More swarm streaming systems

I’ve discovered a few more swarm streamers for broadcasting multimedia to potentially millions of viewers: Coolstream, PPLive, and SopCast.

SopCast seems promising as it has a contributed Linux interface for the SopCast player, called (duh) sopcast-player. I’m still trying to figure out how to “broadcast” with this system, whether from Linux or Windows.

Coolstream looks interesting but not yet fully-baked. The website keeps insisting I log in, and none of the supposedly-active video streams appear to be working for me.

PPLive appears to have active users, but the channels using it as listed on the PPLive iKan site are all in Chinese. The other channel listing site, PP.tv, is also in Chinese. Clicking around seems promising but it’s hard to know what I’m looking at. And some of the clips seem to be blocked here.

There’s another service called TV Ants but the company’s website isn’t coming up for me. That is one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a channel with one of these groups. In order for any of this to work, you need to have at least one server to help seed the stream. If the company hosting your channel goes out of business then all of the channels that company hosts vanish as well.

Don’t piss off a musician

Flying to a gig, the band Sons of Maxwell were shocked to see their guitars being thrown around by United Airlines baggage handlers. When singer Dave Carroll’s guitar came back broken, United was apparently less than helpful in atoning for the mistake. That led the band to take their complaint to YouTube with a video and song called United Breaks Guitars

Catchy song, Sons of Maxwell! Bad, bad, PR move, United!

Update 11 Jul 2009: Taylor Guitars is having some fun with this, too! Also, check out Dave’s latest video statement.

Cheap Thoughts: Have a nice day

If you tell someone “have a nice day” and they do wind up having a nice day, do you get to take some sort of credit?

“Thanks for telling me to have a nice day, Chuck. I wouldn’t have thought about it if it wasn’t for you.”

“Hey, that’s what friends are for!”

Cyber attacks … from North Korea?

Officials are blaming North Korea for the recent cyber attacks against U.S. and South Korean government websites.

Yeah, right. Have you checked out North Korea lately? While South Korea has some of the fastest home Internet connections in the world, North Korea has … well, maybe a 56k dialup connection? Broadband companies aren’t exactly falling over themselves to offer service there and I can imagine that the quirky communist government isn’t exactly encouraging it, either.

I know Kim II Jong is a movie buff but I’m betting money he isn’t exactly streaming his shows from Netflix!

Postfix’s anti-spam capabilities

Some of the neighborhood email lists I run over at www.eastraleigh.org were getting attacked by spammers. I don’t really want to lock the lists down as some of them need to be accessible to folks not on the list. I also didn’t want to run something like ASSP because while it’s good, it’s written in perl and also a memory hog. That’s when I looked into what Postfix can do on its own.

Almost all of the spam sent to the lists have fake SMTP HELO statements. Thus, the following two lines added to the bottom of /etc/postfix/main.cf made Postfix very effective against spam:

smtpd_require_hello = yes
smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname,reject_unknown_hostname

Problem solved!

S1004 reportedly gutted

Jay Ovittore has been following the broadband backwater fight and reports that the N.C. Senate version of the bill, S.1004 was gutted yesterday.

Says Jay:

S1004 will be in the Public Utilities Committee tomorrow and for the first time I don’t have to worry about it. The Senate used a procedural rule to gut the bill and replace all text with new text that allows Progress Energy to convert some of it’s Coal fired plants to Natural Gas.

The is not a mere mention of cable, municipalities, Time Warner, none of it.

HB1252 is still alive and I will track it as always.

For now we can all claim another victory against Big Cable!

Fantastic news.

All Michael Jackson, all the time

Ok, so I said my peace about Michael Jackson the day he died, as did almost every other person and media outlet on the planet. Some media outlets have been milking Jackson’s death for all it’s worth.

I was really, really hoping that the News and Observer wouldn’t succumb to infotainment levels and put Michael Jackson’s funeral on the front page. Sadly, the N&O disappointed me againby putting this story on 1A, front and center. This is the biggest story in Raleigh?

Is there anyone out there still practicing real journalism?

Warrenton caboose tour

While we were visiting Kelly’s parents in Virginia we decided to take a bike ride on Warrenton’s greenway path. At the start of the greenway is the Norfolk and Western Railway Caboose 518554, a restored caboose on freshly-laid track where thirty years ago freight trains once served the town. We happened to pass the caboose right as a gentleman appeared to be locking it up, so being the curious sort I asked him what he knew about the caboose.

It turns out the gentleman was Ron Scullin, one of the three main volunteers responsible for obtaining the track and caboose and restoring both to like-new condition. Ron had just finished up with tours of the caboose, which are held once a month, but hearing that we were from out of town, he graciously volunteered to provide a personal tour.
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