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.

I’m pretty sure this is the first GUI program I’ve ever gotten to a useful state. No source code yet, as a lot of the buttons don’t work, but the basic functionality does. It’s a GTK-based RSS reader. I did it based off of code in LXF# 91. They called theirs Chomp. Since Mono is Spanish for monkey, I called mine Monkey Bites. Enjoy some screenshots.

If you click on any of the blog posts you will see two new things - related posts and links to tag my blog in digg, redit, etc.

I will be working on getting it showing on the main page too, but it’s not a big priority for me right now.

I’m reading through Leviticus right now and boy is it tough going. The entire Biblical narrative has come to a complete halt as rule after seemingly arbitrary rule is spelled out. And the killer is the repitition. Instead of lumping twenty offenses together and saying, for all of these the punishment is X, it lists the punishment each time for each specific offense!

I used to think that these rules were pretty arbitrary and marveled at just how detailed the regulations concerning their lives was. One thing I’ve always wondered about is what the point of it all was. Why did God have to have all these rituals - did He really need the Isrealites to kills goats, pigeons, and sheep? Couldn’t he just have told them to pray and He would answer their prayers?