Otis Fodder

Band of the Day! Today it is Otis Fodder. I first heard him on the awesome Two Zombies Later compilation album from Comfort Stand. Now he has a whole album of his material, also on Comfort Stand, called Music to Drive Cross-Country By which is available for download at Comfort Stand or the Internet Archive. [...]

In these times…

I’m vaguely following the whole business of Condoleeza Rice, her bosses and their disconcerting unwillingness to testify to the 9/11 commission under oath and in public. Every morning and evening I hear more of the news about it in my car. What I do hear disturbs me. Government officials, testifying to a commission investigating the [...]

Crash Reporting

Here’s a great article from Joel Spolksy on having your applications report home with crashes. This is a subject of interest to me since two programs I use every day, Trillian and Shrook are crashing on me hourly. I liked the whole Mozilla talkback thing, which helped them fix crashing bugs I saw on WheresGeorge [...]

Cygwin and Subversion

Back in October when I found myself having to build a copy of the subversion command line client for
Cygwin, I thought “Hey, I already had to do this once. Why don’t I volunteer to become the package maintainer of this?” It seemed reasonable enough and I made the initial overtures via the proper mailing lists. [...]

Fly the Surly Skies

We watched Airline last night. I have a little more sympathy for the workers of airlines since watching this show. That doesn’t mean that I’m happy when they screw me, but they do catch a lot of shit just for doing their jobs. It struck me last night how many of these issues that people [...]

Stepping Up

This is the beginning of my second week without sodas. Other than adjusting to the lower amount of caffeine I get, it has been pretty much without incident. I suffered from some bad Diet Coke cravings at the beginning, but that has diminshed over time. Now I just drink a lot of water. I’ve also [...]

Optimism Management

Here’s an interesting post from Incipient Thoughts posting the opinion that perhaps it isn’t risk management as much as “optimism management” that software projects need. He points out that optimism is often a contributor or cause of problems, because it downplays the risks. “We don’t have to plan for that, we can just knock it [...]

Rolling Back Freedoms

Here we go. Police in Lousiana no longer need warrants to search your home. A quote from the article:

New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new power will go into effect immediately and won’t be abused.
“We have to have a legitimate problem to be there in the first place, and if we [...]

Georgia Tech in the Final Four

Georgia Tech beat Kansas to advance to the Final Four! I think this is the first time since I was a student there in the late 80’s. Very nice. Like I say, I’m not a huge basketball fan. In fact, I used to live across the parking lot from the coliseum in one of two [...]

More Linux Handhelds

Via correspondent Mike comes two more Linux based handhelds that I never would have known about without his heads up. Royal has the Linea LX coming out soon. It seems to have similar specs to the Zaurus (although lacking a few of the goodies I most like.) The nicest part is that it has a [...]

Shrook Thoughts, Day Two

I am too much of an impatient spazzmo to wait, so even though I was pissed off at not being able to import my OPML file, I went ahead and migrated most of my subscriptions the hard way. I copied the link from my FeedOnFeeds panel, and one at a time created new channels in [...]

Shrook Thoughts, Day One

So this is both my general thoughts on Shrook to everyone as well as an open letter to Graham Parks, who shows up regular as kibo every time I mention Shrook. I assume he’s following Feedster or something to catch folks blogging about it. After having read about it a few days ago and seeing [...]

DRM Woes for Cory

On Boingboing, Cory posts about his problems with DRM’d iTunes purchases. He points out that he is a edge use case that gets hammered because he buys so many Apple products that he is caught in a bind where he can no longer authorize new machines. As he points out:

But I couldn’t. Between my mom’s [...]

YACOT (Yet Another Change Of Tool)

I seem to be in that realm of geeks who is nomadic and restless in my toolset. I swear it seems like every week I’m doing something – learning a new programming language, changing my spam fighting technique, my referer spam fighting, my blogging tool, etc. I’ve been using FeedOnFeeds for 9 months now and [...]

FeedOnFeeds Searching for 0.1.2

A few months ago I released a patch for FeedOnFeeds 0.1.0 to do searching. Here is the same patch for 0.1.2. Just download this zip file and unzip it into the same directory as your FOF 0.1.2 install. It will ask if you want to replace view.php. Say yes and voila – you will have [...]

The State

An unrelated query on Google turned up some information about the comedy troupe The State, late of MTV. I have long been wanting a DVD collection of everything they did, which I think is the finest sketch comedy show ever – yes, even better than Monty Python. At least, that’s how I remember it and [...]

Gentle Readers

After my post about Paul Melancon the other day, in which I mentioned how much I like his guitarist Lee Cuthbert and her band Gentle Readers I was in a mood to spin them. Thus I do. I brought a stack of CDs to work, listened to them all and now I’m listening to Hi [...]

Eat Drink and Be Healthy

On the word of JonnyX I ran out and bought the Walter Willett book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. Willett is suggesting that the USDA food pyramid is part of the reason why Americans are getting so fat. As he points out, it wasn’t developed by an agency promoting health but one charged with making [...]

Fictionwise and RSS

Hey, Fictionwise has RSS feeds now! I added the one for recently added non-DRM books, but they have multiple ones. You can get the same list for the DRM books, as well as best selling books. It’s all pretty cool, and I give them points for actually having the full text of their blurbs in [...]

The Referer Spam Continues

So a few weeks ago I wrote up my solution to my persistent referer spam. I adapted a script I had that would parse out the loads of my web page that include a banned referer URL and add them to hosts.deny. The only problem with that – Apache doesn’t use hosts.deny. Doh! So while [...]

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