February 22, 2007 – 11:07 pm
Congrats to the ntfs-3g project for their first major milestone release (1.0), which will allow non-Windows operating systems to read and write (reliably) to NTFS partitions.
February 18, 2007 – 9:26 pm
I just got around to uploading 391 pictures off our camera today, dating back to October 2006.
Some sets include (in chronological order): Christian’s birthday party, soccer games, Halloween, Pierson Brooks’ shower, Thanksgiving, the b Christmas party, Gingerbread house prep and other Christmas stuff, Disneyland trip, our snow day earlier this month, and this weekend’s hike. Finally caught up… haven’t tagged any of the new ones yet, but that would take too long.
So, if you think any of them may be embarrassing pictures of you and you need to check so you can ask me to remove them, or if they just sound interesting to you, go take a look!
February 18, 2007 – 9:00 pm
We got back today from hiking the North Fork Matilija trail, and I have to admit it was tougher than I expected. We started at the south (at Matilija Road) and hiked up to the Maple camp spot on Saturday, staying overnight and tackling the rest of the trail this morning, which eventually led out to the 33 where we were picked up. In retrospect, we probably should have gone the other way, since it would have been downhill rather than uphill most of the way, but it was a learning experience, and the challenge probably added to it in the end.
It was pretty obvious at the end of the first day that I was not in great shape. After a series of switchbacks up the mountain, my legs started cramping pretty much for the rest of the day. I tried stopping to stretch them out, but if I stretched one way the other muscle would cramp while stretching, so I pretty much just ended up walking the rest of the way to the camp despite the cramping. Luckily, Randy hung back with me, in case I eventually collapsed, so that he could either revive me with his first aid kit or give me an honorable death with his ninja sword.
The next day (today) was quite a bit easier, I think mostly because I paced myself a little better and took more frequent pauses to try and avoid letting my legs start to cramp in the first place (rather than trying to make it stop after they started), and it worked pretty well.
Christian went along too and he did great (better than me). He even had a pack with his sleeping bag and a small bag of food to carry; my pack was about 30 pounds. It was pretty cool to be camping at a place that you can only get to by a pretty serious hike (no cars, etc.) All in all, it was pretty fun; but it definitely awakened me to the intensity of my out-of-shape-ness.
Here’s the Flickr photo pool, with just my pictures so far, but more should be added soon. The nature views were pretty awesome, so I’m looking forward to checking the pictures, since I was probably too tired to take it all in at the time.
February 16, 2007 – 11:24 pm
Don’t expect any quick responses here over the weekend. I’m leaving tomorrow morning on an overnight backpacking trip out in the wilderness.
Funny thing is, these next two days will probably be the longest period of time I’ve spent away from a computer in a long, long time.
February 14, 2007 – 8:30 pm
Well, it looks like some of the forex folks’ scripts learned how to fill out the SK2 captcha fallback, so if you were watching my comments feed this afternoon, you probably saw quite a few of those come through.
I took that as a reminder to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: fix the SK2 akismet plugin.
The way the plugin normally works is it checks a comment against akismet and adds points to the karma score if akismet says it’s good, and subtracts points if akismet says it’s bad. Then, if it gets false positives or negatives and you correct them, it sends back your corrections to akismet. The first problem I had to fix involved disabling the feedback sent back to akismet, because there were so many false negatives (spam comments that akismet said were OK) that it was trying to post back a lot of corrections to akismet. This is dangerous, because akismet will block your API key if they determine you are posting too many corrections to their system.
After I did this, I still had to deal with the numerous false negatives bumping the karma scores up too often, so I eventually disabled it altogether. Tonight I decided to go back and just adjust it so that it only takes points away for comments akismet flags as spam, but does not add points for ones that it says are OK. I’ve done that now, and we’ll see how it goes.
February 14, 2007 – 11:38 am
Great article from the NY Times pointing out Apple’s blatant hypocrisy regarding Steve’s recently published letter outlining his supposed stance that they only use DRM on the iTunes store because the record companies make them.
Some excerpts:
Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.�
In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies’, not Apple’s.
This claim requires willful blindness to the presence of online music stores that eschew copy protection. For example, one online store, eMusic, offers two million tracks from independent labels that represent about 30 percent of worldwide music sales.
Among the artists who can be found at eMusic are Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, who are represented by Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Nettwerk releases are available at eMusic without copy protection.
But when the same tracks are sold by the iTunes Music Store, Apple insists on attaching FairPlay copy protection that limits their use to only one portable player, the iPod. Terry McBride, Nettwerk’s chief executive, said that the artists initially required Apple to use copy protection, but that this was no longer the case. At this point, he said, copy protection serves only Apple’s interests.
Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, agreed, saying copy protection “just locks people into Apple.� He said he had recently asked Apple when the company would remove copy protection and was told, “We see no need to do so.�
Apple’s statement is a detailed treatise on the subject, compared with what I received when I asked the company last week whether it would offer tracks without copy protection if the publisher did not insist on it: the Apple spokesman took my query and never got back to me.
I’ve heard other stories like this as well. So, Steve, if you’d really like to sell DRM free music on the iTunes store, why aren’t you already doing it? There are lots of artists out there who aren’t under the thumb of the “big four” oppressive record labels, who would love to do it, and have tried and been denied.
February 13, 2007 – 12:32 am
I just posted the latest version of the Sidebar Widget Collapser plugin.
Major changes:
- This release includes an administrative options page to override the default settings, for people with sidebars configured differently.
- The two files can now be placed directly in the plugins directory OR any subdirectory under it.
February 12, 2007 – 9:04 pm
I was just watching over Martha’s shoulder as she read her MySpace page, and it reminded me of something I’ve noticed / wondered about.
I wonder what the percentage is of parents on MySpace that use their kids’ pictures instead of their own? Seems like it’s very high.
February 12, 2007 – 3:26 pm
Enough with all this tech talk lately; let’s talk about a subject that’s more accessible to the wider reading audience: the upcoming Ghost Rider movie!
The conflict mentioned in the title of this post stems from two opposing movie watching rules that so far I’ve been pretty good at sticking with, but are now clashing with each other.
- I try to see every movie based on a comic book, and this is certainly one of those.
- I generally do NOT see any movies starring Nicolas Cage, since I find him really annoying.
I’ll probably end up seeing it anyway, but it’s a close call.
February 10, 2007 – 7:54 pm
At long last, and after numerous requests, I’ve packaged up the plugin I wrote to add those collapse and expand links to my sidebar widgets.
The basic idea is that (if javascript is enabled) a script will run after the page loads that will go through your sidebar and add collapse and expand links to their titles, which will serve to show and hide any particular item. It will also remember their collapsed and expanded states for you via cookies.
The reason for doing it this way (as opposed to a server-side modification to the sidebar plugins) is that the collapse and expand links should not be added in the first place if the browser doesn’t support scripting, since their functionality is completely script dependent. Because this method uses javascript to modify the document and add the links, it will only add them when they would be able to function.