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Bluefish & Screem

I want to dedicate two nights a week to programming / web development. Unfortunately, with the 3 machines I have here at my desk, my Windows box is the only one really set up for any type of long term typing.

The problem is I’m used to Bluefish on linux, and recently I also tried Screem, which was equally impressive. Jedit on Windows is just plain ugly, and feature lacking, and there really aren’t any other good open source alternatives I’ve found. I need to get off my butt, get my server sorted out so I know how many hard drives I really have (and work), and pop one in my gaming box so I can dual boot.

So much work to do, so little time.

In other news, Matt came over this weekend, and we’re 90% done with the electrical wiring. Get the ceiling boxed out, fnish the wiring, get the insulation in and we’re ready for the drywall! I need to keep the momentum going with the basement, so I don’t stall anymore.

More Christmas Presents: Books

One of my favorite Christmas presents to receive is a Barnes & Noble gift card. And this year my sister hooked the family up with a dandy. Alex was able to purchase two nice hardcovers by Garth Nix, and I picked up a few.

On my list for quite a while is a few books by Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, EFF board member, and a Stanford law professor. I bought The Future of Ideas and Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

In addition, I picked up We The Media, Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People by Dan Gillmor, who recently put his money where his mouth is, and left his job at the San Jose Mercury News to found a grassroots journalism project.

And last, but not least, Geoffrey Stone’s Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. Mr. Stone had the opportunity to guest on, but who else’s, Lawrence Lessig’s blog in December. Fascinating thoughts, facts, and history behind the governments role in free speech regulation during wartime. I’m really looking forward to reading this book.

It feels good to be buying non-fiction, and topics I believe in: Free Speech, copyright reform, and journalism. Now to finish off the two novels I’m reading and tackle some real reading material.

Alias 4.0

Over a year ago when the 2003 TV season started, I blogged about Alias rebooting for the third time.

After sitting on my TiVo for over a week, I sat down and watched this season’s premiere and the current episode. We’re now on to Alias 4.0, another reboot to start the 4th season. I enjoy the show, but it’s getting harder to suspend my disbelief after all of the plot holes that open up every time they decide to start over.

This time, we find Sydney, Jack, Vaughn and Dixon have been transferred to a black ops division of the CIA. (The show can now just ignore the whole workings of the CIA). And guess who they’re working for – Sloan! We have now recreated SD-6, but sanctioned by the CIA now. By the end of the 2nd episode, Weiss & Marshall are working for them now.

I’ll give them some credit – continuing plot points are still there, with the tension between Sydney and Jack regarding her mother, Rombaldi, and Vaugh and Sydney’s romance. I’ll give it a try, but I’m at the end of the line. I’m all for watching a well done espionage with a beautiful heroine, but at least try and keep a plot for more than one season. I understand that people didn’t watch the show because they couldn’t follow the plot if they missed an episode or two, but dammit people, buy a TiVo. That’s my favorite part of shows like Alias & 24.

Gates just doesn't get it.

Gizmodo has their interview with Bill

Gates Part Four: Communists and DRM up.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chariman has been getting flak for some comments at CES where he equates those who don’t favor copyright and DRM as communists. He more than proves that it’s Gates himself that doesn’t get it in the above interview.

Look Bill: No one questions that artists should be compensated for their work. Period. The fact that some of us may choose to create content, say, a blog, and not want to be compensated, and want to share it, is our choice. And when we do choose that, we can choose to use the Creative Commons licenses to share our work.

God forbid a music artist, or the spoken word, or the written word want to be given away at the artists’ discretion. It’s worked in the programming world, and more and more examples in the media world have started.

Viva la revolution.

Is the Sherman era over?

Will tomorrow be the day Mike Sherman loses his GM responsibilities?

Will he be able to transition to “just” being a coach?

Will he be happy if he doesn’t get a contract extension as he enters the final year of his contract next year?

Will he even be our coach after next season?

I guess we’ll find out some of these answers tomorrow! Change is good. We don’t need more disappointment from the Packers. Sherman’s record is amazing, but his lack of success in the postseason is very disturbing. I don’t question his drive, his motivation and his will to win. But when is it too much for one person? It will take change to get to the next level, so change is good.

Firefox

In Firefox news, share has increased to 21% of all browsers. Take that, Microsoft!

I know personally, I’ve signed up 6 people who are using it now. Not a lot, but I’m doing my share!

Over on Silwenae.com, I’ve given Bizet admin access, and he went nuts posting. And I made him download Firefox on his main machine, after he fell in love with it on his backup box. Next thing you know, he’ll be blogging!

I will get a Mac.. someday

And that day is getting closer.

Today marked the start of MacWorld, and in typical Steve Jobs fashion, he unveiled a slew of new things. I won’t get into all the cool software, but Jobs did unveil the iPod Shuffle, a flash drive iPod, and more imporantly, the Mac Mini.

