting things such as the Bono "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" passed things that should be in the public domain such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and yes, even the 101 Dalmatians Movie should have passed into the public Domain just this year yet none of it has. One of the worst things about this, especially in the case of Disney is a significant portion of Disney's products, especially the better ones, are focuses on Public Domain characters, they wish to take, but not to give back.

2. Insanely stupid DRM restrictions - People like to watch TV, they like to play video games, they like to watch movies, and in the modern day there's more ways than ever to do these things. Initially the content providers fought tooth and nail to keep people on old physical media formats. The people wouldn't have it and turned to pirate tools and piracy itself to consume their media. The content providers relented - sort of - and gave the people what they wanted - sort of. To fight the piracy of TV shows HULU.com (and a few other services) were launched. Now instead of pirating people can watch TV on their computers for free. Well, they still get commercials unlike pirated copies of programs. HULU.com offers a paid version of their service so you can - guess what - watch these programs right after they air on their service - just like pirates would upload the day something airs for free. Of course even if you pay for it there's still commercials, but they make up for it by allowing you to watch it on your TV through various game consoles, Blu-Ray players etc.. - Just like you can do with pirated copies - some shows, not all of them. So we're stopping piracy - a little - by giving people what they want - sort of - not really. That's just the TV end of things, then you have your digital copies of movies that come with lock in, once you put it on an Apple device you're stuck with using Apple devices until the end of time, or you can use Windows to get your copy, in which case you can't switch to Apple. Ever. Or you can get Ultra Violet digital copy, which is very inconsistent one company to the next, such as Sony refusing to let Linux people even log in without stating so while other companies allow it. Should we even get into how some legally bought video games are almost unplayable due to their DRM while pirated versions work great?

3. Walled gardens. I've already addressed some of that above, but it deserves it's own mention. If you buy Apple content, you're stuck with Apple devices, if you buy Sony content you may be able to use this device, their device but not THAT device. Pirated content is by design either compatible with nearly everything or easily converted to be compatible with your device with easy how-to's listed anywhere you want to look.

4. Unavailable content. This one is actually improving, but it's still not there. People like nostalgia, and they want something they had at one point in the past to work with something they have now. Say someone wants to read The Never Ending Story on their ebook reader, but it's never come out in ebook. Or someone wants to play a video game from their youth, but it doesn't work on modern game systems and their old console is broke, or in my case stolen or soaked in hurricane salt water. They would gladly pay for this content were it available, but it's not. This has greatly improved over time. I used to chastise Nintendo in particular over this matter, especially since Sony and Sega had done such a good job of making their old titles available in one way or the other, but Nintendo is now on board with virtual console titles (even from old competitors). It's not perfect, I don't expect that anything I bought for my Wii will transfer to my Wii U or for my DS to work on my 3DS, but I'm not saying they won't accommodate. When George Lucas releases the Star Wars Christmas Special on any form of modern media we'll finally achieve availability.

5. Anti-competitive pricing. I wasn't going to put this one here, I have always thought of the price point to be a cop-out, but one of Steve Job's final acts was to change my mind on this. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, just read up on it.

Piracy is wrong. I tend not to pirate personally maybe one or two unavailable things here or there, but overall I discourage it. I use pirate utils to format shift content I have legally purchased, which content owners do not approve of, but it's legal and it isn't piracy.

As much as I think the people have a responsibility to consume their content ethically and to be certain to compensate those who put their time and creative efforts into creating this wonderful media that we obviously wish to consume, I also think the content providers need to listen to the people and make an effort to meet their demands for simplicity, functionality, and fairness.

Keep in mind - the high road requires effort. The more DRM you use the more effort the average individual has to exert to take the high road and the more appealing piracy becomes.

One last thing in case a content provider reads this. - I bought a physical copy of the World of Goo in a book store. It was Mac and Windows compatible. I don't use Mac personally, I put the copy on my daughters dual G5. I liked it, (and so does she) I bought another copy online for my Linux machine. I then bought a Wii points card, gave it to my mother and encouraged her towards getting the World of Goo on her Wii. Three copies legally purchased for a game with no DRM (excluding the Wii version) by a single individual due to the excellence of the product and the fairness of the distribution. The Linux copy - arguably the easiest to pirate - was the one I paid the most for.

I still had to use Windows to do anything with it. For the download option it demands I install Silverlight, I don't think I will.

