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today’s short posts
there will be a series of short posts today to make up for a long and substantial one. SETI at Home is now over! I never thought this phenom would end, but, sadly, it has.
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Quickies
1) In this post, wget had created a directory structure, foiling my plans to do the md5sum check automatically. The correct way to do what I wanted to do was use the option -nd for no directories. If I had typed wget -nd address it would have just saved to my current directory and the…
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Crazy Christmas Lights
I’m really busy, so check these out, they are awesome. It’s a guy who synced up his Christmas lights to music. Saw it on CNN and googled to find it. Sorry it’s in evil Windows Media Video… http://members.cox.net/transam57/lights.wmv http://www.msftlabrat.com/funstuff/jingle.wmv
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Art and its role in Culture
Reading a post from Miss Izzy is like watching a Simpsons episode. The beginning has nothing to do with the end, but serves only to set up the source of conflict. While reading Sunday Digression, she moved to a topic I feel pretty strongly about, the value of art in culture. She writes: If you…
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A response on Good and Evil
Sarong Party Girl (SPG), who ironically does very little blogging about parties, wrote this hasty article, tackling an issue she talks about a lot – relativism and good & evil. The key point of her post, which has been a theme in some of her other posts is: At the end, whatever we do, there…
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I stand corrected – buying virtual land
A BBC News story has pointed out that my prior post (which I can’t find on my first blog) in which I called this guy a moron for spending $17 thousand to buy land in a virtual world. Afterall, it’s only an investment if you can sell if for a higher price. However, according to…
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Technorati Annoyances
Technorati.corn is a blog search engine. (They also search flickr images, but that’s a minor part of their operations) They are considered to be so important that, on more than one occassion, I have seen CNN’s Internet reporters referring to technorati’s top search items as expressive of what Americans (and others) are interested in. The…
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My Monty Hall PHP Script
Well, actually, it’s not mine. It was a script in Linux Format Magazine a few issues ago. As hobbyists have done since the beginning, I copied the code down to see it actually work. First the background on Monty Hall. Here it is from Wikipedia.com: The Monty Hall problem is a puzzle in game theory…
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Fanatical Civ Playing (by others, not me)
If you want to play Civ4 in the most unique way I’ve ever seen, then head on over to Demogame.civfanatics.net. What do they do? They play a civ game where a group of people act as a president and cabinet controlling what goes on in the game. In other words, I play for a few…
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Save often and Save Well
Linux Uptime: 21:46:52 up 25 days “Save often and Save Well” that was the motto of one of the best pioneering games of the 80s and 90s, King’s Quest. They spouted that advice because it was easy to make the wrong move and have your character die. If you hadn’t saved, you could lose hours…
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Ch-ch-cha-anges
I believe that websites, magazines, blogs, and other media that people become accustomed to should always look the same. Afterall, that’s what people become comfortable with, so why change it up? However, I also realize that these things always change and it’s often for the better. In that vein, I am going to be changing…
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Why the Creative Commons Makes so much more sense…
Today I was reading an article about the perils of blogging about the workplace. This is something I have always avoided. I think it’s ok to say something like, “Man, this guy was a real jerk to me in the cafeteria, I wonder what problems he was facing to feel that way.” It’s not ok…
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Cool stuff with Google Maps
There’s a reason why open source is so awesome – by providing other programmings with the inner workings of your program, they can create new and amazing uses for it that you could never imagine. One of the best examples of this is the fact that Google has release the API (aplication programming interface, I…
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Googling Myself
I haven’t Googled myself in a while, so I decided to see what would come up with my first and last name. What a paper trail I’ve left since the last time I was here. Item number 2 on page 1 was a link to my book at Lulu.com, the self-publishing company. Items 3 and…
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Copyleft
I recently found something interesting – a record label which releases all of its music under the Creative Commons license. In particular you are allowed to copy the music as long as you don’t make money off of it. One of their strategies? If you rip a CD for a friend and they really like…