Tasunke's Random Ramblings

Well, Youtube appears to be having issues. Every video I try to load in standard quality gives me the error message: “An error occured, please try again later.” Videos only available in standard quality won’t load at all. However, the standard quality version of some videos will load if they have HD or HQ versions, while others will still give that error and refuse to load unless you switch to the HQ or HD version of the video. None of the HQ or HD videos I’ve tried has given me that error when I’ve tried to view the HQ or HD version.

Searching Twitter shows that I’m not the only one that’s having this issue, and I’ve confirmed it with friends on IRC as well. Youtube’s Twitter indicates that they did some maintenance that ended at 3:30 PM Pacific Time, which was about 5 hours ago. This issue is still persisting. Hopefully they’ll get things working again soon, as this is a major issue.

Update 1: It has been brought to my attention that there are some videos that are working, but the problem still persists for the videos I have been trying to watch.

Update 2: It looks like that issue has finally been resolved, as videos I was having issues with are now working.

[Pic taken from Safebooru and converted to JPG format]

So, a new fiber-optic cable named “Unity” has left Japan, bound for a rendezvous with another ship coming from Los Angeles. It was announced in February of last year, and is a joint effort by Google and a group of telecom companies. The companies involved are Bharti Airtel from India, Global Transit from Malaysia, Google, KDDI Corporation from Japan, Pacnet from Hong Kong, and SingTel from Singapore. Supposedly its full capacity is 7.68 Tbps (yes, that’s terabits per second), though will be running at 4.8 Tbps when it’s fully launched. The two ships will meet in the middle of the Pacific and fuse their cables together, and the new cable should be operational by early next year.
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Xerox has announced that they have developed a procedure to print with “low-temperature” silver ink using ink-jet technology on a variety of surfaces. What makes this new technique so different and promising is that existing techniques required high temperatures, which would melt materials such as plastics, and/or a so-called “clean room” environment. This new development requires neither.

This is the sort of breakthrough that the RFID industry has been waiting for. With this, it becomes practical to print RFID tags on everything, as costs have been dramatically lowered. According to PC Mag, Xerox claims that this could bring costs for RFID tags down from where they are at about a dollar (US) or so, down to roughly a penny each. In the research I’ve done on RFID in the past, this sort of drop has been seen as critical in the development of item-level tagging.

If this really takes off (and I do believe it will), this could cause alot of changes in retail. Everything from better inventory management due to “smart shelves” that can tell how much/how many of an item still remains on them, to effortless checkout, where you just push your cart through a reader and it rings up all your items at once. Videos after the jump.
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Apparently the manufacturer of Time-Warner cable’s default modem/router combo, SMC, is run by a pack of incompetent morons. Yes, I am using such strong words because they are needed to express the depth of the stupidity in how this router is setup.

First off, the default setup for these routers (model SMC8014WG-SI) is WEP encryption. Anyone who knows anything about wireless networks will tell you that WEP is pretty much useless. They can be cracked within minutes. However, it gets even better. There’s a normal user account that can only access certain options, supposedly. However, the administrative functions are apparently only restricted from non-admin users by HIDING THEM WITH JAVASCRIPT! Hence the double facepalm above. Words fail me at this point, so let me just quote the guy who found this, Dave, from his blog.
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Just yesterday, Steve Jobs posted an article to Apple’s website entitled “Thoughts on Music” which addresses DRM and why it is currently necessary for the iTunes music store. That being that the big four music companies insisted on it being used and effective (meaning that Apple must patch any holes that show up in it), or they will pull their music libraries from the iTunes store. He also addresses the issue of it being kept proprietary, and why that is a necessity. My intent is to briefly explain some of the arguments presented in that article and give my own commentary on such. (more…)

Well, after switching Windows 2k’s default language back to English so I can read the IME’s menus easier, and further messing around with the keyboard, I’ve discovered how to directly type hiragana with that new keyboard, I had to engage in the IME what I believe is called “kana lock,” which you can enable with CTRL+Caps Lock, or by clicking on the little “KANA” button in the IME toolbar.

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A couple of thoughtful friends got me a Japanese USB keyboard for christmas (thanks guys!), and I’ve been trying to read through the documentation that came with it, but it’s really slow going. n.n; It’s very interesting however, the slight differences in the basic keyboard layout. The english alphabet characters are still in the standard QWERTY layout, but the difference is in where some of the symbol keys are (or more correctly, what symbols are on what keys), and the fact that it has a few extra keys in the layout.

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