Recently I have discovered a really cool website, Jamendo. In a nutshell, it provides free music. Unlike most uses of P2P, it does so legitimately. The creators are required to release under one of the Creative Commons licenses, so you can be sure that not only is noone going to mind you having it, but… Read More »
There’s an interesting article on Wired, titled Every Old Meme Is New Again. It refers to the creation of Godwin’s Law. The interesting bit is that it was consciously and deliberately created, by going and using the term, until it got picked up and took on something of a life of it’s own.
All my transport for Linux.conf.au 2007 is booked, and there’s quite a comfortable holiday surrounding it all. I have yet to pay for the conference itself, but that’s because they’re having technical problems it seems. (Update: turns out the payment went through fine) My itinerary is: 11/01: Christchurch -> Melbourne 14/01: Melbourne -> Sydney, Conference… Read More »
For work stuff, I’ve been needing to set up a script to convert videos from whatever form they come in as to SWF (or, really, FLV embedded in SWF). The best thing for this that I found was FFmpeg. It does just about anything. One thing it doesn’t seem to do however is produce SWF… Read More »
When I was home over the weekend, I was working on helping my parents sort out the photos they took while they were in Europe. Doing this, I noticed that the date on the camera was out by a month. Being a stickler for correct metadata, I tried to figure out a way to fix… Read More »
I spent some time over the weekend getting my parent’s new Epson CX5900 printer/scanner to work. It seems to be either so new or so uncommon that Ubuntu didn’t really know what to do with it. So here I’ll document what I had to do (and then I’ll go file some bug reports so the… Read More »
Well, I’m forced to admit now that the evidence is undeniable. It has become clear that the moon landings were faked by NASA. Why else do you think they wouldn’t be able to find those ‘missing’ tapes? More details on the fraud are here.
I’ve finally gotten around to putting all my kallisti.net.nz stuff onto a real server. Well, I guess it’s not a real server, as it doesn’t actually exist anywhere. But it’s a real virtual server, as opposed to the quaint Pentium Celeron 466 that was doing the job. It’s now hosted by TekTonic, who do a… Read More »
A few days back I upgraded my machine to the newest Ubuntu release. As is often the case with upgrades like this, there were a few issues. The main one is a conflict between my M2N4-SLI motherboard and the 2.6.17 kernel. I get the impression that Asus has left quite a few bugs in the… Read More »
Note: most of this is rambling, go to the bottom for the useful technical bit. I’m doing some work with large amounts of data (about 100 million rows), and today I tried loading it all into MySQL on my home machine, so that I could run some collaborative filtering tools over it easily. However, when… Read More »