Disney is trying something new. During May and June they'll be offering some shows on their website, including Lost and Desperate Housewives. I can guarantee I won't watch the latter, but I might try out Lost. Well, actually I've kinda lost interest, but my wife really loves the show and once in a while misses it. A TiVo (or MythTV preferably) would be much better, of course.

Here's what they have to overcome. Right now you can download HDTV versions on P2P networks, with no commercials. They're not instant, but with enough seeders they're not too slow. These versions apparently are only 700x394 which is a widescreen version of standard TV quality. The tradeoff there is that the bandwidth is low enough to deliver in real time.

But speaking of that, they have to deliver the video without any jitter, and I mean none. One of those infamous "buffering..." messages that RealPlayer was known for, will be killer.

It has to Just Work(tm). They're using a Flash media player, so that should work pretty well I think. I'm sure they'll wrap it in all sorts of DRM, which will almost certainly lead to problems (and DRM is just plain wrong anyway).

They're not going to eliminate the P2P TV show swapping, but I hope they realize that's not supposed to be the goal. It's nice to see that they're finally waking up to the fact that people want media on their terms, not on the networks. Hopefully this leads to the next step which will actually be worth using.

On TWiT they mentioned that Revision 3 has posted a new cooking show, Ctrl + Alt + Chicken. I'm new to the whole Revision 3 thing, but I really like this show. I intend to watch further episodes.

This first espisode was chicken cordon bleu. The show was clever and very well done. The food, unfortunately, wasn't. They fried the chicken in oil that was way too hot so it was burned on the outside and raw in the middle. Sounds yummy, no?

Luckily the hosts were funny, had a witty rapport, and seemed to know how to host a show even if they couldn't cook. The production was excellent with high quality equipment, script writing, and editing. It was done with a geeky flair but would be fine for your average cooking enthusiast. They could really stand to watch the language a little, although now that I think about it the average prime time drama uses more foul language. Still, I found it only detracted from the show.

One of my favorite cooking sites, Cooking for Engineers, posted a recipe for deep dish pizza. I love a good Pizza Hut pan pizza, even despite having worked there and seen what goes on behind the scenes. This recipe wasn't exactly a copy, which is fine because it was delicious.

Since I didn't vary much from the original recipe I won't reguritate it here, instead I'll just write up my comments. My dough sure turned out dry. I ended up adding another couple tablespoons of water because the dough wouldn't hold together. I wonder if that was an altitude thing.

Just some minor bug fixes. No changes to code, just docs and install files. If you're running 0.4.1, there's no reason to upgrade.

• change default settings of debug and detach
• overhaul INSTALL (thx Erin)
• check for NetAddr::IP at install (thx Erin)
• fill in README

SSH Lockout 0.4.2

The long awaited update to SSH Lockout is finally here for the downloading. Hey, I beat the one year mark by a week! From the changelog:

• only blacklist on $tries == $max_tries, to combat log latency
• new log filter
• improved logging
• more examples in the sample config
• Gentoo init script (thx Nicholas Leippe)
• Makefile updates

SSH Lockout 0.4.1