Computers: January 2005 Archives
From Mediaweek, December 12, 2005:
Bill O'Reilly, anchor of The CBS Evening News, was formally suspended today for hitting a small child during an interview. The child, a national spokesperson for Children with Hearing Disabilities, enraged the volatile anchor by refusing to "shut up" when ordered to. Sources report that the child, an eight-year-old girl with 80% to 90% hearing loss in both ears, simply could not hear the red-faced O'Reilly bellowing at her, and so continued to describe the recent efforts of the CHD to improve the lives of the partially deaf. The anchor was unavailable for comment, but his spokesperson referred all questions to the platinum-plus member section of Oreilly.com.
-- Rob Long, "The Long View," National Review, Dec. 27, 2004
I love Rob Long. He's a former executive producer of Cheers (which is saying something, as he is only in his 30s), and now he does some radio show and writes columns for National Review. He rarely fails to crack me up.
Anyway, the above is funny for several reasons, but I wonder how much traffic it drove to our publishing friend.
TorgoX complains that Bush's tone is "huffy." Look, when you give more than everyone else and people look at you and say you're being cheap, it's going to get you a little miffed. Note also that those stats only include government gifts, not private, and guess what: we lead the world there, too.
Not that we can't give more, but, as aevil is wont to say, no good deed goes unpunished, and that's the point.
Not that we can't give more, but, as aevil is wont to say, no good deed goes unpunished, and that's the point.
I am taking every Monday off for a few months, to go skiing. Good stuff.
I pulled my hamstring on Dec. 22 in a hockey game. It did OK today on the slopes (I never go down more than intermediate anyway, so not a ton of stress, but a good amount). I have to decide if I think it has healed enough to play this season of hockey, but I am optimistic.
There's a casino less than three miles from my house, that I didn't know about until recently. It's not huge, but a decent size -- 22K sqaure feet, 425 slots, 10 tables -- but it's back in the woods away from any main road, so I'd never seen it. There's also a gun range about seven miles away. On a date, should I go shooting first, gambling second, or vice versa?
I pulled my hamstring on Dec. 22 in a hockey game. It did OK today on the slopes (I never go down more than intermediate anyway, so not a ton of stress, but a good amount). I have to decide if I think it has healed enough to play this season of hockey, but I am optimistic.
There's a casino less than three miles from my house, that I didn't know about until recently. It's not huge, but a decent size -- 22K sqaure feet, 425 slots, 10 tables -- but it's back in the woods away from any main road, so I'd never seen it. There's also a gun range about seven miles away. On a date, should I go shooting first, gambling second, or vice versa?
MP3-Info-1.10 has been released. Download it from the CPAN or SF.net.
(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)
Changes:
(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)
Changes:
* v1.10, day, December 27, 2004Posted using release by brian d foy.
Make utf8 enabled by default (if available).
perl 5.6 is now required.
Remove dependency on Symbol.pm.
Use three-arg open. (Alex Marandon)
Make reading of genres a bit more nimble. (Brian S. Stephan)
Fix frame counting. (Ben Winslow, Anthony DiSante)
Fix syncsafe byte reading. (Pierre-Yves Thoulon, et al)
Some Unicode fixes. (Ilya Konstantinov)
More changes for Unicode. Unicode::String no longer used; Encode is used
instead. Encode::Guess used as last resort. (Dan Sully)
Optimizations and other fixes. (michael, Dan Sully)
Support for reading ID3v2 tags from WAV and AIFF files. Not fully
supported. (Dan Sully)
I saw the TMBG documentary Gigantic. It was great, except for Ira Glass and Syd Straw, who by themselves almost ruined it. She is perpetually unfunny and he's just a tool.
What the hell was that crap with Glass saying he feels sorry for them because they can't listen to their own music as though it was somebody else's? And hey, if you say it THREE MORE TIMES in different ways, we might finally think you're being interesting!
And dammit, Sarah Vowell, must you try to explain everything with metaphor? You're like a pixie version of Tom Friedman. Is "essayist" a euphemism for "person who tries too hard to get people to think they are deep so she can feel better about herself"? This was especially betrayed in her whole "The fact that I like TMBG proves that I am smart" spiel. Pass the crackpipe.
(Maybe I can be to This American Life what Jon Stewart is to Crossfire ... nah.)
Oh, and I found it interesting that much of the footage they showed was from the days leading up to 9/11/2001 -- including a live gig at a Tower Records after midnight the morning of 9/11 -- and they made no mention of 9/11 (unless I missed it), unlike Sting's All This Time documentary/concert ... but in the latter case it was unavoidable, since the concert took place the night of 9/11, after it already happened.
What the hell was that crap with Glass saying he feels sorry for them because they can't listen to their own music as though it was somebody else's? And hey, if you say it THREE MORE TIMES in different ways, we might finally think you're being interesting!
And dammit, Sarah Vowell, must you try to explain everything with metaphor? You're like a pixie version of Tom Friedman. Is "essayist" a euphemism for "person who tries too hard to get people to think they are deep so she can feel better about herself"? This was especially betrayed in her whole "The fact that I like TMBG proves that I am smart" spiel. Pass the crackpipe.
