Posts for February 2006

Just a quickie...

I'll post more on this later, but I just wanted to jump on the bandwagon ASAP:

Boycott SmartFilter!

Thanks to mneptok for the image as well as the post to boing boing!

February 27, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Yo Mark!

Here's the link to Lee's blog: Rantings of a Nerd. The comcast DVR-related link is here. (Might as well move some of my mighty traffic *LOL* Lee's way!)

February 24, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Thoughts on the port flap

I'll be honest; I have an initial gut feeling on the DP World situation, but I haven't finished working through my reading on it and gnashing things out. As food for thought, though, this KRT wire article (damn thing; it'll probably linkrot in 10 days or so) hits a lot of interesting points for me. Among them:

Kirk [R-Ill], among others, believes the president made a decision based on bad advice, counsel that apparently did not include congressional Republicans. "The kind of scrutiny that happens in a closed-door meeting with 10 or 15 staffers in the executive branch is very different from the kind of scrutiny that you will get in a House or Senate committee, backed by an energized press," Kirk said. (emphasis added)

Regardless of your feelings for this president (and I've made no secret of mine; to say I'm no fan of his is putting it mildly), this situation is pointing out some of the dangers of such an insular executive branch. I find the whole situation intensely fascinating.

February 22, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Content DOES sell hardware; just ask Apple

ars technica: DRM and the tech industry's "girlie men" -- My point is that, for even just half the price of a single 65nm fab, the tech industry could buy a few small studios and just start throwing tons of free content at the world...why couldn't investments in free movies and music pay off in home entertainment, networking, and storage hardware sales?

The post's jumping-off point is a hilarious rant against the Small Picture the tech industry has painted for themselves. David Birch makes a great point, and Hannibal goes on, in classic back-of-the-envelope fashion, to nail it home.

And one could even debate the meaning of free here. Free as in beer as well as free from DRM would certainly be awesome, and presumably would sell the maximal amount of hardware (at least in some hypothetical scenarios), but a case could be made for selling DRM-less, CC-licensed material that you (the hardware manufacturer and media mogul) encourage/allow/expect widespread redistribution of. It's a double dip; you get paid (something) for the initial sale of the media, and you make more money, razorblades-style, on the storage, transmission, and player hardware required to support the entertainment infrastructure you're building out!

There's no question that content sells hardware; Apple settled that. Yes, they use DRM, but that's at least partially because that they had no choice, seeing as they don't own the vast majority of the content they transfer. A hardware manufacturer that controlled their own studios could make different choices, and simultaneously leverage the vast podosphere and videoblog landscape.

Sure...it might not work; but bankrolling RocketBoom, Atom Films, and The Podcast Network for a couple of years as an experiment would practically be a rounding error on Intel's books.

February 22, 2006 permalink | Comments (1)

Unplugged, yet plugged in, in 2030

WorldChanging: The Unplugged - A Speculative Fiction -- Touting their movement as a combination of the economic theories of Mahatma Gandhi and the political science of Buckminster Fuller the Unplugged have now reduced the GDP of the United States of America by 20% over their 15 year programme. Opponents of the movement call Unplugging an unscientific and cult-like political movement, but proponents say that "Unplugging" was the best decision they ever made. ...

Certainly speculative, but rich with interesting possibilities. The scenario is worth exploring; some of this stuff "sticks to the wall" when you throw it up there. As I've mentioned before, WorldChanging is well worth taking a look if you are interested in trying to build a better future.

February 22, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Stick with transparency...

It will serve you well, even if it is at times painful: US 'reclassifying' public files (BBC) -- The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 pages began in 1999, the [NYT] said. At that time, the CIA and five other agencies reportedly objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information. The Transparent Society has gone back into my reading queue; it's overdue.

Link from reddit

February 22, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Netflix UI rocks!

I love Netflix. And beyond the service itself, one of the things I've noticed lately is that I even love the UI of the Netflix site. A lot of the little tweaks they've done in the past few months have just rocked. For example, they went through the following progression:

It's this sort of seemingly little stuff (also including RSS feeds of your queue, popup hover previews, etc., etc.) that has really impressed me. And that's not even counting the massive Long Tail of cool movies. Netflix rocks.

February 17, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Why am I not surprised?

WSJ (well, until the link rots, anyway): Senate Rejects Wiretapping Probe. *sigh* May we reap what we sow. And we will.

And just to clarify, I'm not trying to suggest anything ominous and terrorism-related with that comment at all. Far from it. What I mean is that, probably sooner than later, this whole it's ok, it's for the War on Terror, don't worry about the whole civil liberties THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WHAT WE'RE DEFENDING ANYWAY thing will become not such A Good Idea as it seems now.

Some administration (maybe not this one; maybe not even this party; both of the major ones have lost their minds for the most part; just to varying degrees) will do something so obviously across the line that people will stand up and take notice. I only hope that it is indeed sooner than later. Otherwise, we're gonna burn the village to the ground in order to save it. And I'll have to think about getting my head frozen again, because I can't handle 20 years of this in order to make it to the Singularity!

February 17, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

First Opensecrets dig

Damn. I actually planned a couple of weeks ago to bring some info from the Opensecrets up periodically and randomly. I thought it would be interesting to just stick your hands into the zipcode list, rustle around, grab one, and pick either the House member or a Senator related to that zip code.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I turned on C-SPAN2 today, and watched Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) discussing the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act. And I changed my mind. Here's his info, and I will be reviewing it. Career Profile (since 1989) -- Jeff Sessions. *sigh*

Go, Senator Byrd. And no, I'm still not a Democrat (go Blue Guy!); here's Bryd's OpenSecrets info, knock yourself out: Career Profile (since 1989) -- Robert C. Byrd. But I've sat around and taken it as long as I can...way longer, in fact. I am tired of it.

