In " Things that Shouldn’t Make Me Happy", Scott Adams hits on one of the most poignant things I’ve read in a while. For a humorist, he has been making some amazing points recently.

If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.

Sorry about yesterday. Apparently my dynamic DNS hostname decided not to be dynamic. So, after about 30-40 minutes of checking and rebooting my machine (which had 65 days of uptime! - I think a power outage occurred two weeks ago), I realized the problem. If you can read this, it has propagated to your DNS server.

Oracle decided, a few months ago, to exercise a right they have under the GPL: they have taken Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and copied everything about it, rebranded it and called it their own. This is not unique to Oracle. On a basic level, this is what Ubuntu, Linspire, Mint, Xandros, CentOS, and others do - they build on another distro and package it out. Some may have different packaging or have different ideas of which kinds of software they can include. However, there is a huge difference, at least in my mind. With Ubuntu, Xandros, etc they do not exist to compete with Debian (on which they are based). Rather, they celebrate the fact that they came from Debian and make a point of contributing back to it. They also cater to certain markets that may not find Debian easy to use.

First of all, Debian has finally turned 4.0! It’s been YEARS in the making and they are 4 months late, but better late than never! Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the prior release cycle! With Ubuntu and Fedora releasing every sixth months now, it’s up to Debian to find a good compromise between releasing often and undoing their reputation as a nice stable distro to base other distros off of and not moving at glacial speed so that distros like Linspire/Freespire move to being based on Ubuntu.

In t his post, Scott Adams mentions some of his dissapointment with our goverment. The key three paragraphs to his post were:

Recently our so-called Speaker of the House was meeting with the Syrian government while our so-called Vice President was on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show reminding the world that the so-called Speaker of the House doesn’t speak for the United States in foreign policy. Foreign policy is the job of the so-called President who doesn’t speak to governments that don’t already agree with him.

I discovered a great CG artist named Daniel Martinez Lara who has some great material on the web. I discovered him because he recently started using Blender, whereas he had been using commercial 3D software previously. If you want to see a great animation that’s only a couple of minutes long, check out Changes.

These pictures went from being under 25 views yesterday to all being above 100 views today! And I only uploaded them a few days ago!

.

So, according to Thoggen’s count, it took 4.45 hours to encode into Theora. At least with this DVD it seems that the coding team has fixed their error where the software seems to keep going past the end of the DVD. As far as I recall from one year ago, it didn’t add more infomation in - the thread just didn’t get the message that the title was done encoding.

Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid - a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3, which is patented by the group the controls the MPEG standard. Technically all encoders need to pay them a fee to encode to MPEG formats. This can get expensive - M$ is curently being sued by one of the patent holders of MPEG Layer 3 Audio (AKA MP3) for a very large amount of money. I *think* it’s in the billion range, but I could be off by an order of magnitude. So, theora, which was licensed to the open source community, is the safest bet.

The first battle in our war against those who would wield DRM to prevent us from having fair use over our movies and music has been won. EMI, a Bristih Music label with bands like The Rolling Stones, has agreed to release songs on iTunes without DRM. Please, try and support them and show them this is a good idea. Yeah, it costs thirty cents more, but you also get 256kbps instead of just 128. Buy from them and don’t rampantly share with others so that the rest of the music labels can follow suit.