Annoyances: March 2007 Archives

My poor abused laptop has a habit of loosing it's DVD drive on a regular basis, after a few drops too many. Normally I had simply rebooted after pushing back in the drive, but I was feeling like a dirty windows user with that method :) As it turns out, Linux provides the answer. In Ubuntu, simply install "hotswap" using apt-get or your preferred method. To rescan for IDE devices run the following command:

 sudo  hotswap -c 1 rescan-ide

Ignore the errors and simply enjoy your DVD :)

I have been using IE4Linux for a while in order to test some websites I'm responsible for and make sure that they are useful to people who still have to use Internet Explorer. To make it even handier, the IE View extension for Firefox works well under Ubuntu. The only problem I've run into is that the "find" button in the IE View preferences doesn't like Linux file paths, so to use it you have to enter the path to IE manually. In my case this is /home/niall/bin/ie6. Once it's setup properly, I can rightclick on the link and select "Open Link Target In IE" and suffer for a few minutes in the name of testing!

I have had no optical drive in my Laptop for a while since the original fell out a couple of months ago. I finally put in a DVD Drive this evening and attempted to watch a DVD. I started up MPlayer and got the following error:

libdvdread: Error cracking CSS key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB

This was happening for every DVD I tried. As it turns out, the error seems to have been caused by the fact that the region on the DVD Drive I put in was set to Region 1 (America).  Changing the region was fairly easy. There is a imaginately named utility called "regionset" available from apt (apt-get install regionset) which can quickly set the correct region. Run it as root (sudo regionset) and tell it that yes, you do wish to change the dvd region. Then put in the number for the region you're in. Once this is done, you can then hopefully enjoy your movie.

One of my pet annonyances when browsing around on the net is sites where you have to register for no good reason. I have enough useless accounts as it is. What's even more annonying is when they return a different result to the search engine bots so that more than just the registration page is indexed. A prime example of this is Unison.ie. When searching for current Irish news it usually ranks fairly high on Google, however all the pages require you register first before you view them. The registration gives no advantage to people like me who just want to a quick look at the latest news. I suspect that I'm not alone and that lots of people will just go back and look for another site. Unison's simple user agent checking makes it very easy to get in unmolested though. The User Agent Switcher Plugin for Firefox allows you to easily set exactly what user agent you want your browser to appear as. The GoogleBot isn't in the list of Useragents available, but it is easily added. Switch to GoogleBot as your useragent, and magically you will have full access to the Unison site. I know that Unison will probably close this hole within a few days now, but it's nice to be able to make a point. According to Google's Webmaster Help Center "crawler only" pages are a thing to avoid. I would class pages that react differently to GoogleBot as "crawler only" pages. If Unison want to require people to register in order to get nice features such as customization, then grand, I have no problem with that. However, how much traffic are they missing out on by having the register page for everyone? And how many advertising impressions are they missing out on? I know that if I go to the BBC News site I will usually end up going to other stories which interest me, which means more page impressions on the BBC site. More impressions, more chance of clicking on ads, more money! In this day and age it is senseless to have such stupid restrictions on a site like Unison that has enough content to be a massive earner on advertisments alone. Update: I somehow managed to forget the user agent I'm using, it is:

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

Due to a bit of a cold I'm having a quiet night in with a few DVDs. I'm currently trying to figure out the whole idea behind the few minute long "Copyright Theft Is A Crime" crap at the start of some DVDs, which can't be skipped on most DVD players. I'll be the first to admit that it is a crime, but I have bought these DVDs legitimately and so am not really their target audience. I'm pretty sure that if someone is counterfeiting the DVDs, they will already know that it's a crime. They have probably gotten over that hurler a long time ago. Unforunately there is no way to easily find out what DVDs have this crap before buying so I can't really bycott the offending products :(