So this entry has nothing to do with me really. I just thought that I’d share a link to a slashdot article about a hard drive my brother Peter worked on for Seagate. Here is a little picture to see this nice little 2.5 inch SCSI drive.
Pete worked on the LSI chip
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I’m thinking it’s almost time to end my love affair with Red Hat products. I’ve more or less used RedHat as my exclusive version of Linux for the last seven years. I had a brief (as in three week) foray with Mandrake and about a six month detention with Debian as my main operating systems before. I dumped Mandrake because, well it sucks. Any real Linux user will tell you that Mandrake is only one step above Linspire.
I’ve been looking for a simple command line tool that allows some manipulation of XML files. Basically, what I need is a little program that allows me to print out some nodes, delete others, replace some more, and in general, have a good old time mangling XML files. The main reason is because one of the tools we use in our labs requires the use of a XML configuration file. If I want to run in a batch mode, I need a tool that lets me vary parameters easily and rerun the program with the changed parameters.
CNN is running an interesting article about how Disney is getting sued for copyright violation. At stake is the royalties to the Peter Pan prequel “Peter and the Starcatchers”. The basic premise of the lawsuit is this, Great Ormond Street Hospital in England was given the copyright, and thus the royalties, to Peter Pan in 1929 by the author J.M. Barrie. Barrie then died in 1937, meaning that under US law his work is protected until 2023.
If I needed more reason to switch and finish coding PriBlog, I found out today that the reason why some people can’t see the images that I post is because I styleize them with XSLT. This causes an issue becuase the entries are not styleized before encoding them in the RSS feed. The result is that the RSS feed which is supposed to contain HTML, contains raw XML. This is probably a mistake on my part, but it’s frickin annoying none the less.
Kristina and I were awoken at 4am on Wednesday morning to quite a ruckus outside of our humble abode. At first we thought that our neighbors were drunk and making noise again, after all, they seem to enjoy doing that around 3am in the morning, so why not 4am? Then we heard sirens, and Kristina realized that the ruckus was on both sides of our house. Peeking outside, we saw lots of fire trucks and smoke.
While I’m talking about cool and interesting applications, I shouldn’t forget to mention Tomboy, a nifty little note taking application that automagically links your notes together as you go. Very cool. Support is in the works for allowing you to annotate your desktop objects using Tomboy. I can definately see this as something that will make its way into the GNOME desktop very fast. Also, you can search your notes using Beagle.
I discovered Fellowship 9/11 today. It’s humorous, especially if you tend to think that Michael Moore may be full of poo. Also, whats really cool that mplayerplug-in lets it play just fine in Linux. Yay for video and stuff. Also, and upgraded version of a Real Player for Linux seems to handle it fine. I suggest going for the QuickTime stream as Mplayerplug-in lets you save it for later. Like bubble gum on the bedpost overnight.
Today’s neato hack is Gnome VFS Mount. This little guy lets you mount Gnome VFS directories (such as ssh://username@host/home/username) via the Gnome VFS right into the Linux tree. Quite a neat hack indeed. It’s also cool because it uses Gnome Keyring to avoid asking for a password multiple times.
While this probably has little direct practical use (it still needs lots of work on caching and what not first), it provides an interesting proof of concept of what can be possible when everything is a file and you open up the interfaces to all people.
I’ve decided to start working on Priblog again. Basically I’m getting sick of how utterly slow Pyblosxom becomes under load. I still like Pyblosxom more than I like solutions such as MovableType or WordPress. But it’s not optimal when you’re running your server on a 200MHz K6.
So with Priblog what I’m doing is a compromise. It still is all based on text files sitting on the hard disk, but each file is an XML file.