Par2 Files are common on the Usenet today.They are not that common on the Internet in general and I can’t think of a location where I encountered them except for the Usenet. Par2 Files can be used to repair broken archives. That is the basic explanation of course, the technical is a little bit more complicated. Lets use a example to make it clearer. Let us assume that you have downloaded a number of rar files (.rar, r01, r02 and so on) that can be unpacked to create the file test.avi which has a size of 700 Megabytes.

Let us further assume that some of the rar files have been uploaded incompletely to the Usenet which happens from time to time. It would not be possible to extract test.avi because of the broken files in the archive. Par2 Files are fixers. They analyze the blocks of each rar archive and post back if it is complete, incomplete or missing. Every Par2 file can be used to fix a certain number of blocks that corresponds to the amount of blocks of the rar files.

continue reading "Par2 Files Explained"

When you first start a blog and you’re slowly building your audience and your traffic, your site’s uptime/availability is not something that you often think about. When your audience is still small and your blog is down for one or two or even ten hours it really doesn’t matter that much, as the potential number of people who might have tried to visit and failed is small, and most of them at that point are friends or are somehow connected to you and will likely come back again.

Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

continue reading "Monitor your website with Montastic"

You might have heard that the AACS is sending Cease and Desist letters to websites who link to a forum thread at the Doom9 forum which has information about the processing key for HD-DVD movies. Instead of focusing on the free speech issues that arise in this matter I would like to point out to something interesting. This number made many users creative and I decided to publish all the interesting creative works that point to that number.

I don’t want to talk about the obvious ones here which are: registered domain names, t-shirts, mugs and other merchandise with the number or e-mail addresses with it. I link to several images at the end which are worth a look as well.

continue reading "A number that inspired creativity"

The guys at Joost are serious about going live as soon as possible. They announced today that beta members will receive unlimited invites to give all of their friends the possibility to get a glimpse at Joost before it goes live. I’m a little bit concerned about their move to go live at this point because the content that is currently available would be considered B-Content by many. Sure there are some channels that will attract fans like the World Poker Tour channel which will not be available in the United States by the way.

This is actually the first time that I saw a notice on the Joost website listing saying which channels would be available in which country. I think it is really interesting to see that users from the United States will be exempt from many channels - possibly a distribution rights issue. Some channels on the other hand are only available to users from the United States (MTV and Comedy Channel to name two).

continue reading "Joost 0.94 available, soon to go live"

Every webmaster witnesses content theft from time to time. Most of the time it is text or images that gets copied and published on other websites. There is however a solution for images that adds a visible copyright notice to them. You could use image editors like Gimp, Adobe Photoshop or Paintshop to create a copyright notice on every image that you want to publish on the Internet. This is however a time consuming task and I would like to introduce a similar method using the image manipulation software CopyRightLeft to batch edit images and add a notice to them.

CopyRightLeft is a Open-Source application that has two processing modes. The first is an image by image mode that manipulates one image at a time. You can use the tool to open an image in many known formats including jpg, gif, bmp, tiff and png and save the image in the same formats except gif. You can then enter a text, define the font size, color and many other options. It is for instance possible to add the copyright notice at the bottom of the image, in the center or rotate it to place it diagonal.

continue reading "Create visible copyright notices for images"