Roj’s Tech Corner

Slashdot’s running an article how EMI was caught offering illegal music downloads:

“While the RIAA is swift to punish any person caught offering illegal downloads, they’re not very swift with outrage when a member company like EMI offers illegal downloads. Not only did the band King Crimson’s contract never allow digital distribution to begin with, but band member Robert Fripp claims that EMI offered their music for sale even after their contract ended entirely.”

Slashdot | EMI Caught Offering Illegal Downloads

Wonder if they will now sue themselves?

Tags: dmr

Finally Don Imus will be back on the air.  Now if I can only get WABCs radio’s Internet stream to work on my Linux box….

November 1, 2007 — It’s official: Don Imus is coming back to the airwaves, confirming a story first written by The Post in August.

Citadel Broadcasting Corporation and 77 WABC Radio announced today the return of radio’s lone cowboy Don Imus as the station’s new morning host beginning Monday, Dec. 3.

A source involved with the deal said that Imus signed a 5-year deal with Citadel that pays him between $5 million and $8 million annually.

Imus is bringing his team back to the radio on 77 WABC, including newsman Charles McCord, and is unseating the incumbent, highly rated “Curtis and Kuby” show. The show will air 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. on 77 WABC and will be syndicated nationally by the ABC Radio Network.

“We are ecstatic to bring Don Imus back to morning radio,” said 77 WABC President and General Manager Steve Borneman.

“Don’s unique brand of humor, knowledge of the issues and ability to attract big-name guests is unparalleled. He is rested, fired up and ready to do great radio on the nation’s most listened to News/Talk radio station, 77 WABC,” said Borneman.

Imus is also in talks on a separate television deal akin to the one he had with MSNBC though the source was unsure if those negotiations would be wrapped up in time to announce a deal simultaneous with the Citadal one.

Among the television stations talking with Imus about a deal is RFD-TV, a farming-focused satellite television network that was previously granted exclusive access to Imus’ ranch for a documentary that aired over Labor Day weekend.

DON IMUS BACK ON THE AIR

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Imus

Was playing around with PCLinuxOS (I like to try several flavors of Linux) and found Firefox taking forever to resolve host names to IP addresses. Status bar would be stuck on “Looking up www.whoever.com.”

Now being the tech person I am, I prefer to run my own DNS server — especially since my ISP’s DNS servers are always slow. I know I had it set up right and direct DNS queries from the command line came back almost instantly. So why was Firefox taking forever finding IP addresses for the sites I was trying to connect with?

Digging through Firefox’s config, I came across the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting. Then I remembered! IPv6 is usually enabled in Linux by default. Firefox, and just about everything else on Linux, will try to establish an IPv6 connection first if it can. If it can’t, say no IPv6 address exist for the host you’re trying to connect with, then it falls back on IPv4. But even worse, if an IPv6 address does exist for the host your connecting to but your ISP doesn’t support IPv6, Firefox will try to connect anyway until it gets a ‘destination not available’ before falling back to IPv4.

So the simple solution is to tell Firefox not to use IPv6. To do this:

1. Type “about:config” for the URL in Firefox and hit enter (without the quotes, of course).
2. In the filter field, type “DNS” and hit enter.
3. Double-click on “network.dns.disableIPv6″, changing its value from False to True.

That’s it. You should notice a considerable improvement in Firefox’s speed.

Sometimes you just feel like generating a random 16 digit number.