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Global Warming?
I don’t know if it’s the fault of global warming, but something is seriously wrong with the climate recently. Yesterday it was 72 degrees in Washington DC – IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY! Don’t get me wrong, I love walking around in a tshirt and tank top in January – it kinda reminds me of…
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KDE 4 Marches on….
KDE.news has reported on part of the progress of KDE 4 specific to SVG graphcs. (I know that’s redundant) It’s redundant because SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. Ever since about 2 years ago, Gnome and other projects began to move to SVG rather than PNG, JPG or other types of graphics. “What’s the advantage?”…
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Star Tech
Ever though celebrities were a bunch of know-nothing morons? Well, Ironic Sans has used Google’s new patent search feature to discover that many patents have actually been filed by celebrities. The smartest was Hedy Lamar who was actually a brilliant mind in the world of Cryptography. However, her equally good skills at acting caused most…
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We’re Back!
So lycos died today and they provide the name servers for my blog. So my server, all tripod, and all angelfire pages were inaccessible today. Didn’t see anything about it off their home page, but the roughly 6 hour outage was annoying as heck! Glad to be back!
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Fedora News
A few big things in Fedora News. First of all, the Fedora Summit happened recently. They are tackling a lot of things for Fedora Core 7 including blurring the line between Core and Extras (a point of contention for those moved from Core to Extras – they were less important they felt) and finally having…
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Mythbusters Japan
This is from my brother, Dan, who went to Japan last summer. Hey all, I went walking with no apparent destination and, about 6-10 miles there and back later I found myself home and with impressions of Japan that I figured I’d share. Pretty much, I’m gonna take myths about Japan and debunk or support…
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Linux Tidbits
In an interesting game of Russian dolls Techalign released Pioneer Linux, based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based upon the venerable Debian Linux. Technically, they’ve based it off of Kubuntu which is a KDE spinoff of Ubuntu; they aren’t even using Ubuntu proper. So when they send patches upstream, are they sending them to…
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The Paradox of Free and Fair Elections
This morning I watch the Diebold documentary, “Hacking Democray”, on HBO or one of its affiliate networks. The basic information in the documentary was not news to me. Since I currently live in Maryland, the news that Johns Hopkins had obtained the source code to the voting machines was all over the place. I knew,…
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Evolution of the Computer Desktop
As Neal Stephenson tells us, “In the beginning was the command line…” But then came the Graphical User Interface, or GUI. These point and click environments, as they came to be called, originated in Xerox’s PARC research center. However, the Macintosh was the first computer to bring it to the masses. For someone my age,…
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Kids love Linux!
As I read this article about how this guy’s kids love Linux and hate Windows, I had a couple of questions come to my mind. First of all, is this a testament to how easily kids learn things? Second, what does this mean for newbies to Linux who complain that it’s not as easy as…
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Finally, some rulings that make sense!
Joystick.com reports that judges are finally starting to make some rulings that make sense! We all know (if from nowhere else, than from this blog) that the DMCA is evil. It allows all kinds of restrictions to be placed on you, even though you were a good citizen and bought the content legally. For example,…
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Fox’s O’Reilly is a moron
Here’s a quote from O’Reilly: I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life – the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a…
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Spiderman Predicts the future
It’s interesting how Science Fiction often predicts future technologies and trends. For example, this morning on CNN they were talking about a research group that is trying to switch on the gene in humans that would cause limbs to regrow. Apparently they haven’t seen what happens when you do that (I say tongue-in-cheek). Peter Parker’s…
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IF you like/love Star Wars, you MUST see this!
A group has redone the entire Star Wars Episode 4 in ascii art. You can see the javascript version of Star Wars Ascii Art here. Or, if you don’t have javascript, just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl. The website is a better experience because it comes in a little faster and you can fast forward and skip…
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The Right to Commit Illegal Acts
We have a tradition in the USA in which we allow the user the right to purchase technologies which can be used both legally and illegally. For example, a camcorder can be used to film a documentary, a child’s first steps, or a birthday party. It can also be used to sit in a movie…