Today I received my copy of the photography book I’ve published, Eric Mesa’s Top 40 flickr Images. It’s a great feeling to finally have the book published after having worked on it since April. There were a few false starts with the publishing process as I figured out how to make sure my final PDF could be printed on Lulu.com’s printers. But the journey is finally over and I was able to make the book available to the public today.

flickr’s servers suffered some kind of meltdown last night and they continue to run extremely slow into this morning.

Today, The Linux Extremist, posted his attempts to compute what we in the Linux world call “The Microsoft Tax”, this is the extra cost of a computer with Windows as opposed to a computer without an operating system. His numbers are not all that surprising with an extra cost of 323.67 British pounds for Windows, Office, and Paint Shop Pro. In my eyes, the true purpose of his article was not so much to document the extra cost of Windows, but rather highlight that the Windows user must pay 323.67 in order to gain the functionality that us Linux users take for granted.

This Arab quote, which I read in the newspaper, describes exactly how I feel.

“Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; and me, my brother and my cousin against the stranger”

As part of my tasks today, I decided to clean up my home pages and eliminate a lot of the crud and invalid links. I just wanted to make it a bit more pleasing upon the eyes of my visitors. I still have some work to do at http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com, but I think that I like how http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/ looks now.

In biology class we learn about Mendel as one of the pioneers of biology for he determined that tall plants breed tall plants and short ones breed short ones. However, it’s clear that even in the ancient of days there was some knowledge of how genetics worked. Take, for example, the following passage from Genesis where Jacob’s uncle Laban has asked what Jacob would like as repayment for all the work he’s done.

It took me the better part of about 2 hours to figure out how to get everything to work correctly, but I am finally done with my program, GNaughtyNice. It figures out how naughty or nice a word is by using the Google search API and searching once with the porn filter on and once with it off. You can access this great feat of programming at http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/GNaughtyNice.html

I think it’ll probably make a pretty god party game. You also need a Google search API key because I only get 1000 searches which could get used up quite quickly if this were to become popular enough.

last.fm has had a facelift! It looks quite a bit more sleek! The biggest change seems to be adding artist and album pictures near all of the stats. Check out my last.fm page.

To any French readers I may have out there, Happy Bastille Day!

To see a graph of search trends of any search term on Google, just mozey on over to www.google.com/trends and separate any search terms by commas. It’s quite a bit of fun!