Recently I’ve been trying to keep my blog out of the political realm. I’m perfectly aware that there are much better pundits and analysts with much better connections that a lowly Ph.D. candidate. Also, I sort of agree with Jon Stewart, partisan bickering is just bad for America.
Occassionally though, a gem comes across that is too good to miss. Might I introduce you to Operation Clean Sweep. It has but a single goal, defeat EVERY elected legislator in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
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I spent last week in sunny Genoa, Italy attending the First International Conference on Open Source Systems. Overall it was a great trip, and I’ll describe it in a few blog entries here. This should keep my readers from lamenting about my lack of content as of late.
I should have realized that something was amiss when Kristina and I walked out of Robinson Town Center on the way to the airport and saw a couple of F-16 fighters flying around the area.
Yeah, so knowing my luck no one will get a chance to read this. I’m going out of town for a week or so. With any luck I won’t have internet access while I’m gone. This means that scissors will be on autopilot. This also means that it will probably crash 10 minutes after I leave for the airport.
If you’re interested in where I’m going, I’m presenting some of my research at OSS 2005 in Genoa, Italy.
It appears that Google is well on it’s path to complete world domination. Earlier this year they released the excellent Google Maps. About a week ago they came out with Google Earth. And today I see that they’ve finally come up with a suitable home page in Google Personalizable Home Page. They don’t have a ton of options right now, but it suits the geek market pretty nicely. I can’t wait until they allow you to have the system automatically snarf random RSS feeds.
So we thought that we had won the battle against the Broadcast Flag. The court decision said that FCC had overstepped their bounds. Unfortunately this left the possibility for congressional action on the issue. We had at first thought that it was going to be a new bill, but now we see the same crap that happened with Real ID, namely it has a good chance of being tacked onto an appropriations bill.
Well, it looks like Senator Santorum (aka Senator Man-On-Dog in the street) sold out to AccuWeather with senate bill 786. The basic gist is this: AccuWeather provides the same data that National Weather Service does, but for a fee, so the NWS shouldn’t be able to provide the data. Idiot. Here’s my letter to Specter on the issue. As usual, it’s not even worth my time to email the same letter to Santorum.
In the mail yesterday I received a claim form to take part in the class action settlement against Apple regarding their iPod batteries. Basically, Apple claimed their batteries lasted longer than they did, and many people were angry about this. Especially when they saw that Apple charged an arm and a leg to replace the battery. More information about the whole mess can be found on the settlement home page.
Slides for my WPLUG talk tomorrow on MythTV are now online. Feel free to peruse before the meeting if you’re reading this over on WPLUG planet. Hope to see everyone there tomorrow.
This is just a little post to pimp my own talk at WPLUG this weekend. On Saturday I’ll be giving a talk about MythTV and the alphabet soup of standards and regulations that accompany it, including NSTC, ATSC, MPEG, and more! I’ll also talk a little bit about the broadcast flag and why we still need to be on the look out for future similar legislation. For those that are interested in seeing a live system, I’ll have it running on both my laptop and my desktop while there.
Earthlink has released some very cool WRT54G custom firmware that natively supports IPv6 tunneling. This makes it trivially easy for anyone to set up IPv6 tunnels to their home. The fact that big time players are hacking away on this little box is incredibly cool.
I’ve had IPv6 setup in the past, routing it through my OpenBSD server when I used that as my router. However, then I was using Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker service, which unfortunately was not encrypted.