If you use gmail, google buzz is posting your e-mail contacts to the web

Here's how to deactivate it:

  1. From your gmail account, click on settings.
  2. Click on Buzz
  3. Uncheck all the options
  4. Click save

Optionally, you can also deactivate Buzz entirely.

For all the gory details.

Apple is the new Microsoft

From savagechickens.com. iProduct is rapidly becoming a defining force in my generation.

Towards the Abolition of Privacy in Canada

I did this translation for my buddy Anarcat - to see the French original, go to his blog.

The conservative government, supported by the liberal "opposition", is presently working hard to establish a legal basis for greatly expanded telephone and electronic surveillance.

5 à 7 Koumbit : Syndicats et logiciels libres en Argentine!

Vendredi, 27 novembre
Chez nous au 6833 de l'Épée, suite 308

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Pour l'occasion, notre collègue et ami Sébastien Grenier, présentement à l'emploi du Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA) à Buenos Aires, est de passage à Montréal. Ils nous parlera de son expérience en Argentine, particulièrement de la démarche d'automatisation médiatique et technologique du CTA.

Au menu :

  • Intro au contexte syndical en Argentine

Bootstrap drupal from outside of the drupal root

I forgot where I found this, but I was getting annoyed at my inability to bootstrap drupal without placing a file in the Drupal root, so, in the interests of sharing, here it is. If I remember the source of this code anytime soon, I will, of course, mention it. For those unfamiliar with this procedure, insert this code at the beginning of your drupal php scripts, change script.php and mysite.example.com to appropriate values, and you can you use the full glory of the Drupal API in your script and stick it wherever you like in your file structure.

Drupal Accessibility Session Audio

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This is the recorded audio from Everett Zufelt's session: Drupal Accessibility: using Drupal 7 improvements as an example. It was a great session, really engaging, and it's exciting to see the direction we're headed in with Drupal on this issue.

Everett Zufelt

Custom implementation of ffmpeg on an Ubuntu 8.10 server

Update (20 october 2009) - This is now two Ubuntu releases out of date, so please check some more recent sources before trying this.

I've been working for a while on a problem at the NFB where we are moving a Drupal site to a new server running Ubuntu Intrepid. The site depends on transcoding handled by the outdated Drupal video module. Because the video module did only a single-pass encode, NFB staff created a shell script to fool the video module and replace the single-pass encode with a double-pass encode that normalized the film audio.