CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!

Friday, November 21

Rant

Bugger, It's A Sony

My Kannagi OP video on YouTube is probably about to go offline.  Sony has issued a copyright claim against it.

Which is fully within their rights (I think) but bugger them anyway.  It's the opening credits.  No, I can't even claim fair use, but it's the opening credits.

Interestingly, the claim came from Sony Music Entertainment, who presumably have the rights to the CD release.  Not the anime, but the CD.

Still seem to be plenty of other copies of the Kannagi OP online for now.  We'll see what happens there.

Update: Apparently they've just released the OP CD single and are about to release the ED single, so naturally being mindless corporate control-bots (this is the same company that brought you the rootkit CD, after all) they're going around removing anything that might interest people in those CDs.

Having said that, the video still works, at least for me.

Meanwhile, I've loaded up the trial version of Flash CS4 and tried out the new H.264 encoding.  So far I haven't got a file that will even play, so I can't say what the quality is like yet.

Update: Ah, not actually Adobe's fault there, just a missing codec.  Of course, it would be nice if it alerted you to the fact instead of processing the file into something unuseable.  A little box that said, oh, "HEY DUMBASS, YOU DON'T HAVE A CODEC INSTALLED TO PLAY THAT FILE, SO WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO?!" would be fine.

Update: Okay, the results now play in Flash and QuickTime, but not in Zoom Player. cry   Corrupted in Zoom Player 5.5, and don't work at all in 6.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 281 words, total size 2 kb.

Friday, November 07

Rant

Boot To The Head!

I know I often rag on Microsoft for their knowledgebase articles, but frankly, they deserve every bit of it.  And a boot to the head:
  1. Click the Microsoft Office ButtonButton image, and then click Access Options, Excel Options, PowerPoint Options, or Word Options.
  2. Click Trust Center, click Advanced Trust Center Settings, and then click Privacy Options.
  3. Select the Download a file periodically that helps determine system problems check box.
  4. Wait about a week to allow the file to be downloaded, and then run Microsoft Office Diagnostics again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

Wednesday, November 05

Rant

stdole32.tlb To You Too, You Piece Of Crap

I needed to process some data for my business partner, so after mangling the source files appropriately with a little Python script I wrote for the purpose, I fired up Excel so I could convert the text output from Python into a handy spreadshet.

Quoth Excel, stdole32.tlb.

And reinstalled itself.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained; I rebooted but soon was pained to hear Excel once more proclaim

stdole32.tlb

I searched the web but all in vain; no page I found could well explain the reason that Excel laid blame to

stdole32.tlb

I ran Regedit at this point and discovered that my registry has pretty much lost its marbles, not only did no-one have access to HKEY_ACCESS_ROOT (which would explain certain difficulties I've had installing software), but I couldn't grant access to anyone, because it had lost whatever registry setting allows it to grant access to users.  I could grant access to things that aren't real users, various system default things like SYSTEM.  Which I did.

And then all the shortcuts in the start menu stopped working and turned into .lnk files, which makes using Windows pretty bloody difficult, let me tell you.

For one thing, it comes up with a helpful message telling you to use the Control Panel to fix the problem.  The Control Panel which you now have no way to access.

Then, while I was faffing about again in Regedit trying to fix this new problem, it suddenly fixed itself.

Yes, I'm running a virus and malware check.  But I do that regularly anyway, and AVG scans all downloaded files automatically.  And I've been having strange issues with the registry on and off for a while now.

My Linux box hasn't even been rebooted in the past year, while it looks like my Windows box needs a complete reinstall.

Bah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:02 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 310 words, total size 2 kb.

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