How I keep my wordpress updated by hand
I tend to keep my wp-content folder outside of my wordpress installation for 2 reasons:

1. I don’t like to loose my themes, plugins and customizations
2. I like to keep all my customization changes under subversion

So, if I had my wordpress installation say at:
/home/user/public_html/blog

I’d keep my wp-content folder for that here:

/home/user/public_html/wp-content-for-blog

So when I upgrade my blog, I always remove the original wp-content folder that comes along wordpress, and I symlink my hard worked on wp-content folder that lives outside to the freshly unzipped wordpress folder.

user@machine:~/public_html/blog$ ls -l
...
lrwxrwxr-x 1 user www    54 2008-11-26 09:29 wp-content -> /home/user/public_html/wp-content-for-blog
...

So what I endup doing all the time, is downloading the latest.zip to ~/public_html/, it will unzip under ~/public_html/wordpress, and then I’ll copy the current ~/public_html/blog/wp-config.php to ~/public_html/wordpress, then I’ll remove the default ~/public_html/wordpress/wp-content and symlink the outer wp-content with all my customizations, themes and plugins to it. Once done, I’ll make a backup of the old wordpress folder, and then I’ll rename wordpress folder to the name of the blog folder, and it’s all done.

It’s simple, but when you have to do it for 5 blogs, every week, it’s not fun anymore.

The Update Script

So here’s a script to do it in one step. If you’re not using my symlinked technique, this will do it for you, you only need to specify the full path to the folder where you want to keep your current wp-content folder outside the new installation before you apply the update, and the name of the folder where your current blog lives. The script below will have its configuration variables towards the beginning set so that they are in line with the example I’ve been talking about.

#!/usr/bin/python
#########################################################################################
#
# upgrade_wordpress.py - Script to automatically upgrade your wordpress installation.
#
# Requirements:
#   - Python 2.4 or older
#   - Wordpress should already be installed
#   - CURL (sudo apt-get install curl)
#
# Author: Angel (Gubatron) Leon
# LICENSE: See the GPL2 license.
# 2008
#########################################################################################
import os

#########################################################################################
#Config (relative to the folder where this script will be run from)
#########################################################################################

#The current folder where the blog lives
BLOG_FOLDER='blog'

#
# The first time you run the script, it will try to make a copy of your
# current wp-content folder outside. Copy here the location of where
# the wp-content folder with your themes and plugins should exist.
#
# After it unzips, it will remove the default wp-content folder from
# the new installation, and it will symlink the external wp-content
# That way you don't ever have to worry about loosing your customizations
# and plugins.
#
WP_CONTENT_OUTSIDE_COPY_FOLDER="/home/user/public_html/wp-content-for-blog"

#This is where a backup of your current blog will be
BLOG_FOLDER_BACKUP_FOLDER=BLOG_FOLDER+'.old'

#Where to download the wordpress latest.zip from
WORDPRESS_LATEST_ZIP_URL='http://wordpress.org/latest.zip'

#### DO NOT MODIFY AFTER THESE LINES ####

def downloadWordpress(url=WORDPRESS_LATEST_ZIP_URL):
    if os.path.exists('latest.zip'):
        print "Removing old latest.zip"
        os.remove('latest.zip')

    #Try to download with CURL
    print "Attempting to download latest.zip from wordpress.org"
    os.system('curl %s -o latest.zip' % url)

    if not os.path.exists('latest.zip'):
        os.system('wget ' + url)

    return os.path.exists('latest.zip')

def dirExists(dirName):
    return os.path.exists(dirName) and os.path.isdir(dirName)

def backupBlog(currentBlogFolder=BLOG_FOLDER,
               wpContentOriginalFolder=WP_CONTENT_OUTSIDE_COPY_FOLDER,
               backupFolder=BLOG_FOLDER_BACKUP_FOLDER):

    #Remove any previous backups
    if os.path.exists(backupFolder) and os.path.isdir(backupFolder):
        print "Removing previous backup folder"
        os.system('rm -fr ' + backupFolder)

    #Copy the current blog folder into a backup folder just in case.
    #We won't do any database backups for now.
    print "Creating new backup folder"
    os.system('cp -r %s %s' % (currentBlogFolder,backupFolder))

    #Check for the copy of wp-content outside the blog, if it doesn't exist
    #we'll make it for the first time.
    if not dirExists(wpContentOriginalFolder):
        print "Creating outside copy of wp-content"
        os.system('cp -r %s %s' % (os.path.join(currentBlogFolder,'wp-content'),
                                   wpContentOriginalFolder))

    #Copy the latest wp-config.php outside to the current folder
    print "Copying your latest wp-config.php outside"
    os.system('cp %s .' % (os.path.join(currentBlogFolder,'wp-config.php')))

    backupFolderExists = dirExists(backupFolder)
    wpContentFolderExists = dirExists(wpContentOriginalFolder)
    configFileExists = os.path.exists('wp-config.php')

    return backupFolderExists and wpContentOriginalFolder and configFileExists

def upgradeBlog(currentBlogFolder=BLOG_FOLDER,
                backupFolder=BLOG_FOLDER_BACKUP_FOLDER,
                url=WORDPRESS_LATEST_ZIP_URL,
                wpContentOriginalFolder=WP_CONTENT_OUTSIDE_COPY_FOLDER):

    if not downloadWordpress(url):
        print "Could not download latest.zip, aborting."
        return False

    if not backupBlog(currentBlogFolder,wpContentOriginalFolder,backupFolder):
        print "Could not backup blog or wp-config.ph, aborting."
        return False

    if currentBlogFolder == 'wordpress':
        print "The current blog folder cannot be 'wordpress, aborting."
        return False