(Maybe I can be to This American Life what Jon Stewart is to Crossfire ... nah.)
Oh, and I found it interesting that much of the footage they showed was from the days leading up to 9/11/2001 -- including a live gig at a Tower Records after midnight the morning of 9/11 -- and they made no mention of 9/11 (unless I missed it), unlike Sting's All This Time documentary/concert ... but in the latter case it was unavoidable, since the concert took place the night of 9/11, after it already happened.
For various reasons, I decided I wanted to see about getting some Ethernet wires around the house. I use AirPort Extreme to connect the music room, stereo closet, and server closet (and the laptops), which works fine, but it lacks some things that 100base-T can give me (waking computers, faster transfers, etc.).
The big thing was the stereo closet, where I am streaming movies and audio a lot, and I might be adding another audio player, which would only burden the network further. My stereo closet happens to be below the server closet ... but not exactly. They don't line up. So I could not just drop a line through the floor.
My house was built with Leviton home networking something or other systems. Basically, there's cat-5 and coax going to each room in the house (four bedrooms, living room, kitchen, garage), with the coax carrying either satellite or cable (depending on which it is plugged into in the wiring box), and it all connects in one box. The cat-5 is used only for phone, so I have two free pairs to use (actually, I could use three pairs since I only use one for phone, but I need only two for Ethernet, and I might always add a second phone line, though I doubt it).
So I finally got around to rewiring the wiring closet for Ethernet. I bought a little 6-port punchdown module for $25, that converts the four little wires into RJ-45 plugs, and in the rooms I replaced the faceplates with ones that have data, phone, and coax ports (I need to get the coax pieces later, they just pop in, but they were not in stock).
I just need to finish up the faceplates and put a switch in the wiring closet, and I'll be groovy. Right now, it just has two rooms connected directly. There's no power in there, but there's an outlet nearby, I guess I will have to line the cord along the wall.
Although, I did find out that the master bedroom is fed off the living room, and the garage off the kitchen, so only one or the other of those can have Ethernet (unless I add more switches at those locations ...). But I only need it in the other three bedrooms (that is, office, music room, and bedroom) and the living room, so that's fine. If I ever move boxes to the garage (someday may want to have my main server out there, to free up space and cut down noise), I can do that too.
Oh, and I made some of my own Ethernet cable. Man, that's a pain in the butt. But cheaper in the long run. Since my walls have only four wires for Ethernet, I saved some pain by using only four wires in my cables, too.
The big thing was the stereo closet, where I am streaming movies and audio a lot, and I might be adding another audio player, which would only burden the network further. My stereo closet happens to be below the server closet ... but not exactly. They don't line up. So I could not just drop a line through the floor.
My house was built with Leviton home networking something or other systems. Basically, there's cat-5 and coax going to each room in the house (four bedrooms, living room, kitchen, garage), with the coax carrying either satellite or cable (depending on which it is plugged into in the wiring box), and it all connects in one box. The cat-5 is used only for phone, so I have two free pairs to use (actually, I could use three pairs since I only use one for phone, but I need only two for Ethernet, and I might always add a second phone line, though I doubt it).
So I finally got around to rewiring the wiring closet for Ethernet. I bought a little 6-port punchdown module for $25, that converts the four little wires into RJ-45 plugs, and in the rooms I replaced the faceplates with ones that have data, phone, and coax ports (I need to get the coax pieces later, they just pop in, but they were not in stock).
I just need to finish up the faceplates and put a switch in the wiring closet, and I'll be groovy. Right now, it just has two rooms connected directly. There's no power in there, but there's an outlet nearby, I guess I will have to line the cord along the wall.
Although, I did find out that the master bedroom is fed off the living room, and the garage off the kitchen, so only one or the other of those can have Ethernet (unless I add more switches at those locations ...). But I only need it in the other three bedrooms (that is, office, music room, and bedroom) and the living room, so that's fine. If I ever move boxes to the garage (someday may want to have my main server out there, to free up space and cut down noise), I can do that too.
Oh, and I made some of my own Ethernet cable. Man, that's a pain in the butt. But cheaper in the long run. Since my walls have only four wires for Ethernet, I saved some pain by using only four wires in my cables, too.
the sourceforge cvs is way too slow
i'd like to kick it hard right in the ass
i'd like to cast it off one day, you know
but that decision's been made in the past
to move to a new system would take time
but hm, and yet, more than we waste right now?
our tools, our processes, what hill to climb!
it gives me pause, it furrows up my brow
my fantasy is switching to perforce
or maybe give subversion a good try
my nightmare is that either would be worse
like pulling the speck out of one's own eye
it's hard to know if one would be a log
and so, instead, we watch the server bog
(I normally don't have the time to write sonnets, but funny how for some reason, today I did!)
I updated happening. It now uses Imager to create a background image or screen saver image (I use it on my TV: set the screen saver to use pictures from a directory, set it to the directory that happening uses, and set it to present in random order; also set your screen resolution in the happening config section), complete with the artist/album/title and cover art. It also sends a notice to Growl (unreleased version 0.6 required). Both are switchable via options at the top of the script.
Enjoy.
Enjoy.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
