Vimeo Downloader 0.1 released

Published on November 30, 2008 in Open source. 78 Comments

Update (2010-11-13): Vimeo Downloader 0.3 is now available. Among other features, it will now download HD videos by default. Most people will prefer to use the new version (also linked below). But if you prefer to use version 0.1, which defaults to downloading standard definition versions of videos, you can get it here.

Here is Vimeo Downloader, a script I created to download videos from Vimeo:

vimeo_downloader.sh

The script should work on any system with a POSIX shell (such as Ubuntu, Mac OS X, or Windows with MSYS) and wget or curl (wget is in Ubuntu by default and also available for Windows, curl is in Mac OS X by default). To use it, simply run vimeo_downloader.sh with the ID of the Vimeo video you want to see. For example, the ID of http://www.vimeo.com/2373142 is 2373142. If you have any questions, please leave a comment on this post or contact me directly.

Thanks to Voinage on the XBMC forums for describing how to download videos from Vimeo.

This script is the latest in my attempts to help people depend less on Flash. For more details, see Why I haven’t installed a Flash player. For viewing YouTube videos without Flash, use Free Youtube! by Stephen Paul Weber. Hopefully this script will make it easier to incorporate Vimeo support into something like Free Youtube!.

Update: Free Youtube! now supports Vimeo, thanks to this script. Just install Greasemonkey, then Free Youtube! and you will have Flash-free Vimeo.

Flash required for Gmail voice and video chat

Published on November 25, 2008 in Intellectual property. 3 Comments

You may have heard about Google’s new voice and video chat plugin for Gmail, which lets you use voice and video through the Gmail web interface. You may have also heard that the plugin is standalone (does not require other plugins) or an alternative to using Flash for voice and video chat solutions. Like many, I thought that because Gmail voice and video chat was a plugin, it did not require Flash at all. However, further research showed that this was not the case.
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Why I haven’t installed a Flash player

Published on November 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 10 Comments

Since I installed Ubuntu 8.10 three weeks ago, I have not installed a Flash player. I don’t just mean I haven’t installed the Adobe Flash Player, I mean I haven’t installed any Flash player at all, not even Gnash or Swfdec. Those of you who know me as a free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) advocate may be wondering why this is. After all, I don’t need to use any non-libre software if I run Gnash or Swfdec. I’ll explain why having a FLOSS implementation of a technology is not enough for me to use it.
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Ideas for a better programming language

Published on November 8, 2008 in Discussing ideas. 14 Comments

When I look at the programming languages available today, it seems that all of them try to optimize execution speed or developer time at the expense of the other. For example, although compiled C code is extremely fast, it can take many more programmer hours to write a robust application in C than in a higher-level language. On the other side of the coin, a moderately complex problem can be solved by a Ruby programmer in a few minutes, but the resulting code is executed slowly, running on an interpreter (soon to be a VM, but still slower than native code) and requiring garbage collection and lots of runtime checking. Are these sacrifices necessary? I don’t think so. How is it possible to make a language that simultaneously optimizes execution speed and developer time? I believe the answer lies in static code analysis, particularly at the compiler level.
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StarCraft Power Saver 0.3 released

Published on November 6, 2008 in Open source. 6 Comments

StarCraft Power Saver has been updated to patch StarCraft 1.15.3 executables. You can find the new version on the StarCraft Power Saver web page. If you have any questions or if you are having trouble with StarCraft Power Saver, please add a comment to this post or contact me directly.

Lessig, others: There is more to the world than just the USA

Published on October 29, 2008 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Before I begin with my (minor) criticism, please don’t take this the wrong way. Although I haven’t written about Lawrence Lessig before, I have been following much of what he has been doing in the way of alternative copyright licensing methods (Creative Commons), copyright reform (see Lessig’s “five changes that would make a world of difference” and ignore the title), and reducing corruption in government (Change Congress). His views are well thought-out and are helping to make the world a better place. What follows is a suggestion to Mr. Lessig and others about how they can help even more.
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Positive change: Green Party on copyright

Published on September 30, 2008 in Intellectual property and Open source. 0 Comments

Along with their commitment to free and open source software in government, the Green Party of Canada takes an excellent stance on copyright reform. According to a response from Green Party candidate Glenn Hubbers and the Green Party response to the Canadian Conference of the Arts questionnaire, the Green Party will:

  • Remove the Levy on Blank Audio Recording Media and replace it with private copying exemptions;
  • Introduce a formal notice-and-notice mechanism for dealing with copyright infringement online, thereby affirming common carrier status for Internet Service Providers (ISPs);
  • Renounce the Crown Copyright applied to all government produced documents, thereby immediately releasing them into the public domain;

It seems almost coincidental that the Green Party’s stated goals so closely match my own. Let me elaborate on why these reforms are necessary.
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Clarifying the restrictions on DVD playback

Published on September 19, 2008 in Intellectual property and Open source. 1 Comment

A recent article on Slashdot, Canonical Offers Sale of Proprietary Codecs for Ubuntu, opens with the following line:

Playing DVDs on Linux that required proprietary codecs has been a source of much pain.

This statement is misleading. The primary reason that DVDs cannot be played by default under most distributions is CSS. To play a DVD with CSS, you need a licensed player that has a key to unlock the CSS or you need to circumvent the CSS. In both cases, the openness of free software is at odds with the desires of the motion picture industry.
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StarCraft Power Saver 0.2 released

Published on September 6, 2008 in Open source. 10 Comments

Version 0.2 of StarCraft Power Saver fixes a problem with checking StarCraft executables that made it unable to patch some of them. If you had trouble with version 0.1 please try version 0.2, which is available from the StarCraft Power Saver web page. If you have any questions or concerns about StarCraft Power Saver, feel free to add them as a comment to this post.

Thanks to everyone who added information about their StarCraft executables on my previous post.

StarCraft Power Saver needs your help

Published on August 29, 2008 in Open source. 6 Comments

StarCraft Power Saver (blog post) currently has trouble patching many people’s StarCraft executables as reported here and here. A likely solution to this is to check a smaller portion of the StarCraft executable to verify that my patch will work with it as suggested by MasterOfChaos. But before I do this, I need to make sure that this smaller portion is indeed the same on all StarCraft executables. That’s where you come in. If you happen to have StarCraft installed, I would really appreciate if you could download EXE Info (main web page), run it on your StarCraft executable, and add a comment to this post with your results.

For example, if you have exe_info.exe in your current directory and StarCraft installed in the default location, run the following in a Command Prompt window:

exe_info "C:Program FilesStarcraftStarCraft.exe"

Then copy (right-click, Mark, highlight, and press Enter) and paste the results into a comment on this post. Please include which language your version of StarCraft uses (ie. English, German, etc.) in your comment.

For more information about EXE Info, check out the EXE Info web page. Feel free to add a comment to this post with any questions you might have. Thanks in advance for contributing to StarCraft Power Saver!