    #1. If a wordpress/ folder exists, wipe it.
    if dirExists('wordpress'):
        print "Removing old wordpress folder"
        os.system('rm -fr wordpress')

    #2. Unzip new copy
    os.system('unzip latest.zip')

    if not dirExists('wordpress'):
        print "Could not unzip the wordpress installation, aborting."
        return False

    #1. Copy wp-config.php into the new installation
    os.system('cp wp-config.php wordpress/')

    #2. Remove the default wp-content folder
    os.system('rm -fr wordpress/wp-content')

    #3. Symlink the original wp-content that lives outside
    os.system('ln -s %s wordpress/wp-content' % (wpContentOriginalFolder))

    #4. Verify symlink was created
    if not (os.path.exists('wordpress/wp-content') and os.path.islink('wordpress/wp-content')):
        print "Could not create symlink to wp-content, aborting."
        return False

    #5. Move original folder to folder.delete, and make this wordpress folder the current folder.
    os.system('mv %s %s.delete' % (currentBlogFolder,currentBlogFolder))

    if not dirExists(currentBlogFolder + ".delete"):
        print "Could not rename current folder for later deletion, aborting."
        return False

    #6. Rename the new installation as the current blog
    os.system('mv %s %s' % ('wordpress',currentBlogFolder))

    if dirExists('wordpress'):
        print "ALERT: The wordpress folder still exists."
        return False

    if not dirExists(currentBlogFolder):
        print "ALERT: The blog doesn't exist, recover from the backup folder %s please" % (backupFolder)
        return False

    #7 Cleanup
    os.system('rm -fr %s.delete' % (currentBlogFolder))

    return True

if __name__ == '__main__':
    upgradeBlog()

Requirements

Installation

Usage:

python upgrade_wordpress.py

The script is very fault proof, it will always try to abort in case something is not going the way it’s expected. At the end of the day it’ll also leave a backup copy of your current blog in case something goes bad, you can always recover.

Thanks to Daniel Chang for sharing this with me.

Cola: Real-Time Shared Editing from Mustafa K. Isik on Vimeo.

This is one of the oldest self made t-shirts. I was constantly pissed at the amount of spam email I was receiving, and I thought some of the subjects were really eye catching for t-shirts.

For a few months I thought maybe I could make money on the creativity of spammers by mocking them with t-shirts, called, SpamTShirts, but nobody caught on my joke, and I desisted from the business idea.

If you can appreciate it, the icon/logo of the website is a Trash can, honoring junk mail.

I believe I made this t-shirt at cafepress.com

That’s me on Xbox live, my gamer tag is of course “GUBATRON”

Check out the Xbox Live Upgrade experience screenshot by screenshot.

What’s your avatar like?

They have 18 crazy deals to propose organized into 6 rounds. Amazon users get to vote on each of these rounds for their favorite offer, what will you vote for?

Then a limited number of customers are selected at random to participate in the buying round, where they race to buy deals for that round.

This year’s potential winning deals include a Samsung 46-Inch 1080p HDTV for $699, an ASUS Eee PC 900 Netbook for $129 and a KitchenAid Professional Stand Mixer for $69. See the Product Pricing and Availability section for the full list.

It’s different from last year
The biggest difference is that this year, Customers Vote is a race. Amazon will invite more customers to participate in the buying round than they have available deals.

Amazon recommends selected customers sign in early on the buying day, as deals are sold on a first come, first served basis. (Check here for the buying days calendar.)

Another difference is that customers selected to participate in the buying round will be able to buy any (or all) of the deals, not just the one they voted for.

And remember, only customers who voted can participate, so vote now!

CHANGELOG:

Version 4.17.2 (November 2008)

About FrostWire
FrostWire, a BitTorrent/Gnutella Peer-to-Peer client, is a collaborative effort from many Open Source developers and contributors from all around the world. In late 2005, concerned developers of LimeWire’s open source community announced the start of a new project fork “FrostWire” that would protect the developmental source code of the LimeWire client and any improvements to the Gnutella protocol design. The developers of FrostWire give high regard and respect to the GNU General Public License and consider it to be the ideal foundation of a creative and free enterprise market.

wedoit4you.com was one of my personal efforts from school, with it I learned a lot about web development, technology, news, and the tech industry since it was a blog before the term was even invented.

During those times, I was learning CSS, and I had to learn about centering elements, I always found it very annoying that you could float elements to the left, or to the right, but there was no “float:center”, and you had to go through all this hoops to do what in the past, we could do just by using the <center/> tag.

This is a self made tshirt, ordered at spreadshirt.com

About wedoit4you.com

More recently wedoit4you.com became a spanish podcast that reviewed the latest happenings in the Internet, Technology and entertainment industries. Me along La Tati did a series of 75 weekly episodes, until the end of the spring of 2008 where my work got pretty hectic and I couldn’t find more time to continue recording, editing, and distributing the podcasts. It reached well over 1500 weekly subscribers listening to it, and we still get mails from users asking for the podcast to come back. Maybe in 2009 :)

So, your launcher class, finishes unpacking your jars, adds the jars to the current classloader, and now you need to invoke your Main.main(String[] args).

