Chris Dodd, the chief lobbyist for the MPAA:

Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,

Shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone really. We know congress has been corrupted by money. There are organizations, such as Rootstrikers trying to rally others to fight this.

A petition on whitehouse.gov has been started to “demand justice”. I don’t know if what Dodd is admitting constitutes bribery but it is up to the other branches of government to help keep the legislative branch in check. If that takes investigating bribery accusations then I think that should happen.

Laws that affect all should not be established in such a biased manner.

After reading Brett Terpstra’s na: Per-Project Todos in Terminal I decide to implement something similar but for my git repos and much more minimal. So I added a quick Bash function to always open TODO.taskpaper in vim (at the base of my git repo). This way I don’t have to worry about how many ../ to include, etc. Just git-todo and done. If you use TaskPaper and vim then get taskpaper.vim

function git-todo {
    OS=$(uname -s)
    if [ "$OS" == "Darwin" ]; then
        SED_OPT="-E"
    fi
    if [ "$OS" == "Linux" ]; then
        SED_OPT="-r"
    fi
    GIT_DIR=$(git rev-parse --git-dir)
    if ! (( $? )); then
        GIT_DIR=$(echo "$GIT_DIR" | sed $SED_OPT 's/\/?\.git$//')
        if [ -z "$GIT_DIR" ]; then
            GIT_DIR=.
        fi
        vim $GIT_DIR/TODO.taskpaper
    fi
}

Also on GitHub, .bashrc.d/git.sh.

I stopped using AdBlock a couple of years ago because I was concerned that if too many people used it then the some of the sites I liked would not be able to continue operating. Instead I started relying on Flashblock which would effectively block the worst ads but allow many through. So it is interesting to see now that AdBlock Plus has recently decided to start allowing some “acceptable ads” by default. The story is mainstream enough story that it made it onto The New York Times.

AdBlock Plus’s definition of acceptable is:

• Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar)
• Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
• At most one script that will delay page load (in particular, only a single DNS request)
• Do Not Track support

Perhaps in defining “acceptable ads” we should also include a reasonable proportion of ad space/time to content space/time. For example, no 30 second pre-rolls on 30 second clips. No plastering the page with ads; even if they are text only. The whole point of this is two-fold to both maintain the value of your original content and of your advertisements. Quality over quantity because noise is ignored.

As a user if you do use AdBlock or similar you should also consider using Readability or Flattr. If you care about the content please don’t make it harder for the content’s creator to dedicate time doing it. (I prefer Readability for several reasons but I’ll save that for later.)

I enabled iTunes Match a few days ago and am still trying to get it sorted out. After searching for the error number (4001) I came across the recommendation to turn iTunes Match off while holding down the option key (⌥) and then turning it back on. Unfortunately this did not resolve the error for me. Thinking that maybe the iCloud servers were having issues I decided to give it a day and come back to the problem later.

Waiting did not help so next I tried reinstalling iTunes but I was still getting the 4001 error. Then I noticed that I could select songs, right-click, and “Add to iCloud”. I then when through in batches of several hundred and added my songs to iCloud. Eventually I came to a batch that produced the 4001 error. Turns out one of the music videos I had in my library was causing the problem. I removed it from my library and then was able to select the Store menu and “Update iTunes Match”. No more error!

Last night I updated to iTunes 10.5.2 and the “Add to iCloud” option is no gone. I still have a handful of tracks that do not appear to be in iCloud yet. All the trouble I have had so far combined with the fact that I cannot stream videos I have purchased from iCloud has me seriously wondering whether iCloud will be reliable and trustworthy.

I removed all the microblog digest posts because I’ve decide if I want to archive something I should create it here and then share it via Twitter instead of the other way around.