Technophile Monkey

Some time ago, I started writing NRK Scraper, a small tool that takes apart the Norwegian national broadcaster’s website and gives you back pure, nice video streams. NRK’s site can’t do that: It’s full of crazy Flash applets and advertisements that make my browser explode. Here’s a screenshot of clean NRK video instead:

However, NRK Scraper is very young. The core functions are there, but the tools for them aren’t very nice yet. So here’s how to use NRK Scraper on an Ubuntu 8.04 box, but it works on any OS that can run Ruby:

1. Grab the latest NRK Scraper release from the file releases page at Rubyforge.
2. Save it somewhere useful, let’s say /home/yourname/nrkscraper-x.x.x.tar.gz (the x.x.x of course represents the current version of NRK Scraper, 0.0.3 at the moment)
3. Open a terminal and change to your home directory by typing cd.
4. Type tar xvfz nrkscraper-x.x.x.tar.gz (of course replacing x.x.x with the actual version number)
5. Type cd nrkscraper-x.x.x (again replacing x.x.x with the actual version number)
6. Now install Ruby and the libraries that NRK Scraper needs: sudo apt-get install ruby libwww-mechanize-ruby libxml-ruby (You can of course use other packaging tools such as Synaptic to install these)
7. Make sure mplayer is installed on your machine. If it isn’t, try apt-get install mplayer-nogui
8. Type ./video_player.rb -u http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/nyheter
9. After a while of fetching pages and analyzing, mplayer should start playing the news in fullscreen! You can also launch video_player.rb at any other of NRK’s video-containing pages by giving that as an argument for the -u option. But video_player.rb is only a small example script! You can also download whole shows using the download_stream.rb script.

Now why am I telling you all this? I want you to help me improve NRK Scraper! If you know a little Ruby and would like to make NRK Scraper a better thing, please join the project. There’s a page at Rubyforge, and a bunch of very useful new features are already added as feature requests, such as the ability to recursively download all the episodes of a show that you’re interested in.

In Switzerland, there is a federal office that is in charge of regulating prices in the market. One of their stated goals is to make sure that monopolists (such as the federal railroads, electric utilities etc.) don’t abuse their power to inflate prices. Starting October 1st, Microsoft’s Stefan Meierhans will unfortunately be the price supervisor for Switzerland.

Seeing that Microsoft was incapable of treating the ISO submission of their MSOOXML format without bias, we have enough reasons to suspect that Meierhans might use his newly gained power to apply two different measures to the prices of IT products: One for Microsoft and its partner companies, one for the rest of the market.

So one of Switzerland’s most important federal offices against the abuse of monopoly power is now led by someone who works for a monopolist power abuser. A twice convicted one, at that, and additionally the first one to receive extra penalties from the European Commission for not complying with the measures ordered against it in an antitrust case’s ruling. Sounds like a good idea. That will surely improve things.

Keep in mind that if Microsoft were not a monopolist, none of this would matter, and no one would complain. Some people seem to believe that Microsoft’s ballot-stuffing and political games are acceptable because it’s a “free market”, but we can only overlook such issues if the company in question is not a monopolist. If it is, we should use an entirely different set of morals, just like there are entirely different laws concerning monopolists that don’t apply to anyone else.

Update 1 (2008-06-18, 15:54)

Voices from elsewhere in Switzerland are also full of surprise in reaction to this odd new head of all things price-related.

Swiss technology community Donax writes:

Le site de l’organe de surveillance des prix nous apprend qu’une enquête avait été menée sur l’entreprise de Bill Gates et le fait que ses prix étaient plus élevés en Suisse qu’ailleurs. Difficile de croire à la partialité d’une enquête de ce type quand l’investigateur n’a pas trouvé immoral de travailler pour cette même entreprise.

(“The price supervisor’s site tells us that an investigation was launched against Bill Gates’ company and the fact that their products are more expensive in Switzerland than elsewhere. It’s hard to believe in the impartiality of this kind of investigation when the investigator did not see anything morally wrong with working for the very same company [they are investigating].”)

Update 2 (2008-06-19, 12:39)

/ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group, is sending out an open letter/press release asking some critical questions about the strange nomination. The letter is signed by several Swiss groups that fight for people’s freedoms, such as the Free Software Foundation Europe and Digitale Allmend.

Update 3: Other voices from around the blogosphere

• Konsumentenschutz (Swiss consumer rights org): Hochspannung bei Wettbewerb und Preisen
• Digitale Allmend: Preisüberwacher kommt von Microsoft
• Donax: Monsieur Prix vient de chez Microsoft
• Digisus: Schweizer Preisüberwachung. Wird der Bock zum neuen Gärtner gemacht?
• Inside-IT: Ausgerechnet: Microsoft-Behördenflüsterer wird Preisüberwacher

Photo made with The GIMP and licensed under CC-By-SA 3.0. Based on this photo by Kevin Lawver (CC-By-SA 2006) and this origami-head by “A l’abord d’un” (CC-By-NC-SA 2006), slightly larger .xcf available by request.

I just noticed there’s a Letzigrund stadium outside my office window. Can you see it? It probably doesn’t have the right colors, but that’s okay. On account of a 10 year old sunlight-damaged CMOS-based webcam, you can’t really read the UEFA label on that building, but it’s there.

Getting to work was quite an adventure today. Dozens of trucks and travel buses are cheerfully blowing their diesel clouds at my face along the roads around the stadium, and the police seem to have hired helpers to manage traffic. Teach newbies to direct traffic? Let’s do it at the Euro 2008. Why swim if you can drown?

I have no idea when the first game is at the Letzigrund stadium, but it’ll make getting to work a bit more interesting still.

Roughly five years ago, I bought an iRiver iHP-120 (today called H120). I bought it for three reasons:

• Ogg Vorbis playback support (as one of the first players)
• Optical in/out for best possible signal quality when at home
• Good analog sound quality, something that only Cowon and iRiver seem to be able to produce in a portable digital audio player

The surprising thing is: The machine is still alive and well, and it’s getting new features every day, thanks to the Free Software firmware Rockbox. iRiver have probably long since stopped caring about firmware upgrades for this player, but the Free Software community keeps adding features the player was never meant to have. Being able to save your played tracks to your Last.fm profile, for example, or building an artist/metadata database on the fly. There’s also an EQ with billions of functions, but I’m a silly purist so I never use that.

It seems that other people are very happy with Rockbox on their H120 too, so yay Rockbox. If only iRiver and Cowon would publish specs for their newer devices so we could port Rockbox to them, that would be really nice. Since Rockbox outperforms most of these manufacturers’ stock firmware, it would be a win-win situation for them. We make them decent firmware, they don’t have to invest any work. If they still need some special features that aren’t yet available, they can write a Rockbox plugin.

Some people have claimed that SanDisk has actually helped the Rockbox project with docs and specs, but this is not true and based on a rumor. At least they donated some hardware. We would certainly need some more activity from the manufacturers on this front.