This is how I managed to do it, using Java’s reflection mechanisms

    public final void startMain(String[] args) {
        //this will create a new class loader out of all jars available, see below on next
        //code section of this blog post
        addJars2Classpath();

        try {
            //Instantiate the main class, and execute it's static main method
            Class clazz = jarsClassloader.loadClass("com.mycomp.somepackage.Main");
            Class[] argTypes = { args.getClass(), };
            Object[] passedArgs = { args };
            Method main = clazz.getMethod("main",argTypes);
            main.invoke(null, passedArgs);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            //oh oh
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    } //startMain

In case you’re interested in how to add new Jars to the classpath during runtime, this is how I managed to do it:

    /**
     * Adds all the newly available jars to the classpath
     */
    public final void addJars2Classpath() throws Exception {
        //Create a new class loader with all the jars.
        Object[] jars = getFiles(getApplicationResourcesJavaFolder(), ".jar");
        URL[] jarUrls = new URL[jars.length];

        for (int i=0; i < jars.length; i++) {
            URL jarURL = null;

            try {
                jarURL = new URL("jar:file:"+(String) jars[i]+"!/");
            } catch (Exception e) {
                //LOG.error("Bad URL for jar ("+jarFile+"):\n"+e.toString()+" ("+jarURL+")\n");
                return;
            }

            jarUrls[i] = jarURL;
        }

        //and this guy here, is the classloader used to load
        jarsClassloader = URLClassLoader.newInstance(jarUrls);
      } //addJar2Classpath

    /**
     * Get a Object array that contains the names of the files
     * that end with 'type' on the given folderPath
     *
     * e.g
     *
     * String[] jarFiles = getFiles(".",".jar");
     *
     */
    public final Object[] getFiles(String folderPath, String type) {
        File f = new File(folderPath);

        String[] files = f.list();

        Vector results = new Vector();

        for (int i=0; i < files.length; i++) {
            if (files[i].endsWith(type)) {
                results.add((String) files[i]);
            }
        }

        if (results.size() == 0)
            return null;

        return results.toArray();
    } //getFiles

Notes to Joost developers: I had to resize the size of the embedded object, by default it was 640×360, but this is too wide for the standard blog, which usually has a 2 column layout.

It’d recommend 400×225 as the default size for most bloggers to copy and paste without further editing.

This should probably the standard embed code you should have for your users to embrace this:

<object width=”400″ height=”225″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.joost.com/embed/37aigyt”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowNetworking” value=”all”></param><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.joost.com/embed/37aigyt” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” allownetworking=”all” width=”400″ height=”225″></embed></object>


Hat tip to the Joost team for allowing embedding, I was waiting for this to start recommending content properly.

Well over a year ago I asked a Joost executive why not use some of that money they recently had gotten in funding into going for the living room via Xbox or PS3. I got a politically correct answer about yes, we’ll do it eventually, but that’s not our focus right now.

In the meantime, Hulu was building their platform for the web, and 4 months later it was king of the hill. Joost then had to rethink their distribution and ditched their p2p client for an all Flash streaming based approach, which seems to start picking up traffic but the differences in the audience sizes are ridiculous. A tip for your current approach, and it has to be done a month ago: Allow non-signed users to watch your some of your content (short-clips), and allow for embedding, worked wonders for YouTube, it’d be awesome for all that niche oriented content you have. (Update Nov 22 2008: Joost has just released video embedding!)

But even though Hulu has almost 10 times more traffic now than Joost, it’s earnings are still a joke compared to the advertising earnings of Broadcast and Cable, it’s just peanuts. With Ad Spending going down, it would make sense to me as an advertiser to somehow stay in the living room, with cheaper CPM, and better targeting. Hulu & Joost on the Xbox could do that for me, if only they were available in the living room.

Netflix on the other hand, monetizes month to month, and they also saw the opportunity of getting to your living room in different ways. They’ve tried with their own $100 box, but I find the most interesting and convenient way to get an audience of at least 15 million people that spend hours and hours wasting their time in front of their TV playing video games (with barely any ads) in the Xbox console.
They give me as an Xbox Live customer yet another option to keep my Xbox Live subscription and think twice about getting the PS3 and ditching the Xbox live payments since my Netflix subscription gains added value cause I don’t have to plug my laptop anymore to the tv. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have all those Hulu and Joost shows there too?

Netflix has released their stream service this week via Xbox, and it’s exactly the way I suggested to Joost, make it a free download, negotiate with Microsoft an ad revenue agreement, I can think up so many business models from this partnership… I wish I had super powers.

In any case, pictures speak louder than words some times. I hope bizdevs at Hulu & Joost take a look at this and remotely consider this as a probably great channel for content distribution. This could be your chance to grow your audience several orders of magnite, just become a Microsoft Live developer and port your technology (wish it was as easily done as said, I know), Internet Video needs to compete in the living room, forget about mobile for now, the living room is here now.

See More pictures of my Xbox Live update experience.

Chris Pirillo has reviewed this week our Infinite Storage service MyBloop.com very positively, and he has called it “The World’s Biggest Hard Drive.

About Chris
Christopher “Chris” Joseph Pirillo (born July 26, 1973(1973-07-26)) is the founder and maintainer of Lockergnome which is a large blogging network. He spent two years hosting the TechTV television program Call for Help before parting ways with the show. He also hosted the first annual Call-for-Help-a-Thon on TechTV. He now hosts videos on several internet sites, including CNN.com, YouTube and his own website.

