After my last post I got a few emails from folks saying that they didn’t know what I was up to now-a-days. I’m currently working for IBM Research in Hawthorne, NY (just outside of NYC), in their IT Governance group. In other words, I’m doing similar things at IBM that I’ve been doing for my thesis research for the last few years. I’ll be in the NYC area until at least the end of August.
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Computer science and information technology is, by its very nature, a complicated field. I’m not talking about the math, or abstractions, or models, or classes or any of the other typical things you learn about before graduation from any decent school of computer science. It’s complicated because it is one of the few fields which has people in the field trying to actively subvert and destroy the work of many people in the field.
PennAve, the web gallery application that works in conjunction with F-Spot released version 0.4 today. This newest release brings a slew of new features including:
New user interface Better support for internationalization Improvements to splash intro page Use of the much improved CherryPy 3.0 Option for server side rendering of HTML Canvas tag support for intro pages A slew of little bug fixes I haven’t gotten my personal gallery running this newest version yet, but I hope to do so in the next few days.
Nearly two weeks ago I called Mike Doyle’s Office asking him to support HR 2060, a bill that would save music and netradio as we know it. At the time I was told that he was meeting with Representive Inslee soon and hadn’t yet made a decision on the bill. That was understandable given the fact that Inslee introduced the bill the day before I called.
It’s now been two weeks and there are 51 cosponsors of the bill, and growing.
Here’s something you may not know. When you’re listening to streaming music over the Internet, that site needs to pay a compulsory royalty of 7/100 of a cent per song streamed. While this may not seem like a lot, it’s already more than is required of satellite radio, and not really comparable to terrestrial radio because of the inability to accurately measure the people listening. Back in March, a decision was made that would increase this rate to 19/100 of a penny per song streamed, almost a 3x increase in the price.
One important aspect of keeping a computer healthy and happy is monitoring its vital stats. This is especially true of systems that are on 24/7 or that don’t have a traiditional mode of user interaction. In my case, my MythTV box fits both of these qualities. In particular, it’s important to make sure that the fans are running and none of the drives or processors in the machine are running abnormally hot, as this could indicate a malfunction within the machine and should be looked at.
When I first started what could be called a weblog, sometime back in 2000, it was mainly a little place for me to scribble my thoughts about what was going on in my life. You can see a snapshot from early 2002 at the Internet archive. Unfortunately, I couldn’t a copy on the archive from the origins of my weblog. At the time, there wasn’t any large scale concern about privacy on the internet or employers examining personal web pages before hiring people.
In the dark old days of the internet, I used to run a weblog using a few ad hoc PHP scripts. They broke a lot and generally weren’t well maintained. Somtime later I started to use Movable Type. After all, it was 2001, and that was all the rage back then. However, as a devotee of the “Dump Perl for the good of all humanity” movement, I wan’t too keen about running a set of Perl CGI scripts on my webserver.
I went through and decided to give my weblog a facelift. Originally I had intended it to be much more exhaustive, but I settled on something pretty simple for right now. I’d still like to add the ability to leave comments at some point in the near future. However, it always comes down to this issue of updating my Pyblosxom software, which is so incredibly branched from old school version 0.
As part of the preparation for PennAve 0.4, I’d like to give the application a little bit of branding magic. So, if anyone out there has some graphics talent and would like to give me a hand, I could use a logo for PennAve. My original thought was to take a photo of the street sign at the corner of Penn Ave and Main St here in Pittsburgh and then trace that to make a vector graphic for the logo.