On Teosto and YouTube block in Finland

The whole of Finland was just about to strangle Teosto yesterday as YouTube blocked almost all music videos. Teosto is the umbrella copyright mafia here and collects money in different odd ways to the "starving" artists... (and collects a nice 4.2 Million for their own salaries...)

Anyway, what is interesting to think about is what artists are using YouTube for. They have their own channels for promoting their stuff, music videos. These days, as MTV is just playing reality TV and other shite, YouTube is probably the primary place to show these videos.

Now what is interesting is that YouTube is totally Free, anyone can create a channel and share their stuff. Good quality. Full HD. 4K. 60fps.

Seeing what I'm getting at ? They get a platform, for free, to distribute high bandwidth content that takes up plenty of space, plenty of bandwidth, power and servers in the thousands. For Free. For marketing their own content. For free.

Think about that for a second. Even some crappy Finnish artist video with 3-4 million views in Full HD, fully streamed, say a conservative 300MB/view takes a nice ~900TB on bandwidth. And they get this FOR FREE.

And the fuckers demand money ???!!

Right.

A couple of cheap Macintosh SE's

A friend found a bunch of Macintosh SE's at at recycling center a while ago (year?) and I was finally able to go and pick them up a couple of weeks ago.

Two Macintosh SE FDHD models and three dual DD floppy drive models.

One of the FDHD has been used as a server, and digging around the drive I was able to find out that they had been used at a school in Lahti in the 1990s.

Documents where dated around 1994 and some log files said 1996 so they have probably been unused for 20 years or so.

Apple Macintosh SE

I picked them up on the way to our summer cottage, so to be able to test them I grabbed, what I thought to be, a SCSI box with Mac System on it with me.

Unfortunately my memory had failed me and I took some other systems SCSI disk so I didn't have anything to boot from until I got back home. The server did boot up but directly into AppleShare. And obviously I didn't have any administrator password codes so I couldn't disable it.

Back home I got the right SCSI disk box connected and everything seems to work just fine.

You can see the price in the above picture, 10€ :) (And luckily for me I didn't need to pay anything for them, all free :)

Coding don'ts: enourmous if blocks

When wading trough other peoples code I find these annoyingly large if structures, especially used inside while/foreach loops that check if some item is ok to process or not.

Especially in PHP code for some reason or another. It's like people don't know about continue.

Don't do this!

foreach ($something as $item) {
 if ($item) {
   ...
   .. screenfull of code ..
   ...
 }
}

Do this instead

foreach ($something as $item) {
 if (!$item)
   continue;

 ...
 .. screenfull of code ..
 ...
}