The Labyrinth (of th3 Malfunction3d Droi3d)

Introduction I am back writing again this week, after a rather abbreviated entry last weekend, surrounding a couple of albums from the 1980's I was listening to, that sounded as though they were twenty-years ahead of their time. This week, I will be talking about the "Psychology of security" if you will and the "paranoia" surrounding it!. It should be dully noted, that this weeks entry was inspired by a rather "elegant rant", but some poster on "Slashdot" a couple of days ago, that was being blown out proportion (you can look up the post yourself on their if you would like, I won't be referencing here, because I consider it be "nonsensical" in some regard). Let's start by separating "fact" from "fiction". Afterwards, we will continue to work our way into conclusion about "news" sites on the Internet, from there on out. "Fact" vs. "Fiction" and some underlying "assum...

Introduction I wanted to start off this week's entry, by saying I hope everyone in the U.S and all of my readers around the world enjoy the upcoming holiday and have a wonderful New Years!. In this week's entry, I am going to be exploring music from the 1980's AGAIN (this may or may not be a re-occurring theme in the future). The difference between this week's entry and the music entry I wrote a couple of weeks ago, is these albums (while 80's in nature) sound as though they could have been written in this decade or even today for that matter! These artists and albums were about twenty-years ahead of their time. If you like "old classics" that don't sound as though they written thirty years ago, you will like this week's entry! Here is the list I came up with. Like always, you may agree or concur with it. If you have any comments or concerns let me know! Here is a short list I came up with this weekend: "sleeper" albums from the 1980...

Introduction In this week's entry, I will be discussing a piece of U.S legislation that has been in place, since the Carter Administration in the United States circa 1978. I realize I have several readers, from all over the world, including the U.S who read my blog on weekly basis. This law is applicable to readers outside of the U.S, but will only make sense to you are familiar with U.S statutory laws. It applies to both U.S and non-U.S citizens equally, but from a civil liberties standpoint ONLY if you are U.S citizen. The first question your probably asking is what is this law about and how does it apply to computers? The answer to that in short, is according to most Criminal Justice textbooks, FISA is a law that dictates how and when the U.S is able to conduct electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence and national security purposes outside of the U.S. It's been the subject of frequent debate [1] here in the U.S, in post 9/11 world on, whether or not there is enough...

Introduction I have decided to "mix" things up a bit and discuss my other favorite past-time in this weeks first blog entry "music". Today, I am going to be taking a break from I.T and I.T law subjects that I have been hammering home, over the last few entries. I will be discussing a list of "five" must have albums that I believe IMO "defined" the 1980's, that you must must listen to, if you enjoy various genre's of music in general. These were handcrafted from my own personal collection! enjoy. You may agree or concur with the list. Without further ado, here are the five albums that I came up with handpicked! Five 80's Rock/Pop albums that "defined" the decade Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982) - Michael Jackson second solo album with producer Quincy Jones that has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, making it the single best selling album of all time!  Prince - Purple Rain (1984) - An album based around the ficti...

Introduction Today, I am going to be showing you how to encode with Theora 1.1 library using ffmpeg2theora 0.28 tool in Linux. Briefly, Theora is an open source video codec, that was donated to the Xiph.org foundation by On2 video in 2004 (The same company Google recently bought that consists of VP8 codec portion in WebM!). Attempts where made to include it in the HTML 5 standard in 2007, by members of the W3C. Those attempts were met with heavy resistance. One of the main problem with the earlier builds of Theora, was the perceived lack "quality" with encoder and how it was not on "par" with H.264 standard put forth by the MPEG consortium. Proponents of the H.264 video, claimed it was "inferior", because it did not have the same level of glossy sophistication and there were too many macro-blocking artifacts, due to a older codebase with no bi-predictive frames, such as those of the newer more advanced H.264 codec. The lead developer and engineer of ma...

Introduction Note: I want to stress that I DO NOT CONDONE using this guide to encode movies that are infringing upon international and local copyright laws (which include the WIPO Treaty in Europe and the DMCA in the U.S). These examples ASSUME your encoding material in which you OWN The RIGHTS too! I will not be held responsible for individuals that are using it to encode copyrighted material in those respective countries! If there are disputes about this or any other questions please DO NOT hesitate to contact me right away! Thank you. This week I am going to focus on showing you how to transcode videos to WebM, which is playable in both VLC and most HTML 5 compatible web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and I.E 10! If you recall way back several months ago (if you had been following my old blog) I showed you some code snippets for how to encode directly to WebM using an older version of libvpx 0.6.1 code named "Bali", that came out last year, but has since be...

Introduction In today's topic, I will be showing readers different ways you can encode your music collection, if you just moved over to Linux from Windows using open source codecs! You do not have to encode your music files with Vorbis, due to the fact that MP3 is also supported in Linux and HTML 5, but there are some substantial benefits to doing in this day and age (at least from the perspective of an open-source nerd 8-)). The first is you don't have to worry about royalty's and licensing rates (especially if you are opening up a store for indie musicians). The second is that both objectively and subjectively Vorbis sounds substantially better and has been greatly improved with the help of dedicated "audiophiles" and the open source community, since it's first public release over a decade ago, way back in 2002. Today, I will show you some tips and tricks if you are new to encoding your music collection in Linux using the oggenc command-line program in Li...