Posts

I’m organizing a mass purchase of pcHDTV 3000 HDTV tuner cards for folks in WPLUG. The more we buy, the cheaper they go. I’m hoping to get an order for 10 or so. That way we get about $25 off per card! Wowza! Take a look at the current sale status. If you’re interested in a few cards and are not a WPLUG member, email me and I’ll see what I can do for you.

Sat, Mar 26, 2005

I’ve been adding tags to all of my weblog entries recently. I think it’s a kinda cool thing to do. However, if you’ve been reading my weblog, or even just the RSS version of it, you’ll notice that the tags have been bouncing all around. Well, let me explain the reason for this. Technorati has set up a system to tag weblog entries. In this way, when I write an entry on “linux”, people can go visit the linux tag on Technorati and see other associated folks who also wrote about Linux.

Thu, Mar 24, 2005

This is just a quick note to say “hi” to anyone who reads my blog on Planet WPLUG. I can feel all cool because I’m syndicated now. Of course, now I probably won’t have a chance to post anything for another few weeks.

Thu, Mar 24, 2005

Codi Brocious has posted a project statement for PyMusique describing in clear terms what it does and why they do it. Of key to note is that PyMusique does NOT give you free access to iTunes. You still need to have an account and pay for the songs or redeem them with bottle caps from Pepsi. However, what they don’t do is apply the DRM because its an open source project and thus would be trivial for people to remove this capability.
The Uber cool Seth Nickell, previously of storage fame has released some AMAZING videos of what’s coming up in the desktop for Linux. To sum it up in a nutshell, Owen Taylor, of GTK fame, has written a cracktastic GL compositing X server where everything is rendered as a GL texture, ala Mac OS X. This allows us to do all sorts of cool stuff with the desktop, just like Mac OS X does.
MindBending Software produces nifty products that inserts subliminal messages into games. This is accomplished by intercepting GL calls and layering new graphics on top of it. They also can perform some trippy transformations to get your zen on. Unfortunately, it’s really expensive, most modules will run you between $700 and $1100. Ouch. In particular, take a look at some of the videos they have online. I dunno if putting images of Jesus in a kids game of Grand Theft Auto is really going to help them.
I’ve added preliminary support for Technorati tags to my weblog. The beauty of everything being all XML-ified on this weblog is that it means this took basically 0 programatic support requirements. A few small changes were made to my XSLT so the tags show up on both the blog entries and on my rss feed. One of the planned features for TimeSuck is to give everything tags so it’s all sucked together in one big happy family.

Tue, Mar 15, 2005

This is sort of a test entry and sort of an entry to explain what I’ve been doing. It’s a test entry because I’m not sure if the problem with spaces on BlogLines has been cleared up or not. I hope it has. If it hasn’t then I know a ghetto way to fix it, but it involved encoding hard non-breaking spaces around hyperlinks, which is not quite ideal. Anyway, I think I’ve got everything going well enough that most of my weird markup should handle properly.

Mon, Mar 14, 2005

Ah yes, the joys of an open platform bringing innovation back to the web. It’s really a wonder to see all the cool extensions hackers are creating for FireFox. A few weeks ago I installed Google Preview, which provides very cool tumbnails of webpages on Google. Today, I found out about GreaseMonkey which lets you add custom scripts for different webpages. For example, Fidelity still has some b0rkage in their login on Firefox in Linux (it doesn’t recognize X11 as a platform so things don’t quite work right, like research of stocks and funds).

Sat, Mar 12, 2005

I just noticed another interesting Bloglines problem. Apparently BlogLines doesn’t properly handly article updating as it should. This means that if it fetches my mythTorrent feed while a show is recording then it will include the show twice, adding it again after the show is completed. Mainly this is because the entries for filesize will vary. The solution to this is to have entries not show up until after they are finished recording.