Chris Pirillo live streams from his home-office using Ustream technology and uses this to create YouTube videos daily with a focus on software, computers, iPhone applications, and other technology-related topics and events.

Chris Pirillo is also an avid blogger, combining his website which contains over 1,500 posts, and updating his micro-blogging accounts, such as Twitter and FriendFeed daily.

Every year, Pirillo hosts Gnomedex, a technology conference tailored to technology and blogging enthusiasts.

About MyBloop.com
MyBloop.com is a free service that allows its users to store an unlimited number of files absolutely for free. It allows for an evolving and incremental set of functionalities depending on the file types, being the more feature rich, music, playlists and picture files. It has social features, search, and several file sharing functionalities such as flash embedding, which makes it attractive to podcasters and musicians looking to host their audio files and get exposure without paying for the storage or the bandwidth.

A Joost beta tester T-Shirt.

About Joost
(From Wikipedia)

Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”, Zennström and Friis assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. According to Zennström at a 25 July 2007 press conference about Skype held in Tallinn, Estonia, Joost had signed up more than a million beta testers, and its launch was scheduled for the end of 2007.

The teams are currently in negotiations with FOX networks. It has signed up with Warner Music, Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions (Indianapolis 500, IndyCar Series) and production company Endemol for the beta.[2] In February 2007, Viacom entered into a deal with the company to distribute content from its media properties, including MTV Networks, BET and film studio Paramount Pictures.

If you are an internet or technology company, feel welcome to send me a t-shirt, If I haven’t done a review of your company/product, I’ll do a review for you in return and I’ll take a picture of myself wearing it.

The Ubuntu Upgrade T-Shirt

Front - “sudo apt-get upgrade”

Back - Ubuntu logo

This T-shirt I made as an homage to Ubuntu and the mantra of easy updates, as well as a mantra of always keeping yourself up to date in life with whatever you do.

Nowadays updating Ubuntu is even easier, but some people like me still might do it old style, updating manually the /etc/apt/sources.list file, and running sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get upgrade dist, the t-shirt reads sudo apt-get upgrade which will basically upgrade those packages on your machine that need to do so.

The T-shirt was made at my favorite T-shirt-making website, (here goes the free ad) SpreadShirt.com

Photographed by Paulina Leon at 5 Points in Long Island City, NY.

About Strands

Strands is a life streaming service that helps users discover new things based on what their friends like and do, and allows them to see what’s hot among the people they care about.

Thanks to Kalong from Strands.com for posting this video of her receiving the FrostWire T-Shirt and stickers.

Also thanks to all the users that have posted pictures of their stickers and t-shirts on our Flickr Photo Album

About Strands.com

Strands is a life streaming service that helps users discover new things based on what their friends like and do, and allows them to see what’s hot among the people they care about.

From Wikipedia

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Official FrostWire 4.17.1 Download link

FrostWire.com — The last of the 4.17.x FrostWire series is finally out. The following is a list of the most important updates made for this release, which irons out most of the complains received from the community in regards to 4.17.0.

The new FrostWire will allow us to distribute twice the number of installers using the same bandwidth employed by 4.17.0, The new FrostWire installer has been reduced in sized more than 50% by using the latest in compression technology.

About FrostWire

FrostWire, a BitTorrent/Gnutella Peer-to-Peer client, is a collaborative effort from many Open Source developers and contributors from all around the world. In late 2005, concerned developers of LimeWire’s open source community announced the start of a new project fork “FrostWire” that would protect the developmental source code of the LimeWire client and any improvements to the Gnutella protocol design. The developers of FrostWire give high regard and respect to the GNU General Public License and consider it to be the ideal foundation of a creative and free enterprise market.

–

This article is about why I think they will be the real winners of Internet Video, with a different business model than the free/ad based approach of Hulu and Joost.

Their current business model
I’ll attempt to disect their current business model, which has proven to work, they now have over 8 million subscribers and a catalog of over 100,000 movies, revenues of over $1.2 billion, and a net income of $66.9 million last year.

But the goal has always been to deliver the movies instantly, the technology wasn’t there, but now it seems to be here, and probably it’s also gotten to the point that the bandwidth of delivering a movie is cheaper than the associated current costs of delivering a real DVD to your door.

Being a customer for many years, I can guess some of the costs involved per movie are:

• Custom Envelopes (which also make money cause they add advertisement in them)
• Employee Processing costs (cataloging, putting cds in envelopes, receiving CDs in envelopes)
• Shipping costs (at least $0.47 for USPS)
• Replacing costs (many DVDs break, scratch, and get stolen, boy have I gotten my DVDs stolen)
• Royalties costs (no clue, but they must be there)

Somehow, Reed Hastings and his team figured out a way to make money after these costs, maybe from the people that pay every month who don’t really have the time to watch 12 or more movies a week.

Let’s do the actual numbers to get the average customer price.

REVENUE PER CUSTOMER:
$1,200,000,000 revenues /8,000,000 subscribers = $150 a year avg. revenue per subscriber

$150/12 months = $12.5 avg. subscriber monthly rev.

NET INCOME PER CUSTOMER:

$66,900,000 net income / 8,000,000 subscribers = $8.36 a year avg. cost per subscriber

$8.36 / 12 months = $0.7 avg. subscriber monthly rev.

If we substract the net income from the revenue, we’ll get the average costs monthly per user, that’s
$11.8 a month, in costs.

