Archive for April, 2005

Paul McCartney on Tour

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005

Paul McCartney
I must go to this. I’m going to try to buy as many tickets as I possibly can (8) and go to this thing.

Anyone else want to go? If I can’t get tickets to the LA or Anaheim showing, I’ll go to Vegas or San Jose. There have got to be a few Beatles fans amongst my friends. One of the Vegas shows is on my birthday. I’m down to go to multiple ones.

Staples Center

Update: Got tickets for Vegas on my birthday. Anyone who wants to come is welcome, you just probably won’t be sitting with us during the actual concert.

Requiem for a Camera

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

My trusty point and click Konica Minolta Dimage x20 has died. The screen did some funky stuff, and now it has problems turning on and the screen doesn’t show anything ever. A great number of pictures in the photo album were taken with this camera; it will be missed. I have replaced it with the Konica Minolta Dimage x50. I didn’t comparison shop like I did when I bought the first one. I just bought the newest version of my old camera because I was happy with it. The internally mounted lens is a must have for me on a point and shoot camera.

I have another digital camera with manual focus and the like, which because it’s huge and bulky, never manages to go anywhere with me. I would probably be happier if the x50 had some sort of option for adjusting the focus though.

Old Camera:

x20

New Camera:

x50

Requiem for a Phone

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

On Saturday night I went to go watch Sin City again. Bob and Kit wanted to go see it, so I drove to The Block on my scooter. When I got home I noticed I didn’t have my cell phone. I think I either left it in the theatre or dropped it on the way home. So my Sony Ericsson z200, which was purchased in the Philippines, accompanied me through Japan, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, was lost in the 2 miles from The Block to my apartment. So I got a new gsm card, which cost 25 bucks, from cingular to replace my old one. In Asia, you can buy a prepaid gsm card for like 3 bucks, so I’m pretty sure they’re making tons of money on this little service of theirs.

As a result, I’ve probably lost your phone number, so please email or IM me it. I’ve also had to switch phones to my backup phone, which is a crappy Sony Ericsson t237.

Old Phone:
z200

New Temp Phone:
t237

I’m in the market for a new one, so any suggestions will be appreciated.

Gnuyen.org Upgrades

Sunday, April 17th, 2005

In order to avoid doing more important work, I’ve been doing a lot of work on gnuyen.org. I decided to put my work integrating Gallery 2 into wordpress with a wordpress plugin because development on G2 is going by way too fast. I’ll have to wait for it to stablize. Changelog:

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Mix, Burn

Saturday, April 16th, 2005

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has released his new single “The Hand That Feeds” in GarageBand format so people can remix and play with the song in a format similar to that which he composed the song in. He did the “Rip” part for everyone, as he converted by hand from Pro Tools to Garageband. Now it’s up to us to Mix and Burn.

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RMS Right Again

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

Those of you familar with the Linux Bitkeeper saga know that RMS was very against the move to use bitkeeper to maintain the linux kernel because it forced software developers to use non free software when developing the linux kernel.

Linus Torvalds, who works at OSDL, justified it’s use by claiming it would result in more open source software, not less, and as such it would be a net gain for the open source community.

RMS pointed out this was exactly the difference between free software and open source software, and that Linus was a bad philosophical leader. A lot of other people had concerns with locking up the revision data inside a proprietary database with no way to get it out in case McVoy and the Bitkeeper gang changed the license around last minute or something. Lo and behold, McVoy killed the free version, and the people using Bitkeeper were kind of screwed.

The reason McVoy killed the free version was because Andrew Tridgell, who also works at OSDL, was reverse engineering the protocol so people have an open source client that could access data they had a right to that was locked into a proprietary database. Linus, amazingly, was against this.

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FCC v. Brand X

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

There have been two court cases recently heard by the supreme court that are very important to the future of the internet. I’ve been wanting to write an entry on them since oral arguments were made but never got around to it. The first was the FCC v. Brand X, the second the all famous MGM v. Grokster case. Due to my laziness the great Lawrence Lessig beat me to the punch in noting how relevant these cases are to the stewards of end to end internet. Now that the oral argument transcripts have been posted, I have no excuse not to comment. The law is however, a very interlinked and complicated thing, so bear with me.

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RIP Carroll Lynn Parkison

Wednesday, April 6th, 2005

Carroll Parkison
Toki’s breeder, Carroll Parkison passed away recently. Carroll was a great person that was full of spunk. For as long as I had known Carroll her health had always been an issue, but she survived so long I thought she would last forever on sheer willpower. The breed will be less without her, as she was a balancing force in the breeds dynamic. She will be surely missed.