Thursday May 19, 2005
Tuesday May 17, 2005
Check out this cool visual of the history of sampling music, dating back to the mid 70's. Just click on an album, and it shows you which songs were sampled. Reminiscent of musicplasma.
Monday May 16, 2005
Woohoo! The conflict between the 21st Amendment which gives states control over importation of alcohol, and the Constitution which prohibits states from passing laws that discriminate against out-of-state businesses, was brought to the Supreme Court's attention by Virginia vintner Juanita Swedenburg. This morning, they have reached a 5-4 decision, ruling that state bans are discriminatory and anticompetitive.
"States have broad power to regulate liquor," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. "This power, however, does not allow states to ban, or severely limit, the direct shipment of out-of-state wine while simultaneously authorizing direct shipment by in-state producers."
The amendment was largely created to protect minors, but seemed as backward as the DMCA, taking away our liberties that were constitutionally granted to us. Cheers to the US Supreme Court for correcting this wrong.
Thursday May 12, 2005
While looking for a good picture of Zorro (don't ask), I came across this collection of someone's cowboy heroes. One in particular caught my eye, as it reminded me of this. Although the original is good in its own right-- I will have to deploy it in 6 months when the holidays arrive-- I had to pass it on to a friend with The Gimp skills to chop it into a message more appropriate for spring. Enjoy...
Wednesday May 11, 2005
Now that Pilot Manager has USB support, I thought I'd make the jump from 1.107 to 1.108 (don't let the revision numbers fool you- its been 6 long years between releases!)
Unfortunately, even with a relatively up-to-date and complete build environment, with nearly every GNU and CPAN module and the fact that it was a 0.001 increase in rev, it took a while to get built. (not my idea of a 1/1000 increase in revs guys...)
Here's what I did, in case you're having trouble with the build also:
1. Download PMgr 1.108
2.Install the Perl Tk package (perl -MCPAN -e "force install Tk"). Actually, it appears perl ignores the force flag unless you drop into interactive shell mode. :-/ )
3. Download Pilot Link 0.12.0 pre2. Follow these directions to get it to actually compile- otherwise libpng will complain about an undefined reference to `pow'.
4. Pilot Link by default does not build the perl module. According to Pmgr's install doc, you shouldn't use the --with-perl due to a bug (what a shocker!), so follow the Pmgr instructions to build the perl module.
5. Resume the Pmgr install by doing a perl Setup.pl. This will create the startup script if your environment is setup correctly...
6. On launch, its likely it will complain about some missing CSA library. Sigh- the dependancies doc didn't list that... one more for you. perl -MCPAN -e "install Calendar::CSA
And there you go... it should run.
Tuesday May 10, 2005
This DIY temperature controlled fridge mod is cool on so many levels:
- Its partly made with spare "junk" found lying around.
- It runs on *nix.
- Anyone can telnet to it to get realtime temperature data.
- The author (Greg Lehey) makes the source (C) available for download.
- It involved brewing!
This is one of those projects that makes me feel equal parts embarrassment (for being a techie brewer and having not tried something like this myself), and warm fuzzies (that others out there have put something together and shared.)
Anyone out there in the bay area with a 1/2 fridge they wanna get rid of? ;)
Thursday May 05, 2005
This hilarious video of a guy auditioning for some sort of martial arts role and knocking himself silly in the process (complete with backflip and nunchucks!) made the rounds a while ago. Its pretty dang hilarious if you haven't already seen it. (Sorry, I can't seem to get this to play with Mplayer.)
Now I see someone's put together a hilarious explanation for the guy's antics.
If there was ever a time to use the phase ROTFLOL, this is the time. ROTFLOL, my friends.
Wednesday May 04, 2005
I dunno what prompted it, but I took it upon myself to to track down the origin of the phrase "great caesar's ghost". The interweb is good for lots of stuff, but all I could find were Batman references. Although I'm sure the big B helped make the phrase popular, I doubt he coined it.
Then I came across this issue of Take Our Word For It, the only Weekly Word-origin Webzine, which had this to say:
At one time it was common to say great God but during the 19th century a prudishness fell upon the English-speaking world and people began to replace it with expressions like great sun, great Scott and great Caesar's ghost. The Scott in question is not the author of "Rob Roy" but a popular U.S. general, Gen. Winfield Scott, a hero of the Mexican War.
Sounds convincing to me. (BTW, General Winfield Scott looked like a Civil War pimp if you ask me.)
