Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel (DC) is not my cup of tea. There are lots of other things to wile my time away with, but some people love it.

There are fan sites on the net all over the world - but one in particular seems to have drawn the ire of the DC lawyers and he's about to cave in and give them his web domain.

The fact is he's got www.deadliestcatchtv.com but that's not it completely. His site includes links to YouTube postings by the DC people such as show excerpts, etc. Stuff that you and others might link into our own blogs via the "embed" code provided by YouTube for their videos.

He also has information that the DC people have sent him directly - and presumably want him to post because it boosts the show's ratings.

The problem is, the DC lawyers have gotten into the act and they just don't seem to understand the internet at all. They think that this site owner has done something wrong in showing the YouTube embed code on his site (remember, the video still comes from YouTube - it just shows up through a window on his site)

It's not like he's copied the video and hosted it on his own hardware - that would be both against the law and silly.

It's not that he's edited it and made a collage of it (legal in the US but not in Canada under Fair Use/Fair Dealing - at least until Bill C-32 comes to pass)

It's not that he's the only one with a domain name that is similar to the show's name, he's not - in fact the show does not even have "deadliestcatch.com"

What the legal-beagles don't seem to understand is that such fan sites as this are what make a show work today. They are what help keep people interested and in fact do the show a major service in many ways.

One of the major ways these fan sites help the show is that they support fans that a legitimate site might not appreciate. Fans come in all shapes and size and temperaments. I know, I help look after a "kid friendly" set of sites, and some of the people we've attracted really need to be somewhere else away from the kids. Same thing goes when you're a fairly family-oriented channel like DC - you have a show like Deadliest Catch that attracts some of the more adventurous, and of course likely weird and hence likely to be disruptive to the "normal" people the site might attract, it sure would be nice if they went elsewhere but still supported you...

Anyway - 'nuff said. IMHO they (the lawyers) 're idiots.

Personally this puts a big black mark against Discovery Channel in my book.

richard

I met my wife while attending Simon Fraser University as a "mature" student just over 30 years ago. We used to sit together in Statistics class. Since then I've done very little with this particular subject but at least you know I've taken a course in it.

Prior to that I worked for a time-sharing computer company that provided access to the Stats-Can database, and I had a chance to play with some of the data. Since then I've gone into the database for all manner of information on demographics and information. The information was completely devoid of personally identifiable information and in courses from the Stats-Can people we had it impressed upon us that as a vendor of their information we were included in their security infrastructure and personally culpable for any such personal information if it ever did get to us. This part (the security of the individual) of the gathering of statistics is of such high concern that those in Stats-Can pride themselves on not letting anyone know what is on specific forms; it's far higher than I've found in any other government department or body that I've dealt with, anywhere.

A friend of mine tells a sad tale of his wife's web business.

He is a very competent Windows system administrator, able to deal with both the hardware and software. He shops at garage sales for bargains and makes a reasonable living off referbishing laptops and such. She makes her income by doing some quite extraordinary graphic web site setups.

She used a 500 Gig external backup drive to store her archived works. Needing to refer to one of them, she hooked in the backup drive and poof... it died.

He took this external USB drive and tried to get it to work on another machine - poof, the USB slot no longer worked!

He took the drive apart and pulled out the raw SATA drive, and mounted it in a machine with a PCI-based SATA card. It blew up the card.

Suffice it to say, the drive is dead - badly dead - disasterously dead.

There isn't a backup of this "backup".

In fact, this "backup" isn't really a backup - it was an offline "archive" drive and should itself have been backed up because there was no other copy of much of the content of the drive.

Let this be a lesson to you... the real meaning of "backup" is "redundant" - which implies at least 2 copies exist!!!!

In playing around with the default font size for a site I noticed that the drop-downs on the top horizontal menu were no longer properly lining up.

A bit of sleuthing shows that this width is hard coded at 177px, whereas to work correctly it really should be relative to the font size.

