My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode.  I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM).  But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV.  We bought it off of iTunes and then tried to watch it in iTunes.  It was skipping and stuttering worse than a Youtube video.  It was reminding me of the old dialup days when the buffer would keep running out.  Any TV show I have ever downloaded for free off the net has not had this problem - it has played flawlessly - even if it was an HD recording.  So why should I pay $2 for a stuttering video when I could get it for free and have HD quality??  And I’m not the only one - I searched the web and  3 million pages came up on this issue.  The solution was to play it in Quicktime, outside of iTunes.  This is ridiculous - pay content should NEVER be worse quality than free content if you want people to pay.  That is, after all, how the free market works.

Hey Everyone! Yesterday my server died. I finally bit the bucket and rented a VPS. Sadly this means that I am no longer hosting my own site on my own personal server. However, hopefully this will translate to greater reliability for you guys. You no longer have to go through my POS home router and crappy comcast upload speeds. So I hope it’s a better, faster experience for you guys now. It’s great to be back!!!

As 2008 has proven - draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games.  Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008.  The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use.  This is always the case.  Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it.  These DRM schemes are not cheap.  They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.

Now that I have “I’m Not Mad” caught up for the next month, I thought it was an OK time to upgrade to Fedora 10.  Unlike with the Fedora 9 release, there haven’t been huge complaints of the upgrade causing the system to become unusable.  (Most, though not all, of that came from the version of X.org that Fedora 9 used)

As usual, I followed instructions at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq and I started the yum upgrade command at 1852.  KDE basket-contact gave me dependency errors so I had to uninstall it.  It had been giving me problems with updates as well - I had just forgotten about it.   1854 - started upgrade again.    This time a problem with gstreamer - I think gstreamer gives me problems every upgrade.  So I remove gstreamer08-plugins.  (Which was apparently hanging around from fedora 6).  This also got rid of some more gstreamers packages hanging around from Fedora 5.  Don’t know why I still had that kruft there, but it’s gone now…  1859 - started yum upgrade again.  This time it works!  2.8 GB!  Well, it’s certainly the least painful yum upgrade process I’ve gone through yet - at least from this point in the process.  The download process seems to be moving along pretty quickly.  I guess getting that “fastest mirror” package out with Fedora 9 really does find the fastest mirror.  Also, this far out from the Fedora 10 release, there shouldn’t be too many people hogging up the mirrors.  What am I looking forward to in Fedora 10?  Oddly, not much.  Compared to previous releases, there isn’t any one technology I’m very excited about for Fedora 10.  Sure, it’ll be nice to have the latest Gnome, but that release is so incremental, I doubt I’ll notice much.  The latest KDE MIGHT be enough to finally get me back to KDE.  KDE 4.1 was good, but not good enough.  Other than that it’ll just be nice to have the latest stuff.  Something I can do every 6 months or so with Linux and only every five or more years with Windows.

Welcome to 2009!

This is over a decade old, but I just discovered it.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa’s a wreck… How to live in a world that’s politically correct? His workers no longer would answer to “Elves”, “Vertically Challenged” they were calling themselves.

And labor conditions at the North Pole Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul. Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety, Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.

…With my webcomic I’m Not Mad. Hope to get some more stuff up here soon. But it might be hard with the holidays and all.

Ever since I last wrote about Opera and Chrome, some things have changed about my browsing habits. On Windows, I’ve gone from always using Flock to always using Opera. I just found out that Flock finally released version 2.0 because I wanted to check up on my facts before looking like a dork on my own blog. So I haven’t used version 2.0 and that doesn’t figure into what I’m going to say here.

So, Wordpress 2.7 is finally here.  It’s their second visual refresh in a year and I have to say they have really outdone themselves.  When they did the last change, I thought “wow, there’s no way they could improve on this.” and “I thought their old interface was good, but this makes it look like a pile of crap!”.  But now I feel the same way all over.  There are a few things that aren’t where I remember them, but overall, I am loving the new work they’ve done.  There’s just one thing that annoys the heck out of me - the new threaded comments don’t work with my theme.  I’m going to either have to figure out how to redesign it on my own or switch themes again.  But I really like this theme and I’ve done so much customization already.

Somewhere in the middle of 2008 my wife’s computer kept making very disturbing noises upon boot up. She had told me she would move to Linux when her current computer broke. So I bought her a new computer and loaded Kubuntu on it because she wanted “the version that looks like Windows”. I new she would want KDE for the desktop and I liked Ubuntu’s user-friendliness from when I installed it on my laptop. I had a feeling Fedora would be a bit much for her. She’s not afraid to learn about her computer, but she doesn’t want it getting in the way when she wants to get work done.