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DRM (Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management) is a system to restrict the use of digital media (DVD’s, music, ebooks etc.), usually using encryption technology. This is mainly used by publishers of these media to prevent unauthorized copying and printing of these media. Its purpose is to restrict usage of the media to those people that legally obtained them and to restrict the usage to those actions that the publisher allows and sometimes to a set time period, e.g. when it is borrowed from a library. That look like an accetable purpose; however, there are several circumstances when things go wrong and the stuff can no longer be used by the person that legally acquired it. In this post I will collect links to reported cases of these kind of problems. Last update: Jan. 17, 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

I had an Applescript to use the bit.ly url shortener. In fact I had two of them: one takes the current Firefox URL as input, and the other one takes the clipboard as input. Moreover I preferred the new j.mp instead of bit.ly because it saves 2 characters.

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Yesterday I installed Snow Leopard on my recently bought MacBook. After installation I wanted to run Calibre (an eBook management application) because I wanted to download an eBook to my iPhone. Unfortunately Calibre completely went haywire. It was consuming about 100% CPU time, and the machine got almost completely unresponsive. Read the rest of this entry »

In this post I am going to investigate the structure of categories and tags in Wordpress. Read the rest of this entry »

As I described in the posts about upgrading Wordpress I am investigating automatic conversion from Gengo to WPML. Of course I searched in the WPML site and I found a few threads in the forum. Read the rest of this entry »

I have Wordpress upgraded to 2.8.3 without problems. Just had to be careful about Gengo activation and the permalink refresh (see previous post). Some people have reported that Gengo wouldn’t be compatible with Wordpress 2.8. With the patch that I mentioned in my previous post it does work however. But I must admit that I have been hacking in my copy of Gengo in the past so it could be that the official version still has problems that I don’t have any more.

Anyway, I think the Gengo situation is just too fragile. Therefore I am now investigating the WPML plugin. More about that in a later posting.

Update August 22, 2009: Although reading the site now seems to work with my patch to Gengo, I experience problems on the Admin page. Some of the popups don’t work e.g. in the `Edit a post’ page.

About a week ago I upgraded my Wordpress installation. Before I forget how it went I want to describe it here. Read the rest of this entry »

Quote (+1)

The entire programming community has a kind of endemic sexism — or at least an almost complete lack of sensitivity to the concerns of women — that arises from being an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession in a sexist culture. Too many male programmers seem to have no interest in accommodating women, and far too many of the rest are unwilling to speak up about it.

Matthew Boeh, April 25, 2009 on Dyepot, Teapot

These apple cakes (muffins) are low fat and low cholesterol. Instead of butter they contain a little vegetable oil. Read the rest of this entry »

Suddenly Gengo doesn’t work anymore with the Tiga theme. When I deactivate Gengo it works. With Gengo and another theme it works. But with the Tiga theme and Gengo activated it doesn’t work: the pages are empty. Apparently somewhere php crashes then.

For the time being I decided to switch off Gengo.