For the record this is what it looks like when I try to watch a Sony movie with a Linux box:




This is what a Universal movie looks like when I decide to watch it:



Just in case you're unfamiliar with this site and coming in via search engine here's my account from yesterday dealing with Sony and their horrible implementation of Ultra Violet. To go further back here's my account of my initial setup with Universal. What needed to be done initially wasn't obvious, but in the end I was somewhat impressed. If they actually make an Ultra Violet app for my Blueray player I'll be a happy camper.

Next day follow-up:
I decided to try some user agent switching, something I don't usually do. It didn't look simple in Chrome so I tried Firefox. Telling it I was using IE caused the Sony page to render black. Telling it I was Firefox for Windows gave me a login prompt, but it once again gave me a string of numbers instead of proper "Fuck you hippie!" message.

BTW - I just ripped the DVD. That's right, don't make it work for me your way I'll make it work for me my way. I can rip the Blueray if I want, but really I don't need high-def for my intended purpose.

I wrote Sony a support email over their implementation of Ultra Violet Digital Copy. It's mostly self explanitory, this is what I emailed them, I hope they respond.

I got my daughter the full blown expensive 3D version of the Smurfs for Christmas, and I immediately attempted to claim the Ultra Violet Digital copy since the one I claimed from Universal for Cowboys and Aliens went so well, heck it's the only MPAA approved way to watch movies on Linux!

I tried setting up a Sony account, first of all the instructions send me to the Sony Rewards site that has nothing to do with Ultra Violet and I was utterly confused with how I was supposed to get my copy there. I eventually just Googled Sony Ultra Violet and the found the Ultra Violet site. I kept getting this message when I tried to create an account:


An Error Was Encountered

A system error occurred. Please try again later or contact customer support. (848ecb5f-912f-43d2-a2dc-b06bad3b837b)


I figured you got a Christmas rush on your servers and you didn't have people around to fix them so I patiently waited and tried a couple of times a day only to have that error every time I tried to create an account.

Finally on a sneaking suspicion I started up a Windows XP virtual machine on my system at home (the only commercial OS I have and it's usually reserved exclusively for client support, and only then when absolutely necessary) Using the same browser I use on all of my Linux stuff I was able to create an account. The only number inside the with the disk has nothing to do with the digital copy. I Google some more, turns out the number was on the cellophane, something completely unheard of to me before now. That was thrown out in a bag full of used tissues yesterday 300 miles from where I am now that I figured out the problem.

If your error message would simply have said "because we dislike Linux and we don't think you should use it - despite the fact we use it in many of our products" instead of (848ecb5f-912f-43d2-a2dc-b06bad3b837b) I would have been able to retrieve it once I figured out the number inside the movie box had nothing to do with the digital copy.

Could I possibly get another registration number for this movie? Also could I get you to alter your server either to allow Linux clients to register or at least to put up a hate message? All of my difficulties could have been prevented with a proper hate message.

BTW, yes, this does mean I think Universals implementation is far superior to yours. I blogged about theirs. Now I'm going to copy paste this as my follow up entry.

Thanks

David Monroe
Geek of many talents

I sure hope this gets indexed up high. On another note - This is how I figured out where the registration code was, today, a couple of days after I threw out the cellophane in a bag full of snotty tissues. This post is sort of a follow up to my previous one.

Update:

Sony sent me a new key, still ass-hats about OS, I can see the Smurfs movie next to my Universal movies on the UVVU website, I can play my Universal movies right there but the Smurfs requires me to go to the Sony website where instead of saying "Go away Linux hippie!" they still throw numbers at me. Here's my account of that, with screen shots!

I usually hate DRM with a passion, and I'm not fully on-board with it. Sure my Kindle is full of DRM laden books, which I'm not particularly happy about. When I broke my last Kindle's screen, backed the files up to my PC and restored them to the new Kindle I found out even my public domain books from Amazon were full of DRM. Of course Amazon restored them over the cloud so as a non-pirating individual it wasn't really an issue. It will only become one when I ditch my Kindle for the IRiver reader or something (in which case I can get the public domain ones free again anyways, the paid for ones, not so much).

I've been ripping my DVD's to a NAS drive that does UPnP and DLNA, and that's worked really well for me. I've even ripped a couple of BluRays but I still consider those in the experimental stage. The thing is even with all my DVD's in binders instead of the original boxes I have such a huge collection that takes up physical room, has to be moved when I do, and still is subject to the likes of hose-beast theft and hurricanes. The real question - do I trust DRM companies or do I trust the multiple time proven unreliable reliability of optical media for backup? Granted my situation with the hurricane and multiple thefts is unique to me, but it leaves an impression.

