Rayey.Com

I have a yearly subscription to UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) video site, and this subscription is supposed to entitle me to see the high lights of the matches and even the matches once their done. The problem that if I had know I wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place is that it uses DRM technology (Digital Rights Management) to encrypt the videos .. The thing that requires me to be connected to the internet and login every time I need to watch a video that I’ve already paid for and I’ve already downloaded .. That’s not the worst part .. What really pisses me off is their implementation of this service .. since more than 75% of the time I get the message “User has too many simultaneous connections” Whenever I want to view a video and I won’t be allowed to see it !!

The HD videos are around 260 MB on average, and my DSL is not that fast, so I download them using a download manager, and then I TRY to watch them, I can watch the first one OK but when I try to view the second one this message starts to show and I have to wait for a long time in order to be able to see the other videos ( I got this message, wrote this whole post and found and uploaded the pictures yet the ‘User has too many simultaneous connections’ still shows ! )

I really think that these companies are really paranoid about their content, and they are making their paying customers suffer and not even think about renewing their services just because they don’t want their content to be pirated and copied while anything that is shown on the screen can be recorded and their content is already being copied anyway so they are just making hard for people to purchase use their services and making their customers unsatisfied.

This article ( 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them )  is an excellent article that talks about the different kinds of Web design clients out there .. It’s a good read for designers and developers and explains the highs, the  lows and  how to work with each type ..

Web 2.0 Summit Videos This is a page from the web 2.0 Summit .. A summit that was helt back in November 2006 ..

On this page they have the complete coverage of all the summits seminars, discussion and presentations. They include some really great an inspiring discussion from people who are changing the face of the web. The videos feature speakers from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, GoDaddy ..

Those videos are very inspiring and informative and I thought I’d share them with you ..

I came across this page  “How I Work: Bill Gates” where bill gates tells  in details how he does his daily work, an thought I’d share it with my blog reader(s) ..   (I don’t think that I need the ’s’ yet :P)

P.S.

and I think that Bill Gates is copying from me

I’ve recently got a new LCD screen and added it to the existing one to create a dual screen setting ..

The advantages are endless.. and the main one is increasing the productivity,

To mention only one way of increasing productivity .. now I can easily have dreamweavor on one screen and the web project I’m programming in the browser on the other screen and view the changes as I change the code in stead of using ALT+TAB a million time and loosing the focus every time the windows are switched ..

I definitely recommend using it ..

Multiple screens or a BIG one

I’ve done a part of the math for you and compared the use of a 40” LCD screen against using multiple smaller screens based on Screens prices in Kuwait  ..

When it comes to displays the main factor is not how large the windows will look on the screen , it’s how many windows or how many applications can you view on your screen and this is determined by the resolution .. the other factor of course is the size of your wallet $$

A brand new 40” SONY LCD will give you a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 ( 2.073 million pixels ) and it’s priced at around 1000 KD !!

while a low priced ACER 17” Screen will give a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 ( 1.310 million pixels ) and it’s only 51 KD ..

But if you use two of these screens in extended mode you’ll get a total of 2.621 million pixels of desktop space which is way better for you and your wallet

of course there are higher resolution (30” - 40”) LCD screens for a single screen setting ..

but you can also use larger screens for the multiple screens setting and even better you can use more of them !

Software

This is a great software called Ultramon will make you utilise and manage your screens more efficiently.

Links

Here’s a more detailed article about multiple screens from a site called TECHARP .

and for those of you who already have multiple screens this free dual monitor backgrounds website dmb might be useful ..

A discussion about this on Slashdot

ISPs in Kuwait usualy ban websites, but today it was the opposite thing that happened!

Starting from today (and I don’t know when will it end) If you’re a fasttelco subscriber when you try to access Slashdot.org you’ll get a weired error page saying “Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot”. Of course at the begining I thought that for some reason only  my IP has been banned but when I called Fasttelco’s support and told them to check the website they got the same message. It turns out that the ip they banned is the ip of the gateway and all the subscribers will not be able to access it.  The technical support guy promised that they will contact them and  it might  be solved by “tomorrow” .

Now what could possibly be the reason for that ban ?!

Do you think that there’s someone in Kuwait performing a DoS attack on slashdot ?

or is there someone who’s trying to crawl their website using a crude robot?