A bit of playing around in /private/plugins/sitetailor/templates/custom/gl_horizontal-cascading.thtml (make a copy of the file from the directory above custom) turned the line:

width:177px;

to

width:14.6em;

I'm on all manner of RSS/Syndication feeds, from science to copyright to video to politics - a list that I've cultivated over the past few years to get rid of the huge numbers of email lists I used to be on and the number of Usenet News groups I read from time to time.

Every now and then something really thought provoking shows up - and today is one of those days.

The subject is soot; the stuff that is basically carbon that has not been properly burned and turned into carbon dioxide in all the various ways we burn things these days.

The article in question is from Wired.com reporting on a simulation, the results of which are published in Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

The bottom line on this simulation is that elimination of soot could reverse global warming in as little as 10 years, compared to much longer timelines for reduction in CO2 emissions, typically measured in hundreds of years. This is because soot only sticks around for a few weeks whereas CO2 stays in the atmosphere (and continues to affect global warming) for 30 to 50 years.

Soot is what I find on my car in the morning here in Pitt Meadows - downwind from Vancouver much of the time. I'm at the beginning of what is called the Fraser Valley air shed - that funnel-shaped physical layout of mountains/hills on either side of the valley that keeps the air from upwind/Vancouver intact as it carries its load of soot and other noxious contaminants up the valley.

Soot is what coats glaciers and causes the sun to warm the snow more, melting it and decreasing the size of them over time. This is known as "lowering the albedo" or lowering the reflectivity.

The dramatic lowering of the amount of soot our civilization creates could help reverse the temperature climb we're seeing and if nothing else, extend the time we have to do other things to reduce and finally correct the global warming.

What can you do? Tell your congress-critter, MLA, MP, local government and anyone else about this study - and get them to start their process of dealing with the soot that the likes of poorly tuned diesel engines like big trucks and railway/generation stations, etc.

You can also support efforts to control soot at the smoke stack of industry - a very easy task that simply has to be done.

And you can support anyone who helps change third-world burning habits away from things like open fires and burning dung to properly constructed and equipped stoves and burners that lower or eliminate soot.

This is not hard, it just needs to be recognized as a very inexpensive way of helping with the overall problem

richard

This isn't really about Videon on the internet - but it is about digital TV and the fact that here in Canada the government is dropping the ball in telling people, especially out in rural Canada, that their old "analog" TVs won't work come next August 31, 2011 unless they get a digital channel converter box.

If you get your TV signals from a cable company or satellite company you're fine. Their equipment is already digital and you don't have an antenna on your roof or rabbit-ears on your set top.

To those of you who have an antenna (and I see them all over, even here in Vancouver) you're in for a big surprise come September 1 next year. You won't be able to see TV at all because not only are the Canadian channels all switching, those in the US have already switched.

In the US, the government subsidized the purchase of the converter boxes - why shouldn't they, they stand to make billions from selling off the freed-up frequency spectrum to wireless phone and service carriers?

The Canadian government on the other hand has neither stepped up with a subsidy, nor even told you much about this change - they've been mute except for some pretty well stifled stuff from the CRTC chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein.

If you have an antenna on your roof you should be looking into getting a converter - and you should be giving your MP heck for the complete lack of preparation they've foisted on the unsuspecting public.

On the other hand, maybe this is about Video on the Internet - if you have to purchase a converter box anyway, why not go whole-hog and get one of the ones that gives you access to stuff from around the world? Just Google "internet TV set top box" and you'll see what I mean. Netflix is coming to Canada and their box is only $99 (US, but...)

Take a look at this site to see some of the various other boxes available too

Should be interesting - the local stations are going to scream - but then they should be selling you converters!

richard

Sometimes serendipity steps in just as you think you're going to have to re-invent the wheel or (shudder) pay for some proprietary software and run it on Windoze.

This happened late last week as I looked around for ways of converting the publishing PDF of a huge reference book (made using Quark) into something I could put up online as a reference work with good search engine coverage and potential for crowd-sourced editing and extension.

The project is about to be announced as an adjunct to the work being done by Hancock Wildlife Foundation, an organization I've been part of in both technical and managerial roles since its founding in 2006.