On to the actual Ultra Violet digital. I'm not 100% sure why the companies are taking this approach now. I suspect they're worried someone will figure out how to break the encryption on the physical digital copy disk, I consider that irrelevant considering I can already rip both the DVD's and the BluRay's. I suspect it has something to do with Microsoft, Apple and Sony having to cooperate to make the Digital copy disks work while us Linux folks are shouting about being left out of the loop, this offloads the responsibility to a shared third party.

My redemption process with a little confusing, the websites from the links aren't exactly straight forward in their explanations, and that's been one of the top things people have been bitching about online. When I follow the URL on the little slip of paper inserted with my Cowboys and Aliens disk it told me to go to a Universal website, which I did. Then it asked me to create an account which was mostly a revolving door dead end. I found out first I had to create an account at uvvu.com which is the license holding website, THEN I had to create one at universaldigitalcopy.com, which is the rights holder. When I got logged into both of those I got to type in my redemption code. THEN I had to chose a retailer to provide the digital copy. That's right, setting up all of that, THEN I had to log-in to Amazon with a code given to my by the Universal site to actually obtain the movie/file itself. They also said I had to hurry, because if I waited until March it would be too late. Amazon reiterated this fact. I had to have my code in and the movie downloaded or streamed by March if I wanted to keep it. I couldn't find a download option even though it was mentioned, so I streamed it.

Now never fear, Amazon wasn't my only option, I believe iTunes, Vudu and a couple of others were mentioned, but I don't recall which ones for certain, Amazon was the only one I actively used unless Hulu was one of them and I don't have a plus account so I didn't bother.

As I was writing this I decided to poke around to see if I could play back the movie on my Android phone. I had a "thank you" email from Universal, I clicked and they offered me a free copy of either Being John Malkovich or Dazed and Confused. I took John Malkovich, oddly I hadn't seen either movie which is a surprise and it was a true coin toss, I'm not sure why I chose the one I did other than it looked like it may have had a little more SciFi and artistic value, but it was close. Unlike Cowboys and Aliens I did not have to redeem a coupon code at Amazon or elsewhere for this title. The rabbit hole gets deeper.

To answer the question, I haven't figured out how to play back the movies on my Android phone yet. Amazon doesn't seem to have a method through any of the four apps on my phone, the market place, the regular shopping app, the MP3 app OR the Kindle app. I tried logging into the uvvu.com site, still no luck. There doesn't appear to be an ultra violet app either. I'm not really into watching movies on my phone, but it is a matter of curiosity.


The Good:

I can stream it from either Amazon or the the uvvu website.

Since I can stream it from Amazon I can use my BluRay player to play back Cowboys and Aliens. That's nice but I do actually have the BluRay for that.

The copy is secure even if there is another devastating incident that wipes out my property.

It's operating system agnostic - except for maybe Android and I'm not convinced there.


The Bad:

Three friggin accounts to redeem something?

The order of operations wasn't exactly clear, I could see other people giving up or calling support. (actually according to reviews on the Green Lantern movie Amazon page many did)

The playback methods are inconsistent. The uvvu site even states not all of the movie companies will allow playback from their site, so far I've dodged the bullet on the whole site centric thing.

Inconsistent management. I cannot play back Being John Malkovich on my BluRay player since it was a uvvu only redemption and there isn't a uvvu or Android app.


To finish:
I think this may actually turn out to be an acceptable DRM laden media management service for both the studios and the customers. It's nearly seamless, once you actually get content, and unlike iTunes it doesn't have platform lock-in, and in the case of one of the two movies mentioned it even works with the locked in platform. One of the nice things about going virtual that promotional offerings are more likely to happen, for instance when I was looking through my email for answers I found not only the movie redemption that got me Being John Malkovich, I also found a free MP3 and movie redemption from Amazon. This has nothing to do with Ultra Violet, it just points out the offerings are more common. (BTW, I got Time Warp as my freebie song and Imagine That as my other freebie movie)

As of this moment I wouldn't dump money directly into getting Ultra Violet content, but it does have some promise. If the prices get/stay low I may consider it. As it stands I'm not going to ignore the freebie/included redemptions that may come my direction. I've been giving my classic digital copies to my mother save one or two I played with she wouldn't be interested in anyways. Mostly they've been kids movies and she redeems them with iTunes on the Mac I gave her. Things just may change now.

----------------------
P.S.