Estimated Cost Per Movie (Now, CDs shipped)
The company ships on average, 1.9 million discs a day, that’s 57 million discs a month. They have 8 million users, that makes the average user watch around 7 movies a month. (I watch at least 3 a week, that’s 12 movies a month, 3 times more than the average user).

So, let’s say the average subscriber watches only 3 movies per week, that’s at least 12 movies every month. We grab those $11.8 and divide it by 12 movies

Average Cost per Movie $11.8/7.125 movies monthly = $1.65

The Online Business Model

Netflix has understood that the key to evolution on the TV/Movie business does not lie on the browser, it’s right there on the TV Room where we have been trained to sit and be entertained for hours. Only us early adopters, or people with no TV really have the adaptation capabilities to watch content on our computer screens, or we know that we need an HDMI cable and can do the whole setup to get our computers to play video on the living room.

This means the audiences for video on the internet are considerably smaller (Today) than those of TV, the best way to put it is by grabbing the numbers of the biggest internet video audience so far, The 2008 summer olympics… they only generated $6 million in ads, vs $1 BILLION that the broadcast generated… why? cause the big audience lies right there in the confort of the Living Room, or wherever you have your tv.

Netflix knows that there’s a great deal of people that have:
- TiVO
- XBox
- Other video game consoles

They made a first step when they came out with the RoKU, their own way of putting Netflix on a box in your living room. They’re cutting out deals with Samsung to put the same technology on Blu-ray players.

They will come out this Nov. 19th on the revamped Xbox Live which sits already on 10 million households with XBox Live Gold Subscriptions. I already have a Netflix subscription, but my guess is that at least 4 million of those 10 million XBox live subscribers don’t have it, and they will be tempted to subscribe. If Microsoft and Netflix are smart, they will allow those users to give it a try, and once they see the benefits, those $9.99 will be worth their while.

Xbox Live gets to keep the user base that’s doubting if its time to buy that PS3 and toss the subscription. Netflix on the other hand will almost double it’s customer base, if it manages to convince 1/2 of Xbox Live subscribers to give this a try.

(I wonder where Boxee stands in all this, they could also cut a deal with Netflix if they amass a millions of users at some point, although they seem to be doing something with Apple, and this would compete against the Apple Store per per view model, which BLOWS!)

At what price?

Here’s where the analysis gets tough. Microsoft has huge infrastructure, and Netflix just announced another partnership with TiVO (see, they know the war is won in your living room), but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth.

Engadget also confirmed that their streaming quality will be nothing but HD! (only 300 titles to start though)

So we estimated that currently netflix has about an average cost $1.65 per movie shipped (might be less if the average user watches less than 12 movies a month) and we see that bandwidth costs are dropping. Let’s take Amazon EC3 (which is expensive to me, given we can do it at a much lower price at MyBloop.com):

“Over 150 TB per Month $0.10 per GB”

If you’ve ever watched a movie compressed in DivX, you know you can get a feature film at very good quality eating up only 700Mb… let’s say that Netflix will actually do this in HD, and they had films in double the DivX quality, and each film would be 1.5Gb, it would only cost them $0.15, hell, even if it was 3 Gb or even 5 Gb per movie, you’re still below the 50 cent price, add to that royalties and other costs, at you are still way below the $1.65 cost per movie of today. Let’s say it’ll cost $0.65 per movie streamed.

That’s a saving of $1 per movie, however this convenience will make the number of movies delivered (streamed) to increase, but this might mean they’ll cut better deals in bandwidth getting the costs even lower.

Not to mention the savings to the environment, less DVDs would need to be printed, less paper and ink wasted in envelopes, no gas burnt by USPS, and all the carbon emissions generated in each step of the CD delivery process.

What this means also, is that Netflix will probably get rid of many of its +2000 employees, bringing costs further down, I will add less and less DVDs to my queue as the online catalog grows.

Helps fight Piracy

Another big plus of a full blown catalog (maybe available a few years from now) is movie piracy mitigation. Instead of the MPAA suing their customers, or making things hard for everyone being forced to distribute content with DRM based solutions that never work, what you need to do is have your product easily accessible to as many people, legally. I strongly believe most people are good, otherwise you couldn’t go out on the street and make it back in one piece every day. As a side note, I find it very funny that the MPAA is always asking Internet Video distributors (including netflix) to add DRM to their streams, but they don’t put DRM on their DVDs, anyone could get the 6 DVD subscription to Netflix and copy all the DVDs, there’s just no need to do it, cause Netflix makes it so convenient for you to get more and more movies.

So Why do I care?
I’m just very interested in what happens with TV, how it will manage to survive or evolve, but in this case, there’s a financial incentive.

Ladies and gentlemen, just check out the price of netflix on the stock market, we’ve been blessed with a recent crash, If I were you, I’d be buying NFLX right now.

So the question is, what’s gonna be the price of NFLX a few months or years from now? I’ll leave that answer to Henry Blodget, I think it all depends on execution (get XBox right and then expand to other services and the user base will easily double or triple for Netflix, then go international), they’re targeting the biggest audience ever, the living room audience, the one that makes billions of dollars in the Olympics, the one that’s fed up with the passive entertainment model and who wants to see what they want whenever they want, to share this experiences with friends.

I also care since I no longer have cable TV and I’m constantly looking for legal video entertainment of professional quality. Companies like Hulu and Joost should follow the same steps and try to go to our living room, Netflix not only has a great catalog of movies, but they have entire shows, some you can already watch, for example I got to stream 2 seasons of the office back to back on Netflix, before they were available on Hulu.

