Photo Sharing

Paradigms are a battle of the mind that take place when we prepare our children with certain expectations about the world. Don’t let them grow up thinking there’s something right about Digital Restrictions Management! Have them read The Pig and the Box and let them learn about why software and culture need to be libre. (That’s free as in speech!)

Why is DRM so bad? This is why!

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.