If you happen to absolutely hate the idea of this DRM laden stuff and you happen to buy something that comes with a redemption code please feel free to email the code and URL to me or post a reply anonymously - anonymous posts are screened and will be for my eyes only unless I approve them :-)


-------------Update-------------

Yes I realize I just posted this but I don't feel like editing the original post to reflect what I just discovered. There is an app called Pocket Blu that will enable you to watch the movies from an Android device. Maybe. It has to be a Universal release to work with this app, and your phone can't be rooted. Considering I would rather have two days worth of battery life instead of 12 hours tops, really 8 last time I tried it with the Sprint firmware I'm going to keep my phone rooted. It was supposed to have a nifty feature that let you watch/listen to directors commentary on your phone streaming over the network while leaving the actual movie running without that sort of stuff being on screen, and work as a remote control but it didn't work. Never found the player. I know it's not networking issue, I shut down the Pocket Blu app and started up the LG Remote control app and it worked just fine, so networking issues aren't to blame. Rooting or issues with my particular player may be however, but my player seems to work with just about everything else, I'm quite happy with it.

Update Again:

If you've read the above be sure to read my very next post dealing with Sony's version of Ultra Violet. The above Universal method is far, far superior to Sony's, and with Sony I already had the uvvu.com account setup so it should have been easier.

Plus another note - I tried Pocket Blu at my parents house with their Samsung last week.  It didn't work there either.

So you've setup ZSNES, Mednafen, or any other number of emulators and you want to use that really convenient, readily available Bluetooth PS3 game control with it. You go to all the forums, do a little research and you find it's actually quite easy to setup with QtSixA or some other method and you think you're ready to go. You start up your Joy Stick option in your control panel applet and you see that all the buttons, joysticks, and even the tilt axis work correctly. You fire up Mednafen, hold Alt+Shift+1 to program the emulator to run your games then to your horror it runs through every button push on its own. You say "that's a screwy program anyways!" so you start ZSNES, go to the gamepad setup and every time you click your mouse on the button you want to program the same way you did with a dozen lesser pads and it fills in with some garbage that isn't what you pushed.

You just experienced the program taking the input from the tilt accelerometers as your programming button push.

I use Kubuntu, if you use a non-Ubuntu distribution or a driver other than mine this may not apply to you, but for those who have a setup similar to mine (most Debian-derived distros), here's what you do. According to the QtSixA manual the files I'm having you edit in /etc/default should be in /var/lib/sixad/ so you may need to do some extra searching on your own system or ask someone who's better versed in your particular distro to locate the correct config file.

Here's a hand hold - you can actually copy-paste this into your terminal window to make it easy, or if you can tell what I'm doing, do it your own way.

sudo cp /etc/default/sixad /etc/default/sixad.accel_enabled
sudo pico /etc/default/sixad

Type in your password.

Change only the things I'm telling you to, if you want to experiment later go ahead, but make sure it works before you screw it up and blame it on me.

In the file you will find these lines:

# Enable sensible buttons? (as axis)
Enable_sbuttons=1

This one is optional. You might want to make that "1" a "0". This is what makes your buttons pressure sensitive, I don't know of anything on Linux that will benefit from leaving that enabled, some emulators detect different pressure sensitivities and will register a light push but not a hard push/hard but not light. My previous work around was just to press hard when programming the buttons but disabling this all together isn't a bad idea.

Look for these lines:

# Enable axis? (Left & Right)
Enable_axis=1

Make that "1" a "0". I don't know if this is redundant or not given the next step but better safe than sorry.

Next:

# Enable accelerometers?
Enable_accel=1

Again, make that 1 a 0.

Hold Control and press "o" to write the file, yes, keep the original file name, just hit enter. Hold control press "x" to exit pico. Yes I can use vim, but I didn't suggest that because it's too complicated for people who don't already know how to use it and that's another how-to.

Reboot the system (or if you know how restart Blu-tooth)

Your control should now work without the accelerometers screwing up your control programming. You can re-enable them if you want to after configuring whatever programs have been giving you issues, but I'm just leaving mine as is, I don't see any use for them in my little world.

If you started toying with things I didn't specify, or if you just screwed something up copy paste the below into a terminal and reboot, it should put everything back the way it was. You can start over if you like.

rm /etc/default/sixad
cp /etc/default/sixad.accel_enabled /etc/default/sixad

UPDATE:

I installed Linux Mint 12 and tried this again. Totally doesn't work in the above manner, now I have to figure it out. Sixad works just fine, but not on boot up, the above instructions don't work, but the GUI handles those things.

Looks like getting rid of bluedevil helped a little, no more forever long boot up, but there's still problems with it (buggy KDE issues) and getting rid of Bluedevil keeps my Bluetooth audio from working. For the record this is something that did work better on Ubuntu.