Democracy Player is to become Miro

From Paul Kim:  The people at what is currently Democracy Player are asking that the blogosphere spread the word — Democracy Player is being re-branded as Miro.

If you haven’t tried out Democracy Player, it’s pretty cool.  It’s a medium for distributing original, user-generated video content over the Internet and it works pretty well.  Added bonus?  Democracy Player is based on XULRunner.

Call to Action: Save Net Radio! Support the Internet Radio Equality Act!

I’m not sure about everyone else, but I rely on Internet Radio to get through my day. I find it helpful to listen to some ambient music in the background as I work. It sets the pace for me.

Well, Internet Radio is under attack right now. The aggressor is a form of ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board that seeks to squeeze blood out of stone. They want our Internet radio stations to pay through the nose for broadcasting rights.

The defense against this aggressor comes in the form of the Internet Radio Equality Act, which seeks to restore the percentage-of-income royalty model, where broadcasters will only be required to pay a fair percentage of their income, rather than some arbitrary figure decided by the CRB.

Today is the day of action where we call our senators and representative now to ask them to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act (S. 1353 in the senate and H.R. 2060 in the house).

The “Save Net Radio” site has talking points and contact information for the senators and reps for your zip code. Go there now give your political representatives a call and ask them to represent your view.

Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). If the increased rates stick, net radio as we know it dies. Call now!

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Helpful Hints – Running multiple instances of Firefox

Ever wanted to run more than one instance of Firefox? At the same time? It’s quite simple, really!

The advantages of doing this are apparent to those who might be in a multi-user environment using only one account on the PC. Also for web developers who may have a separate Firefox profile for development, and another one for regular browsing, this is a useful ability.

The way to do it is to set up a Firefox shortcut with the link target being:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p -no-remote
You would, of course, want to modify the path to the Firefox executable depending on where you’ve installed it.

In Ubuntu, your application launcher should reference the following:

/usr/bin/firefox -p -no-remote

The keen observer will note that we’re actually providing two different command-line switches to Firefox. The “-no-remote” tells Firefox to launch in a new process, and the “-p” switch tells Firefox to bring up the Profile Manager. Without the profile manager switch, Firefox will simply try to load your default or last used profile, provided you haven’t setup Firefox to bring up the Profile Manager every time you start it.