I have plans to add topic tags to posts in the near future, which will allow those who want to filter to do so; feel free. See, I'm a nice guy! *grin*

February 15, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

It's our government...so let's keep our eyeballs on it

I was reading a really good article tonight on government data and the Semantic Web, and realized that this pointed me to yet another treasure trove of data from our government. I believe it's important to be an educated citizen and voter, and one of the great things about the internet is it's ability to provide us with the information we need in that regard.

Here are some sites I'm fond of:

A good reminder list for me (I can always track down stuff I put in my blog!) and a good starter list if you're looking to keep your eye on what's really going on with those pesky legislators!

February 15, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Convert addresses into map coordinates via web

This looks very useful for some of the geocoding stuff I've been toying around with: Free Multi-Address Geocoder. Accepts comma or bar-delimited bulk data, validates fields, and dumps geocoding results, web page map, and/or Google Maps KML file. Pretty dang cool.

Link from Jon Udell's del.icio.us feed

February 11, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

I've seen posted a couple of different places a mention that this week is the 10-year anniversary of John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It's worth noting, worth remembering, and worth reaffirming. (Hey, so I'm a nerd; sue me. *grin*)

February 10, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Swimming in syrup is as easy as water

Now we know; you can swim just as fast in a pool of gloop.

Link from reddit

February 10, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

DSMyth and MPC works for Windows!

Holee crap! I've been trying to get a Windows-based mythfrontend working for awhile now...unfortunately, the most well-known contender, WinMyth, doesn't work so well yet. As in, not at all (for me, anyway...as always, YMMV). But one of the prereqs for WinMyth is called DSMyth (it's the DirectShow filters for the MythTV protocols), and I was reading through the news on that site today and finally noticed that they mention another option. So I downloaded Media Player Classic (6.4.8.7), per the DSMyth instructions...and lo and behold, it freakin' works! (Additional notes; I'm using DSMyth 0.10 with this, and go to this forum thread for info on changing live TV channels [it's supposed to get easier in next version]).

I'm impressed. I'm freakin' impressed. And it's all open source/free software, so I can poke it with a stick if I want. Joy. This makes my Windows laptop (w/ 802.11g) a wireless TV extender, and player for recorded Myth programs. Uber-cool. Much thanks to everyone involved with WinMyth, DSMyth, and MPC. You all rock.

February 9, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

MythTV gotchas

Joy...after far too much worrying about it, I've got my MythTV box back up and running. I figure I'll tell the tale, and get notes for my future self in the bargain!

I had a horrible crash back on the box back during the summer, and pretty much talked myself out of rebuilding it. I had all my notes, but with all the backtracking, tweaks, etc...I just didn't want to deal with it. But guess what? As is so often the case, I remembered the bad alot more readily than the good. Most of my notes were, um...unneeded. Surprise, surprise.

First off, I realized about a week ago that I had been COMPLETELY stupid, and not checked my memory after repeated box crashes during the summer. I had previously convinced myself (sans proof) that the issue was the hard drive...but a quick dig around and test via the excellent memtest86 diagnostic tool last Friday confirmed the memory stick was indeed the culprit. (Hmmm...a test; fancy that. Repeatable, even.) And memory is even cheaper today than it was a year ago...

After that, the machine was actually up and running remarkably quickly; I love Debian. Pretty much from install, I was running. Mostly. I had picture...but no sound. Second thing to remember:

I spent way too much time spinning my wheels with ALSA settings that were correct the entire time. I had accidentally cleared the audio recording field when doing the initial card setup, and didn't bother to re-check THAT setting for two days (in the meantime, I had tweaked ALSA about 200 times...). Lesson learned. (Hey, can't a man dream?)

Finally...if you plan on running mythfrontend without setuid (ie, the way it's set out of the box), turn OFF the realtime priority threads setting (which is ON by default). Otherwise, with no setuid and r/t priority on (which, as you may note, IS THE DEFAULT), watching live TV hangs the frontend and crashes the backend in about 10 seconds. With realtime priority threads turned off, there is joy. She works. Maybe someday I'll play with setuid'ing the frontend just to see if it works better...but not today. (There may be something tricky going on here like Debian turns off the setuid for security reasons, leaving the settings wonky. I could be convinced of this. But still weird, and frustrating. Thus the note.)

That's pretty much it! I'm up and running smoothly, with no crashes or hangs, and Battlestar Galactica set to record weekly. All is well with the world.

February 9, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)

Oy. Space.

Wow. Needed some temp space for this thing, so time for a little cleanup. I have LOTS of old stuff...hack, hack, delete, delete...

I'm so easily amused. I haven't even gotten to the SL client yet.

February 1, 2006 permalink | Comments (2)

Joy! SL on Linux!

Woo-freakin-hoo! I'm downloading the Second Life Linux client as we speak (er, post, whatever). It's alpha, and there are known issues, but I am psyched. I would LOVE for this thing to get the kinks knocked out of it; I spend much less time in Second Life than I would simply because of the activation energy required to stop, shut things down, and reboot to Windows. If I could just pop in at will, I really feel that I'd spent a lot more time there. And it's an increasing returns sort of thing...when I dig in and start playing around in-game, I get so involved, and have so many ideas, that I want to log in even more...cool!

So I'm actually looking forward to the inevitable coredump hell. Color me masochistic, I suppose. Download complete. Cross your fingers; here we go!

February 1, 2006 permalink | Comments (2)

Earlier posts -- Later posts