I wanted to inform you that I have put up a new review for Linkman.  I don't want to take away anything from KenR's excellent review which introduced me to the program, but I like to write reviews for software that I use a lot.

Also, as mentioned at the end of the article, stay tuned for a Linkman giveaway here soon.

Of course, Linkman is now officially part of my recommended software list:
http://aram.dcmember...erior-software-list/

Lifehacker has a longish article up today that discusses how to grab and convert flash videos..

Whether you want to save and watch a Flash video offline, convert a Flash music video for your MP3 player, or do something else entirely, learning how to rip and convert Flash videos is a useful skill. Here's how it works.

When it comes to ripping Flash videos, there's more than one way to accomplish the task, and in many cases it depends greatly on where you're grabbing the video. We'll cover a number of different options for downloading Flash videos, as well as several ways you can convert them into more useful formats. Once you've seen the options, you can choose the one that works best for you and your situation.

http://lifehacker.co...verting-flash-videos

This is video and transcript of a talk by Andrew Tridgell on how to defend yourself against Patent Infringement claims.

I'm one of those people who believes software patents are a horrible idea, and that the patent system in general is a travesty.  If you are serious about selling your own software, you owe it to yourself to investigate this issue a little bit.  If you start to make real money, *someone* will try to sue you for patent infringement, if only to try to pressure you into buying them off.

Andrew Tridgell: Okay. So, I’m going to be talking today about patent defence for free software developers, and, as it says on the slide there, I am not a lawyer, but, the point of this talk is not to have a talk by a lawyer. The point is to learn about how an engineer interacts with patent attorneys, to teach you the basics of language and the day-to-day you do when you try to communicate with patent attorneys in building patent defence. So that’s the first part of this talk. The first part is a bit like a tutorial how an engineer interacts with patent attorneys to do analysis of patents.

The second part of it is a discussion on how the free software community can lower its exposure to patent attacks. This is something I’m quite passionate about, I am concerned that patent attacks on the free software community are going to become more common in the future, and I believe there are things that we can do as a community, as developers within the community, to lower our exposure to those attacks. That’s the aim of the second part of the talk..

http://news.swpat.or...pt-tridgell-patents/

Background

I find that Control+A doesn't necessarily select all text in various contexts and typically notice this after typing Control+A.

Not finding anything that seemed to help, I put together a little utility tentatively named "SelectAll" in an attempt to improve the situation a bit.  I have been using it for a bit now and have found that it has turned out to be useful in my particular situation so after some discussion with mouser, decided to post it.  (Please let me know if you know of something similar or better.)

Welcome to this weeks edition of 'Stephen's Tech News' - By now, you all know that this is a selection of my favorite news stories from across the globe, and are placed in no particular order.  Anyway, I hope you are all as interested in them as I am!
-Stephen

Table of Contents:

• Message from the grave, straight to your cell phone
• Microsoft, 'open' data, and the curse of open source - Thanks a lot, HTML5
• Google to flee China on April 10, says report - Announcement on Monday. Apparently
• Computer glitch prompts 50 raids on elderly couple's home - 51st time's the charm
• Living in a Constant State of Red-Alert Security
• Bill Curbs President's Power to Flip Internet Off-Switch
• Google Hatches Plot to Break Into TV
• Inside the world's first 3D satellite broadcaster
• 6 handy tools to tune up your PC
• New research finds Macs in the enterprise easier, cheaper to manage than Windows PCs

For you paranoid delusional peasants out there who think the big rich websites play by different rules that the little people, here's some more fodder for your anger.

Recent documents from a lawsuit between YouTube and Viacom show how the companies vying to become the dominant video uploading websites (a battle which YouTube seemed to have won), knew quite well that to win the race to become the dominant video website would require focusing on illegally hosting copyrighted material.

So they weren't just content to simply turn a blind eye when people uploaded such copyrighted videos -- they were in a race to win the market, so naturally they did what any one would do, the founders of the site were busily uploading the illegal copyrighted videos themselves, in an attempt to boost the traffic on the site, and therefore win the popularity competition and make the big money.

Welcome to the web 2.0, where if you want to get bought out by google and make the big money, sometimes you have to do what it takes to inflate your traffic.  The law is for people in 2nd place.

"Chen twice wrote that 80 percent of user traffic depended on pirated videos. He opposed removing infringing videos on the ground that 'if you remove the potential copyright infringements... site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20 percent of what it is.' Karim proposed they 'just remove the obviously copyright infringing stuff.' But Chen again insisted that even if they removed only such obviously infringing clips, site traffic would drop at least 80 percent. ('if [we] remove all that content[,] we go from 100,000 views a day down to about 20,000 views or maybe even lower')."

http://arstechnica.c...e-viacom-filings.ars