BMG has been putting the full spin about the new release from Velvet Revolver, the band consisting of non-Axl Guns N’ Roses and Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots. They claim that the large sales of the album, incidentally protected with shift-key-bypassable-SunnComm, means that people are accepting the DRM. But that’s probably not the case, most people don’t realize that the album has this copy protection on it. Furthermore, the copy protection is supposed to prevent users from ripping the albums to MP3, but that only works on Windows PCs, a Mac or Linux can still rip the CD, eliminating the whole problem.
Posts
About two years ago, I wrote a [simple 2d drawing program][http://patrick.wagstrom.net/projects/academic/cs411/prog1/] for an undergraduate computer graphics class. I got bored today and somehow decided that I need to play around with Python, pygame, and OpenGL some more, so I decided to redo it. It ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would be, and the most difficult part was remembering what all the commands to the input file meant.
Apparently I won’t have to take my time to write my own version of an Apache XSLT handler. Behold mod-xslt2. It seems like it does everything I want it to do. Including using the <xsl-stylesheet …> header for fetching XSLT sheets. Could be a nice combination with PennAve, of course, it’s not difficult to put the translation in PennAve either.
So, maybe the spirit of OSS2005 got to me or something. In any case, I finally finished putting MythTorrent up on SourceForge where it will rot like many of my other projects. Here’s hoping that someone will find it interesting.
I got ambitious yesterday and decided to upgrade the firmware on my WRT54G wireless router. While there are a lot of choices, including EWRT, OpenWRT, I decided to use the semi-open Sveasoft firmware. We’ll it is open, at least the release that I used, which is the slightly older Samadhi release. So, after first using the Ping.asp exploit to turn boot_wait on, I then uploaded the firmware. It seemd as though everything went okay, the router continued to function and give out IP addresses.
I’ve got a bit of a live demo of the gallery software running at http://patrick.wagstrom.net/gallery/. Right now it mainly goes to show one thing, my web server is VERY VERY slow. If you hit a page that hasn’t been hit before, it will be very slow as there is the need to have the script resize the image. Considering this server is the computer that I had when I first went to college back in 1997, that can take a while for large photos, like the digital camera shots.
Today I went and registered the gallery software over at source forge, and with that I also named the software, it’s going to be called PennAve, which is a street by my house. I figure that is better than pyDynaPhotoXMLGallery or whatever other stupid name most people give to projects. I’m working on getting it installed on this server and will post a link to the demo when it’s ready.
I’m in the process of cleaning up my gallery software for an initial release and posting to SourceForge. Mainly this consists of moving stuff into different files, and putting credits on the files. However, this has introduced the need to watch how I was implementing some things as the original proof of concept was nothing more than one 500 line python script. This meant that everything was in the same namespace, which shouldn’t be.
Recently there has been a bit of a furor over the forthcoming book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) that touts how Linus did not really write the kernel. I haven’t have a chance to read the book yet, but would like to. The gist that I’ve seen, from sources like Andrew Tennenbaum (author of Minix) and GrokLaw is that it’s pretty poorly written trash. I agree with Martin Pool when he says that if Microsoft paid for this report they didn’t get much for their money.
This is just a quick update on my gallery software. It’s coming along quite nicely, to be honest, I think that it’s going better than I expected. Who knows, I might actually finish this. Or not. Anyway, the system now spits out an XML file that is translated through an XSLT script. The XML file is really just an RDF file that contains all of the fun information about the creator, rights, etc.