Well, they’ve just all been stolen – during my sleep like a proper robbery – by the FBI, who effectively took them away when they decided to shut down MegaUpload. Although I did have a backup of my most important files, I didn’t have a backup of most of the files, which were rather there for storage or archiving. They claim they did that to fight copyright infringement, well at least copying isn’t stealing. But taking away the files is. The FBI robbed my files, should I call the police? … or maybe I should call al-Qaeda?

Anyway, for you visitors, it means that at the moment, all the files I link to on Megaupload are sadly unavailable. For a few of them, a FileSonic mirror is available. I’ll try to upload some of the others there, too. But I don’t really have the time to browse all the site looking for every missing file, so in case you need specific files, drop a comment and I’ll give them priority for the re-up, if I have a backup of them.

Update (2012-01-23)

Well, this seemed to have scared the hell out of other hosts. FileSonic, the alternate mirror where I put some of the files, also SILENTLY (as usual when they do a crappy move) disabled file-sharing (since they delete uploaded files after 30 days with no downloads I really wonder what kind of a business model they can have now…). Good thing I hadn’t moved more files to them…
Since it seems that most file hosts are (or will be) chickening out too (which I guess is understandable since they get treated worse than terrorists), I’m left with the only option to host the files on this very server. This means that there won’t be big files anymore (bye bye Pioneer One…), and also probably I won’t keep an archive of old versions apart from a few exceptions.

Update (2012-01-28)

Looks like legal action is indeed on its way, see Joint complaint of those affected by the closure of Megaupload service. Of course, Megaupload’s Terms of Service said something along the line “we reserve the right to delete your hosted files at any time”, but it didn’t reserve the right for a third party such as the FBI to do so.

As usual, I thought a bit about the best way to pack the pictures, decided that the moderate JPG gain wasn’t worth the quality loss over PNG, then squished the PNGs as much as I possibly could, using OptiPNG and PNGOUT.

The second picture, as can now be seen here, was about 472 KiB in size, substantially down from about a whole MiB (slightly less actually) as originally created with Paint or GIMP (not really sure which one I used this time). But when I grabbed it from PhotoBucket… it had inflated back to 920 KiB, a whopping 95% increase! I don’t mind PhotoBucket trying to recompress my uploaded pictures, but if they fail to improve the compression (particularly when they fail that much) maybe they should keep the original…

Well, otherwise iWeb is a fairly decent web host where I check out dedicated server prices every now and then, to compare with what I currently have. Never actually made the switch, though.

First, unfortunately, there is a pretty high requirement: you need to be somewhat involved in the development of Firefox itself. Well, you don’t definitely have to, but in both the proofs of concept I’ve seen (see below), the author met that requirement, it makes the first step much easier. Ok, the guide now:

• The first step is to get a useful feature removed from Firefox.
  Example number 1: Mike Beltzner [:beltzner] got Dave Townsend [:Mossop] remove the extensions.checkCompatibility setting (see bug 521905 – and the post about it on moronmoronical.com). Nice move. Screwed basically all nightly testers and more generically pretty much every beta enthusiasts.
  Example number 2: Dão Gottwald [:dao] removed the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting (see bug 574654). Now all your tabs must be at least 140 pixels wide. Thank you Captain ScrewUps.
• If you’ve been following properly, I bet you already guessed the second step: simply, create an extension that performs exactly the feature that you removed!
  Oh, I know what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute… this is too big, I’d never get away with this! This post is a joke, this can’t work.” Well, trust me it can (although this post is indeed a joke). But I guess bringing on proofs can do no harm, there you go:
  Example 1: Dave Townsend aka Mossop published the Nightly Tester Tools, the primary feature of which used to be to remove compatibility checking (NB: as of today it seems that that feature got move into the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension).
  Example 2: Dao Gottwald aka dao published the Custom Tab Width, the only feature of which is to add back an easy way to configure minimum and maximum tab width.

So, have you been able to apply this guide? Congratulations, you’ve published a successful Firefox add-on! Maybe you also pushed a few hundreds of thousands of users a bit more towards Chrome (I wish I could say Opera), but who cares anyway?
As a token of appreciation for your brilliant work at making Firefox a better worse browser, I’ll reveal to you the third and last bonus step to this guide:

• Abandon your add-on. Example 1: Dave Townsend aka Mossop abandoned the Nightly Tester Tools.

Muhahaha. All Ur about:config R belong to Us

I found out that logging whatever happens is a great way to spend time when traveling, so here’s more:

around 8 am: the ticket guy just checked my ticket and then spent like 5 minutes checking my 2 neighbors who didn’t pay a cent because they had some paper explaining why they shouldn’t pay (I wish I knew what was written on those – from what I saw they seem highly forgeable ). And judging from their clothes they’re definitely not poor. FFS… I’m sick of all those free-riders, even I as a student pay full fare…

9:13:25 am: we arrived almost on time (I’m considering the time at which the train unlocks the door, ie it’s not necessarily halted yet, and the door needs additional time to actually open). Only 25 seconds late, but still, late.

12:40 pm: TGV 8936 coming from Nantes arrives at Angers 6 minutes late, yet shows up as on time on the arrival board.

12:48:30 pm: my TER 857344 departs on time. First success of the day for the SNCF.

around 1:33 pm: my TER arrives at Le Mans on time, I think. Didn’t really check this one, oops.

2:11 pm: as my TGV 8830 should be arriving from Nantes, we’re announced that it will be 5 minutes late because of “a traffic incident”…

around 2:25 pm: my TGV leaves Le Mans

3:23:40 pm: my TGV arrives in Paris. 10 min 40 late. I didn’t check what was announced on the arrival board.

Note that I’m not complaining about the massiveness of the delays. Of course a delay as small as a couple of minutes isn’t really a big deal (not exactly worth writing about either, but I had some time to kill in the train ). 10 minutes is getting a bit annoying, though (note that we’re talking about short trips of 45 minutes to 1h30). My problem with this is that they announce a schedule that they seemingly don’t even try respect, as they rather seem to aim for “less than 5 minutes late”. Why don’t they just schedule arrivals a few minutes later? This way they’d be on time much more often, and early quite often too… and they wouldn’t need to depart early to earn a few extra seconds… Bah…

So, well, all this spam wasn’t in vain, after all… So thank you dear spammer for feeding me with all those blacklistable IPs. I hope you’ll be kind enough to help me climb even higher in the ranking!