★ bcdef.org ★

So, let’s say you were the kind of person who wanted to report piracy to Motion Picture Association of America, and you went to the submission form on their site, would you be peturbed that the source of the page blatantly confesses that the MPAA is using open-source software without fulfilling the author’s plainspoken license of use?

Join the gaggle, have a gander and be ready to giggle.

For good measure, this post was reproduced without the expressed written consent of Cory Doctorow, who himself stole his cleverness from Digg, a greater body of the Internet’s collective consciousness.

Have a nice day!

It’s official, hot on the heels of abandoning support and future development for Internet Explorer for Mac, Microsoft is now discontinuing support and development of Windows Media Player for Mac.

This is yet another notch of legitimacy for the Flash Video contingency, who are now fueling much of the video on the Internet, including Google Video and ESPN. Any computer that has the Flash Player installed can view Flash Video; and this constitutes a larger percentage of computers than any other video format’s user base.

It does not signal the end of WMV, but it does indicate a significant challenge for Microsoft – how can MS convince developers to use their video codec if a small but cultishly popular segment of the market cannot view it at all.* Or perhaps more damaging, why would video developers, a large segment of which use Mac OS X systems, use a format that is no longer officially supported for their computers? One can only expect that this bodes well for the Flash Video community.

A resounding victory for Adobe/Macromedia!

More about it News.com

* One could conceivably view WMV videos with MPlayer or Quicktime with the Flip4Mac plugin, but these are not likely to become reliable options for the general public.

Wrapping up development on Flappr…

Changes in 1.1.0:

• Many graphical adjustments. Search area is now a bar with options underneath, thumb container moves directly under the options.
• On lower resolutions, the user strips would obstruct images of vertical aspect. This has been fixed.
• Selecting a tag in the header of the thumb container box removes that tag and reperforms the search without it.
• Hover box comes up with photo title.
• Clicking a userstrip’s icon displays the user’s most-recent photos.
• You can now specify which page of results you want. The page report has now moved down by the prev / next buttons.
• Image descriptions now match the aspect of the photo – previously vertically aligned photos would have descriptions that spilled over the right side
• HTML is now supported within image descriptions
• Employs newest Flashr build’s support of cached data requests (should help significantly if you hit the ‘prev’ button or otherwise search for something you’ve already searched for)

If there’s any more requests, send them along before I finally bid this project adieu.

More details on the project page.