(Hulu || Joost) for Free TV streaming on the living room

As for Joost, they should probably acknowledge they’ve lost a great deal to Hulu, which streams 100 million videos a month, it would take a major breakthrough in content to beat Hulu, and even though Hulu is putting big numbers, they just can’t compare with the ad revenue that you can generate on the living room. For Joost (if Hulu didn’t start already) there’s still the opportunity to port their tecnology to PS3, to Wii, why not even come out with an Xbox free download that will allow you to watch Joost on your living room. There’s certainly going to be a lot of people not willing to sign up for Netflix, and the Free TV offer Joost has would be of interest to this audience. If I were Michael Volpi I’d try to use a considerable part of my resources geared in this direction, If Hulu gets in the living room before Joost, it’s game over.

I couldn’t find the new drums, but Activision was cool enough to allow the old drums to be compatible with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Here’s my performance on the old rockband drums of “Are you gonna go my way” on expert level.
I’ve strong beliefs that this is the first user made video of someone playing Guitar Hero Drums (with the rockband drums) outside the official promotional videos you can find all over the web.

This was a lot of fun to play, I didn’t do a 100% score, but close, so to all trolls, this is not a video to show how good I can play, but to demo the backwards compatibility, and that you can actually learn to keep the basic beat of this song with a game like this.

I put the original audio of the song on top and it syncs perfectly.

Played on Xbox 360.

By Gubatron

To only log certain files, or to NOT log certain files, you resolve this the same way as you do every other thing in lighttpd… by matching lighttpd variables to regular expressions and applying the settings where they match.

# www -> the main website
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^www.yoursite.com$" {
  server.document-root = "/var/www/www.yoursite.com"
  server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/www.yoursite.com/error.log"

  #Only log non-css and images
  $HTTP["url"] !~ "(\.css|\.jpg|\.gif|\.png|\.ico)$" {
    accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/www.yoursite.com/access.log"
  }
}

So in this example, we only log, where the URL doesn’t end with any of the “.css”, “.jpg”, “.gif”, “.png” or “.ico” extensions. We filter those out.

Hope this works for you.

I just got a new Apple Wireless Keyboad.

My laptop currently sits atop a Griffin Elevator, this keeps it cool and also helps keep my neck at a healthy angle, something I need given how many hours I spend on the computer.

The problem with the Elevator is that after a while, your arms get tired and you end up resting your arms over your elbows, causing you elbow dryness and sometimes pain.

To rest my elbows and have an ergonomic posture, I needed a keyboard that was small enough to fit on my tight desk.

The other reason I got it was that the MacBook keyboard is extremely worn out.

Getting used to the new keyboard
The function keyboard layout is a bit different from the one on the MacBook. It took me a couple hours getting used to the spacing between the keys, but now I’m fully used to it. The feeling of the keys going down is very addictive.

Since the keyboard is wireless, I’m planning on getting another one to put it in front of the TV. Once Boxee integrates Joost and Hulu perfectly into the system, getting an Apple TV or a cheap custom built computer as a media center will make a lot of sense.

I’ve been hooking up the laptop via HDMI to the TV, and it sucks every time an episode ends in Hulu, or when there are commercial breaks on the ABC.com HD player because you have to get up and click on continue, or select the next episode to watch (unless you have setup playlists previously).

A wireless mouse and keyboard solve that problem.

Useful for Internet TV
Another plus, it can work like a remote control, for your HDMI-TV/Laptop setup.

I can proudly say we’ve been Cable-TV free for over 10 months now (saving probably around $200), I “survive” on Netflix DVDs & Streaming (can’t wait for the Xbox Live upgrade), Joost and Hulu.

Given my past history of doing things 2-3 years before regular people, I can see a big future for the Internet TV/Video companies that survive this “crisis” (bullshit crisis really, go to Venezuela and see what a real crisis is), eventually the whole thing will be packed on little boxes and CableTV companies will be in trouble if they don’t jump on the I-watch-what-I-want-whenever-I-want-via-internet boat.

NEW YORK (Gubatron) — This morning Joost has launched what seems a stealth test of their Flash video player delivering 5 days ahead of scheduled, according to the announcement made by the company the last September 18th when they released a new browser based version of their platform.

There is no press release in relationship to this on their website yet, but the new Flash player is readily available on the web site for Windows, Mac and Linux. It looks and feels exactly the same, and best of all, now all Linux users can enjoy the vast content on our favorite distro (content which I think suits us perfectly as a geek audience)

Also there are no embedding options available as of now. Hopefully it’s just a matter of time, they have plenty of viral content.

Joost could be in more devices = More Viewers
I expect this player will broaden the possibilities for Joost as an ubiquitous platform. Now the possibilities for integration are endless, I’m already starting to think Mobile (iPhone, Android), Wii, PS3, all you need is a flash player on your platform, and anyone out there (if the company doesn’t do it first) with enough spare time on their hands will be able to put together a Joost player.

Now imagine all that free tv spectrum to be released in February 2008 to be used for free internet access, I can see enormous worldwide TV audiences on mobile devices for marketers to start drewling.
This is great not only for Joost but for all the video companies that have enough vision (and funding) to realize these opportunities today. Start gathering your Android teams now.

Other improvements
I also noticed the search result page has a new filtering set of links, that can help you down narrow search results. This is a great improvement, since their search results would yield several hundreds of videos and there used to be no other way but to page through all of them. Now when you perform a search, you’ll see Filters (each with a count of how many videos are available) by Venue, Genre, Sub-Genre, Series, and Runtime.

