Peng’s links for Saturday, 9 August

• Asa Dotzler: shortcut to launch a specific firefox profile on mac. One thing that Windows users, and even Linux users, can do in Firefox is to create a shortcut to launch Firefox with a specific user profile. I do this myself since I’ve created several profiles during beta testing that I haven’t killed off yet. But Mac users? They don’t have shortcuts. They do have aliases, though, and Asa shows you how to create an alias on OSX that launches Firefox with a specific user profile. Of course he also lets Windows and Linux users know how to do this particular Firefox trick in case you haven’t found it yet.
• Launchpad News: Survey about Launchpad’s upstream bug workflow. I know many of you won’t give a flip about how Launchpad handles bugs, but many Ubuntu users do, and should know that you can link Launchpad bugs to other bugs, even if they’re not hosted on Launchpad. So that bug you find in Evolution (the bug is hosted on Bugzilla) can be linked to a bug on Launchpad so folks working on things upstream can quickly and easily see work done by the Ubuntu community. This is also good for users who also experience the bug so they can know that the bug is definitely being worked on.
• Matthew Helmke: An interview with Alan Pope. Matthew preents another Ubuntu Community Interview, this time with Alan Pope, the person behind the Ubuntu Screencasts project. Find out why he doesn’t like forums and his one bit of advise to Ubuntu users. I swear that one belongs to a t-shirt. I hope Alan will grant permission to make the tee (when I get around to it).

I’m going to call that a full lid from me. Have a great weekend, y’all. I’ll probably see you on Monday. I definitely have a few things I need to check out to see if they’re things I want to post about.

Why I won’t be following the Olympics on NBC this year

Last night NBC showed their coverage of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics. Unfortunately my roomies hate sports and see not reason to watch even the spectacle of the opening and closing ceremonies, so we were watching “Be Cool” on AMC instead of the Olympics. I had seen NBC was setting a new standard with coverage reaching not only across the full range of NBC Universal stations (except for SciFi, thankfully) but also including streaming coverage and highlights on their website. So I figured this morning I’d go to the site and see what kind of streaming video they have of the opening ceremonies. That’s when I saw this screen:

The translation? “Oh, you use Linux? We won’t show you any of our video content because we can’t use our DRM wrappers for your operating system. Sucks to be you.”

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that NBC has paid a hell of a lot of money to get the rights to broadcast the Olympics here in the States, and they want to make sure people don’t use Linux (and it’s DRM-free “world”) to snag the videos and post them to file sharing networks and torrent sites to let people all over the world see their coverage. Although if their talking heads run off at the mouth as much as they usually do people would much rather use video content from a source that lets the imagery and action speak for itself.

I understand they have to protect their investment, but to completely lock out all users of an open source operating system? Give me a break. I’d send NBC a thank you email for locking me out, but I don’t see any feedback link and I’m sure as hell not registering with that site just to be able to let them know how disappointed I am that they’re treating all Linux users as if we’re content thieves who can’t wait to capture their video stream so they can post it to LimeWire.

So I’ve decided I’ll just get my Olympics coverage from other sources, even if it means I don’t get a chance to see video coverage. Including never seeing exactly what the cauldron looked like after reading about it from online news sources yesterday. Luckily I’d stopped getting my local news from the local NBC affil (and their love for flash over substance) and went back to getting my news from our local Eye web station.

I’m really regretting that I like so many NBC shows that care coming back this fall.I’d really like to be able to reward them for shutting us Linux users our during the Olympics by returning the favor when the new season starts. Granted one person won’t make any difference in the ratings, but I’d also be one less person viewing their ads and buying the products presented during the commercial breaks.

Just please don’t get me started on the heavy handed product placement during this season’s Eureka. I hate it so much that I’m finding a new deodorant to use when my current supply runs out since the brand I use is a sister brand to a major sponsor of this year’s Eureka.