The book Raptor Research and Management Techniques is a compendium of papers that deal with all manner of the life management of raptors; eagles, hawks, falcons, ospreys, owls, vultures, etc. - birds of prey.

The problem I ran into is that once the manuscript was in Quark (where all the final editing had been done), the only way to get it out in any "portable" fashion is via conversion to PDF - just one of those things you find when you deal with proprietary software it seems; nothing reads Quark files because they are not documented and the format is protected jealously by the company.

OK - so I have a PDF. I also have tools that can take one apart and do other "interesting things" like convert to Postscript (pdf2ps) which can then be converted to ASCII (ps2ascii) and all the stuff in the PDF Toolkit (pdftk) but... none of them work properly with the format of this book with its two columns and lots of diagrams, etc.

What I needed was some method of running OCR on the file and getting things out that way. I've seen some impressive facilities that accompany scanners and such - and of course only run on their output it seems. 

I and many others have been looking for some open source facility that would do the trick. One that appeared to be "interesting" was Cuneiform, but the information on this Russian software is sparse in English. I had downloaded the source and had a short session trying to get it to run on my Fedora Core 11 box but was missing some libraries, and the docs are for Debian systems with "apt get" instead of "yum" and obviously different package names so I had put it aside for the time being.

The alternative was a Windows binary already configured - low on my list for now but a fall-back.

And lo and behold, along comes a note about a bootable Linux disk with all the things necessary:

WatchOCR.

It's web page contains a link to Cuneiform so maybe the problem is resolved.

Read on to find out how the system performed but the docs differ from reality - and how to make the system at least a bit better and do some other interesting things such as create HTML output from your PDFs.

Yesterday I received a reply to my letter to my local MP, Randy Kamp (Conservative, Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission)

My original letter, along with other items, included much of what is presented in my previous article on this topic - what MUST be done if we are saddled with TPM without the ability to crack it for "legal" purposes. Too few people have addressed this possibility and what should be our fall-back position if the government fails to heed our wishes and open up the TPM portion to allow fair dealing exceptions.

A good friend of mine and long-time customer, business partner, co-host and all-round great guy runs an e-mail list through my facilities. To this list (of about 10,000 addresses), he sends the results of his answers to people about their tax questions.

David Ingram (the Taxman) has two criteria for the list: you either opt in by signing up manually (and double opt-in by acknowledging the email sent to you), or, as a "cost" of him answering your question (he charges $450/hour to answer by phone or in person), you are put on the list which is where your question's answer is posted - that's the only way you'll see the answer unless he also posts it on his web site, which typically happens much later.

This means it is not really a "double opt-in" list, but it certainly is an opt-in list since every one of the pages that tell people how to send him questions says this is how the answers get back to them.

I don't have a problem with this.

What I (and he) have a problem with is people getting their answers - then rather than using the very obvious and quite effective "unsubscribe" option on each and every email, they push the "spam" button on their ISP's email system and report the list as spam.

Today my friend blacklisted AOL and all the subscribers he has on that system. This means that if you have a tax question you'd better be prepared to provide an email address that is anything but AOL. Other systems may follow - but for now AOL is the only one that has truly been a problem. His list is on their white list and I get feedback each and every time - and he manually unsubscribes the address each and every time - and some of them even "spam-button" the notice of unsubscribe!!!!

Now I've been at this for a LONG time - ever since AOL (and Compuserve and other "BBSs") first connected to the internet and allowed email transfer to/from it. Considering the number of "spam" AOL "install" CDs I've received - none of which were ever solicited - their making the reporting of spam so easy is just a bit hypocritical IMHO.

Anyway - AOL users - you get what you pay for - a "walled garden" - too bad the weeds are so high you can't see what lies outside and actually interact with it reasonably.

Consider this one of the first shots across the bow of email patrons who push the "spam-button" too quickly. I predict that soon you won't be able to get any information such as this - from anyone! Maybe I'll put together the infrastructure to allow email list services to know who has a good/bad recipient reputation. Might be interesting.