No more p2p?
Now the question remains, will they ditch their P2P plugin, their old P2P client? If they do, this only means one thing:

100% Flash Player = No more P2P

They had said that P2P users would get content in higher quality than those with the “Joost Standard” Flash version, as you can see on the screen shots, the quality is pretty high for the flash version, my guess is somewhere down the line, they’ll probably decide to get rid of P2P altogether and foot the bill just like Hulu is doing now (which has a growing catalog of HD content). Hopefully bandwidth is getting cheaper, In my personal experience I consider the whole Bandwidth business is way overpriced, because Data centers and Networks can always find themselves big corporate customers and resellers that will pay anything, we can only hope this will change as the technology advances.

Screen shots
Click on the screen shots to see bigger.

Joost 100% Flash Player running on Ubuntu 8.04

Joost Full Screen on Linux Ubuntu 8.04

Joost Flash player on Mac OSX Leopard

Joost

Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology (and now Flash), created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

During the summer of 2008, a couple of Venezuelan Parachute Base Jumpers (Carlos and Pedro) got together with Propela Productions to make a short film about an extreme dream of the jumpers, Jump from the Base of one of the Twin Towers of Parque Central in Caracas, Venezuela.

They format published in YouTube was divided in 2 parts, this is part 2. You can see Part One here.

Very nicely planned, produced, executed and edited (to my taste).

Let’s keep an eye on these guys, anybody knows if they have a site? I just got this from Nosgoth

Best damn funny/controversial show I’ve seen. Seinfeld on steroids for what’s left of the decade.

From wikipedia:

The series deals with a variety of controversial topics, including abortion, gun control, physical disabilities, racism, sexism, religion, the Israeli/Palestinian situation, terrorism, transsexuality, slavery, incest, sexual harassment in education, the homeless, statutory rape, drug addiction, pedophilia, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, child abuse, mental illness, gay rights, bulimia, prostitution, nazism, necrophilia and cannibalism.

Stream provided by Hulu.

With your help, we can deliver high-speed Internet access to more New Yorkers.

What if I told you we could use empty TV channels to connect tens of thousands of New Yorkers to the Internet?

The technology exists today. But some members of the New York City Council are trying to stop us from using it.

The Council has bought into a corporate misinformation campaign, and is now holding a public hearing next Monday to consider a resolution that would keep this technology from the New Yorkers who need it most.

You can help the Council make the right decision by speaking out at the hearing:

WHAT: NYC City Council Hearing on White Spaces
WHEN: Monday, Sept. 29, 10 a.m.
WHERE: City Hall Committee Room, enter at the Intersection of Centre and Worth Streets

The latest front in the battle over universal Internet access is “white spaces” — empty frequencies between TV channels on the public airwaves. In New York City, 20 percent of these television airwaves sit idle. New technology can open this unused spectrum to powerful high-speed Internet services, bringing ubiquitous and affordable broadband to tens of thousands of New Yorkers now left off the grid.

Here’s the problem: Councilmember Gale Brewer and Speaker Christine Quinn have sponsored a draft resolution claiming white space devices could harm the Broadway industry in New York City. They, along with the Broadway League, maintain that white space devices will disrupt the wireless microphones used for Broadway shows. Numerous tests conducted by the FCC show, however, that this is not true.

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters and cell phone companies have been blitzing federal, state and local governments with misinformation to prevent white spaces from bringing the benefits of broadband to millions of people. They want to hoard this spectrum to stifle innovation and competition. If they win, we all lose.

Too many in this city have been left on the wrong side of the digital divide. The answer to getting New Yorkers connected is right in front of us:

Attend Monday’s Hearing

The hearing will be open to public testimony. Please come and urge the City Council to reject the resolution and speak out for opening up white spaces for a better Internet.

With your help on Monday, we can help deliver the Internet for everyone in New York City.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
http://www.freepress.net/
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

1. Learn more about white spaces at www.freepress.net/whitespaces

Hats off to the Joost team for a re-launch that went way better than I expected. Thanks for listening to all the suggestions, I know I’ve been a pest.

About Death Note

From Wikipedia

Death Note is a Japanese manga series created by writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata. The series centers on Light Yagami, a high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook dropped on Earth by Ryuk, a shinigami (”death god”), that allows Light to kill anyone by writing the victim’s name in the notebook. The story follows Light’s attempt to create and rule a world cleansed of evil using the notebook, and the complex conflict between him and his opponents.

It’s been kept on the pouch of my HP 48G calculator for all this time, today I thought it’d be probably a good idea to scan it and upload it.

Click on the images to see in high resolution, maybe one they they’ll be worth something and they’ll lay on a museum, or at least, a family vault.

Page 1

Page 2

I recently had the privilege to attend the US Open for the first time in my life, and as with everything I started questioning things:

Scoring

What’s with the ilogical scoring? Who came up with 15,30,40,Deuce, Advantage…
Why such an almost random sequence… why not, 1,2,3 ? or if anything 15,30,45!!!

Why when a set is tied 5-5 do they have to do it till 7 (tie-break)?, just let the first to go to 6 win that set, as if the matches weren’t long enough.

Callings

So 0, is not called zero, it’s called Love? wtf
Update: Simon expained it’s “L’oeuf“, which means “Egg” in french, probably a relationship between the shape of a “0″ and an Egg.

