Here it is:
flickr Pro Account Deleted Over Political Comments.

I’ve no idea what the guy said. I don’t care. Because even if he was in the wrong, this is unjustified.

Here’s the thing: accounts are insecure. Sometimes they get hacked. People re-use passwords sometimes. Point one: data used in account resets can be gained easily through basic social mining. Point two: Yahoo forces everyone to sign in under the same username and password. Like what Google eventually got around to doing. One login. Great. So many more places my username can be seen and potentially hacked.

So whatever, flickr. What a shame your staff feels justified to play nanny state and delete someone’s irretrievable photos, judge and jury. No notification, nothing.

There are a lot of other services where you can back up your photos for free. Where you are even allowed to post political comments. Free speech, and whatnot.

And if you use another service you won’t have to worry about looking like a small-minded idiot by association.

Read the whole story from thomashawk.com.

Here’s how to listen to the feeds:

1. Install the Teamspeak client. It works for Mac, Windows and Linux.

2. Follow the step by step instructions at Scannerbuff.

(here’s the short version: run Teamspeak, then choose Connection>Quick Connect. Enter a nickname. Use this server address: radio.scannerbuff.net:8767, and leave the rest blank.

Scannerbuff.net has a listing of other live streams. )

3. Brush up on your police codes: at radiolabs.com. Bonus points if you know morse code.

4. Log out when you’re done and don’t hog bandwidth. People post these streams from their own scanners as a really great public service, so please don’t abuse it!

Note, you can also try publicsafetyfeeds.com though I find Teamspeak has better coverage for LA County.

But you can search for individual trees!

Considering my extensive collection of bizarre biology photographs and medical clip art, it just seemed unfair to NOT share. There are seven desktop backgrounds, at 1024×768 and 1600×1200.

Freshly posted, get them while they’re still warm!

But really. I feel bad for the QA tester involved. Even though, way totally avoidable mistake, it was an accident, and that just sucks. And it should be mentioned, this qualifies as a big IT boo-boo.

This is why you NEVER install anything on the build box. Not even if it’s Jeremy Allaire, giving you a totally awesome sneak peek of terrific new technology (well, it was new at the time). But that’s probably a story for another day.

Oh why not. It’s late, I just inexplicably spilled half a glass of very cold water down the back of my own pants. Perfect time for a story.

So there was nothing like a virus involved. But this was back in the days after Picasa outgrew Mike’s spare bedroom (and then living and dining room), and since there were now more live-in employees than couches, we’d rented the apartment next door. Somehow we wound up hosting Jeremy Allaire for an afternoon. He came by to talk about what we were working on, and to show off some new unreleased flash technology. As it turned out, our little company had been growing fast and the only monitor in the office/apartment that could accomodate everyone in the room, was attached to The Build Box.

So after a bit of discussion, the neat new technology was installed on The Build Box. Great demos followed, and sometime after that, the crew went out for dinner. It was one of those really fun nights of 12 hour straight hacking and development, the highly productive post-workday workday. And about an hour or so after everyone finally retreated to their sleeping bags and couches, one of the offsite guys discovered they couldn’t build. Big demo, due in a few hours, and no one could connect to the box – there was a small matter of a little memory leak that had gradually eaten up all resources on the build machine.

All in the grand scheme of things, so not a big deal, except for the groggy wakeup call requiring Mike to dig out the extra ‘office’ key and trudge 25 feet to go reboot the thing.

It’s not like the real old war stories, back in the days when a GM was a physical disc that a product manager risked life, limb, and points on their license to get on that last FedEx truck, only to discover a virus on the build box an hour later.

Lessons? Never install stuff you don’t need on your build box. Always keep your virus definitions updated. And whatever you do, don’t put your glass of icy cold water down on the sofa late at night.

you don’t want to applications. You
better at solving software
, and how to exploit
in between sips of a martini.

random text from internet spammers is the new stichomancy.

seriously. how did they know?

I came across this post by Sree Kotay, former Viewpoint CTO, and it reminded me of those early days when Viewpoint was still MetaStream, and it was all about putting fast and beautiful 3D content on the web. It was all cutting edge, exciting and new…

A big contrast to the reputation the player ultimately got, which is, I think, a little unfair. Read Sree’s comments here, if you want the details.

But anyway. Today I got prompted to install the Viewpoint Media Player upgrade. C’mon, are you kidding me? I haven’t installed that since like, 2001. But AIM installs it, and I finally just got around to trying Triton (no small deal for me, since I’ve been using AIM 2.3 for, oh, a few years now) . There are probably still a few other things that slip it in, too (you can tell who finked you out by looking in the MetaStreamID.ini file).

So as a public service announcement, and because I feel at least a little responsible for that damn installer, here’s the easy way to disable that little turd (mostly) forever.

Step 1. Go here:

Step 2. Change this:

to this:

Step 3. Then, just save the file.

Easy as pie. VWPT can’t launch anymore, because you’ve just reminded it that you never gave it permission to launch in the first place. Worst you’ll ever get is a little EULA prompting you to click OK, which I hope you can figure out how to take care of on your own.

“Right rectangular lattice.”

youtube is SO not ready for that video.