A headless Mac G4, you buy this wonderful little piece of technology, and bring your own monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is tiny, cute and semi-powerful (for a Mac). It lacks a decent video card, but who games on Apple machines anyway.

I think this is a smart move for Apple – with the success of iTunes, they may be able to pull off their Switch campaign yet. Starting at $499 for a G4 1.25 gHz with a 40 gig HD, to $599 for a 1.42 gHz with an 80 gig HD, you can upgrade ’em to DVD burners, wireless as well as bluetooth. Introduce yourself to the power of Unix in a cute form factor.

Hit the above link for lots of pictures at Gizmodo, or visit the Mac Mini page at the Apple Store.

Why DRM is Evil, and what it means to your DVD Collection

Cory Doctorow discusses why you can’t legally back up your DVDs and who is to blame. Suffice to say, DRM, Digital Rights Management, is evil.

Cory Doctorow, European OutReach Coordinator for the EFF, is a science fiction author, DRM expert, and blogger.

One of my favorite authors on the evils of DRM, he once even gave a speech, at Microsoft, on the evils of DRM. From the speech, introducing himself to the crowd, he sums up what he does:

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net

This may be better suited for my technical blog – and speaking of irony, I was going to link to it, but silwenae.com isn’t responding. I registered paulcutler.org to test out Nearlyfreespeech.net, a webhosting company. I had first heard of Nearlyfreespeech when Bugmenot.com came under fire. Bugmenot is a website dedicated to providing logins to sites that require registration, so you can bypass giving your personal information to sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or most newspaper websites. Nearlyfreespeech hosted them after Bugmenot was dumped by their current host.

Webhosting is an odd business. Prices have come down dramatically in the last few years, and most webhosts are just resellers rebranding others services, like ThePlanet. They offer control panels to make it easy for non-technical folks to get their websites up and manage their email. Nearlyfreespeech isn’t all that different, as their servers are colocated within one of those type of hosting centers, but they differ in a few areas. There are no monthly fees – you pay for the bandwidth you use over time, minus any credit card fees after you give them a deposit. There are no frills – it’s not for newbies. They actually give you more control over the sites you use, but you need to know what you’re doing.

Most webhosts will give you a set number of things: email accounts, how much bandwidth you can use, subdomains (xxxx.paulcutler.org with xxxx being a subdomain), how many databases you can have, how many other domains you can host on your site (for instance, with silwenae.com / pixehost as my webhost, I can have 5 more domains, as I have movietuesday.com and jholzer.com hosted there as well), etc. Nearlyfreespeech basically says do what you will, just pay for your traffic, with one exception. They don’t do email, just web hosting.

As I was talking to Fazin yesterday, who helped with a database import problem I was having, he pointed out the lack of email. This is a challenge, as silwenae at silwenae dot com has become my email address for everything over the last few years. I’m pretty interested in migrating from pixiehost to nearlyfreespeech, but now I have to research email options. When silwenae.net was up in it’s heyday running a linux distro called e-smith, e-smith had awesome email integration built in. But when I decided to run my own true linux server out of the house, as opposed to a distro that made it very easy to setup (with caveats), email hosting is something that is complex that I didn’t go with as I taught myself sysadmin stuff. From running Fedora Core, to now Ubuntu, I’ll need to figure that out as I debate my options for email, but that’s another post for a different time.

So far, I’m happy with nearlyfreespeech. It’s always been up, I can have multiple users, and for someone like me who just runs hobby sites, it should save me some money. (No matter what I tell myself, silwenae.com and such will never be big traffic generators). Silwenae.com on pixiehost is currently down again – even my wife who was hosting her site with them transferred to a new host. Now I need to get off my butt, get the silwenae.net server in my basement up this weekend, figure out my email and then start transferring websites.

The 2nd best Christmas Present I received

The 2nd best Christmas Present I received was a book from a co-worker: The Daily Adventures of Mixerman, by Mixerman.

The book tells the story of Mixerman, a sound engineer in Los Angeles hired to mix a new up and coming band’s CD. This dysfunctional band, signed to the label after a bidding war, has been locked away by the music label for 2 years to write a “radio hit”. Everyone in the book is anonymous, including the author, to protect the band’s identity. From Willy Show, the big time producer, nick named because his contract to produce the album isn’t done and he doesn’t show up for a week, to the aptly named Dumb Ass, the drummer who can’t do anything right.

The book is a hilarious look at everything that can go wrong in a recording session, and a behind the scenes look at the music industry. Originally posted almost as a blog in 2002 (before blogs were cool), the book contains all of the blog entries, and the missing final entry. It was easy reading, and will keep you laughing the whole way through.