When a serve hits the NET, they call it LET? wtf

And when they go into “deuce” it always sounds as if they’re calling the players Douchebags…”Douche!!”

Other than that, it’s one hell of a game, one of endurance, precision, technique, focus, strategy, excitement, I loved it.

Thank you wifey for taking me there for my birthday, it was awesome.

It’s official, I’m retarded compared to the guys that built this technology.

So, here it goes, thanks a lot for taking the time to send a shout, pretty cool to know there’s so many people that did so:

- My wife
- My wife’s parents, who came before midnight and gave me a drill for my toolset as a birthday gift.
- My mom
- My dad
- My sisters
- The Swaman
- La Tati (via SMS)
- Raul Hernandez, now in UK
- Fitim Blaku
- Hugo Londono
- Guillermo Amador
- Rhona Bucarito and Luis Ramirez
- Laura Borman, now in UK aswell
- Felix Rios
- Eduardo Torres
- Javier Chauran
- Marcelina Knitter, my sister in law
- Nacarid Lopez
- Honack Villanueva, the most responsible team mate when I was in school
- Gabriela Noriega, it seems now all over the place (CCS/CDG/MAD/LUX/CDG)
- Adelaida Moubayyed, now in Spain
- Felix Berger
- Jose Lopez Brett, aka Nosgoth
- Gabriela
- Adriana Fulchini
- Daibory Trujillo
- Sue Geissenberger
- Maria Cione
- Roger Kapsi
- Ale Penichet
- Cristian Radu
- Angel Eloy, who wrote me a very nice email
- Antonio Jordana
- Gabe Perez
- Stephanie Alvarez
- Katay Santos (before in China, now in CCS)

This probably means:
- No StumbleUpon toolbar :( (I’m a stumbleupon.com addict, I feel crippled with chrome because of this)
- No Cool Iris
- No Twitter extensions
- No weather extensions
- No firebug-like extensions
- No toolbars of any kind
- No Synced bookmarks

This means a lot of businesses would die if people were to embrace an extension-less browser. I think it’s a little scary when you allow one of the most important websites of the world to run the browser industry. Let’s hope people will stay distributed around IE, Mozilla, Safari and chrome, and that they don’t become the defacto browser, cause then they would really run the show.

Remember Google, don’t be evil, right?

Update:
Confirmed, no extensions as of this writing are available.

Taken from the Chromium developer FAQ:

Q. How can I develop extensions for Chromium like in Firefox?
A. Chromium doesn’t have an extension system yet. This is something we’re interested in adding in a future version.

To Mac Geeks
If you want to build it for mac, you can (supposedly, I’m in the process off, I’ll post screenshots or video if I manage to do it sucessfully)

Here are instructions

Google today releases a beta of a new multi-process web browser, which makes it look like a mini operating system in itself.

Instead of the old model where you’d have web pages, scripts and plugins running on the same process memory space (with threads for certain things, like images and plugins), now they’ve built a browser called Chrome which puts every tab on a different process.

This is in a way a scary move in terms of how big google is getting (they already pwn Firefox), and how they’re starting to push to us a web operating system, I bet this thing will come with lots of google pre-installed (Google Gears, and what not)… but damn it, this is one of those ideas where you can’t help to say… “Why didn’t I think of that, it’s such an obvious thing to do, put each tab on a different process, and make javascript run in its own damn thread”, so this is why it looks like this will be a trend setter for all of the browsers, in the end competition is good and we can only hope the Firefox team already knew about this and we’ll see similar updates in the future for Firefox. The other thing that doesn’t make this all evil, is that chrome is also open source.

The multi process approach takes an initial toll on your memory, due to the overhead of allocating new processes for every tab you open, but it guarantees more stability, no single page will crash your entire browser since each one will run independently, and once you destroy a page, the OS will truly claim back the memory space.

In any case, you’re better off reading the explanation from Google, brilliantly done in a comic format (which at the beginning sort of scared me, sort of looks a bit like commie propaganda, but it has its fun parts). Leave comments if you want to discuss the subject.

It will only be available for Windows for now, so I’m gonna have to turn on my Windows box to try it, grrrrr.

Happy uploading, more upgrades on the way

MyBloop.com Playlist Creation Demo from gubatron on Vimeo.

“The unpopulated area of the Sahara desert is over 9 million km², which if covered with solar panels would provide 630 terawatts total power. The Earth’s current energy consumption rate is around 13.5 TW at any given moment (including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric)”

Source: Wikipedia.org

The internet has changed the life of many people, you’re probably an example since you’re reading this geeky blog that’s mostly intended for geeks, the curious, and technology lovers.

But the internet won’t really reach it’s maximum potential, that is, until it’s almost everywhere just like electricity or TV.

In February 2009, by order of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) all TV transmissions currently being done over VHF have to cease, and all those TV channels will go only through digital signals. This means that one of the most versatiles spectrums will be up for grabs.

This spectrum (ranging anywhere from the 55MHz to 88MHz if I’m not mistaken) has the power to reach much larger distances than your 2.4GHz WIFI router, the distance actually depends on the height of antennas and somewhat visibility (you can see the formulas for theoretical distances on wikipedia)

Google, Motorola, Microsoft, Philips and many companies are asking the FCC to keep all this “white space” spectrum to be freed for anyone to use, just like WiFI’s 2.5GHz, which has extended somewhat the accessibility to the internet.

There are other companies however that want to license the spectrum and have it exclusively for them, an example are the companies that make wireless microp