MUSIC: On heavy rotation

I was very positively surprised by the last music DVD I bought, i.e. a live from INXS, the Australian band, shot in July 1991 (!) in the London’s Wembley Stadium. About 72’000 fans were present and were actively participating to this band’s landmark – in the documentary, you feel that this concert was a turning point for the band and a kind of peak in their career. I rarely saw so many people (about two third!) dancing, shouting and applauding during the whole concert. Impressive!

This live version of the tracks is really more “rough” than the studio ones. Some are also very funky. All in all, I was quite impressed by the musicians, and specially by the rhythmical part (drummer, bass player).

The DVD is remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1, with a good quality and volume distribution between the channels, which is definitely not the case with all the remastering. It also contains some very interesting documentaries about the concert, its preparation and the evolution of the pressure, stress and mood of the band.

NEWS: Winamp security vulnerability

[via Secunia]

Description:

A vulnerability has been reported in Winamp, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.

The problem is caused due to insufficient restrictions on Winamp skin zip files (.wsz). This can e.g. be exploited by a malicious website using a specially crafted Winamp skin to place and execute arbitrary programs. With Internet Explorer this can be done without user interaction.

An XML document in the Winamp skin zip file can reference a HTML document using the “browser” tag and get it to run in the “Local computer zone”. This can be exploited to run an executable program embedded in the Winamp skin file using the “object” tag and the “codebase” attribute.

NOTE: The vulnerability is reportedly being exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Winamp 5.04 using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Microsoft Windows XP SP1.

Solution:

Update to version 5.05.

NEWS: 200’000 people against Bush in NY

[Via the Financial Times]

Interesting :-) About 200’000 people (source: protesters, United for Peace and Justice coalition) are demonstrating in the 7th Avenue in NY against the Bush’s policies. The Republican National Convention opens on Monday, also in NY. It seems that Mr Bush wants to use the symbol of NY to establish his “leadership”. Some of the New-Yorkers don’t really agree with this usage. One of them said: “I’m furious that they have the nerve to come here, and use the emotion and pain of 9/11 for politics.”

TOOLS: Sauce Reader v1.7

New version 1.7 of Sauce Reader (review here and here). What are the new improvements and functionalities?

  • Integrated comment download, reading and posting using the Comment API.
  • Improved security for handling potentially unsafe HTML in feed items.
  • Support for common operations (e.g. delete item) from inside the browser window.
  • Feed reading with the browser window maximised (2-pane view).
  • NEWS: working session in Zurich :-)

    We had a very hard working session yesterday (actually half a day off, with some wakeboard on the lake, more pictures to come!) in Zurich. We began with one of our special “brainstorming”…in the McDo ;-) And yes we know “supersize me“. And no, we don’t really care ;-)



    left: philippe, middle: laurent, right: lorenz (i’m behind the camera, the “big tasty” belongs to me)

    Update: Laurent added his own view here :-)