Tired

What a week. At the cost of sounding like a broken record CD, it has been a crazy week. After tomorrow, though, I expect clear sailing (not counting normal Christmas hustle and bustle) for the rest of the month. That'd be nice!

It's only 15 days 'til Christmas… are you all ready for it or saying “already?” I'm ready for the Christmas season, but I'm not ready for Christmas day yet. It'd be nice if it was around December 1 right now. Oh, well — still two weeks to finish decorating and all the other good stuff.

KVM Blues

Well, earlier this year I replaced my trusty Linksys 2-port ProConnect KVM with a Belkin E-series 4-port KVM switch. It's never worked quite right with GNU/Linux (I have to switch screens to get things back in order), but I lived with it. Unfortunately, even after adding a USB adapter to get the switch hooked up with the G5, things haven't gone well between the two of them.

The G5 works with the switch and PS/2 mouse and keyboard when I first boot it up, but if I switch and then return to that system, the G5 often doesn't see the mouse and almost never sees the keyboard. A few times, it didn't even see the keyboard at boot. sigh So it looks like I'm going to have to retire a 9-month old KVM and get a different one that works better with Macs (hopefully it will work better with GNU/Linux too). In the mean time, just as a word of warning: be aware that E-series KVM's don't seem to get along with Mac or Linux.

New Look, Same Great Taste

Well, I've been planning to bedeck asisaid for Christmas since the end of October and that fit in neatly with my desire for some improvements in the site's design. Christopher's recent reworking of What in Tarnation!?!? and Avoiding Evil got me even more in the mood to redesign. While I'm still working on some things (like redoing the navbar categories — they really don't fit as well as they did before the site became mostly centered around this blog), I've pretty much revised the look. It's about time: not much has changed on the site for almost two years and I was getting tired of the way things looked.

Obviously, some of it is season specific (it's Ccchrrriiissstmmmmassssss allll oooovverrr the woooooorrrlld… uh, ahem) , but what do you think overall? Is it an improvement? I've tested it on Mozilla, Konqueror and Internet Explorer and everything checks out. I would have tried Safari too, but my KVM switch seems to be getting ready to buy the farm and I can't control my G5 very well atm. sigh

By the way, I realized that last week marked the one year anniversary of the first time I was aware that someone other than Ciaran (who gave me the software to start this blog) was reading this blog — Mr. Wright! It also marks a year since I added comments, so perhaps Christopher, or someone else, was here before that, although I rarely posted anything that was very interesting prior to the redesign of the blogging software that added comments.

The Premier of...

Actually, I don't need this system anymore than I need the Shuttle system I got for free (or actually half price, since I had to buy components for it), but I ended up ordering it anyway in late October. It finally arrived last Wednesday. It's a 2 Hz Dual Processor PowerMac G5. It took almost a month since I custom ordered it with a Radeon 9800 and Bluetooth capability. It's very fast and very nice. I've been too busy to try it as much as I would have liked, but I did take some time over the holiday to set it up.

The thing that really is great about this particular G5 is that it came from TerraSoft, the Apple Authorized Proprietary Solutions Provider that specialized in GNU/Linux. Thus it came with not only Mac OS X Panther, it also came with a preliminary preview release of Teresita's Yellow Dog Linux for the G5. Yellow Dog looks nice, although (as you'd expect with a beta) I'm still fighting with it to give me a proper resolution in X11. Once I get some time to devote to it, I'm sure I'll get it working. Next week, perhaps. It's exciting since, as Linus Torvalds notes, the G5 offers an affordable platform for 64-bit GNU/Linux.

At any rate, TerraSoft deserves a large heap of praise. They got it on Friday, November 14 fresh from Apple. They then delayed shipment (with my permission) because they knew a substantially better version of YD would be out very soon. On Monday, the 24th, they thought they almost had it and they informed me they were upgrading my shipping from 3-day UPS to 2-day UPS for free so that it'd arrive before Thanksgiving. A bug in the new code delayed the system and so it wasn't able to ship until Tuesday. However, TerraSoft still managed to get it to me by Wednesday by eating the cost for next day air (roughly $70 extra dollars over 3-day shipping). In their rush to get it to me, they accidentally forgot to repack the System Restore disc, so this week they sent it to me ASAP using Next Day Air once again. Impressive!

Now I just need to find time to give it a good test.

Not Dead.

Despite rumors of such, I actually am still here. Time permitting I might get a nice post in tonight — if not tonight, tomorrow for sure. I have some last minute work piled up, but I think it should go fairly quickly. Or maybe not.

At any rate, I have some stuff to talk about. I have two new computers sitting under my desk — one of which I really don't need… I'll explain why in my next post.

Happy Thanksgiving

Sorry this is late, but happy Thanksgiving to everyone here! I meant to get this online last night, but after all the turkey and company I was rather busy with setting up a new piece of equipment that arrived on Wednesday. I'll talk about that in a little bit, but for now I just wanted to get my belated wish up.

BTW, what's everyone's favorite Thanksgiving dish (not counting dessert)? My favorite are the delicious homemade mashed potatoes.

iTunes/QuickTime DRM Scheme Disabled

The same fellow who created DeCSS has now created a program that dumps DRM AAC files into non-DRM AAC files.

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the fact that it allows me to take care of legal requirements myself (which I would still obey if I used it) instead of Apple doing it for me — it has always made me uncomfortable that company's are basically saying “yes, we've sold you this song [or something else] but we don't trust you enough to properly use what we've sold you, so we are going to make sure you use it a certain way and sue the pants off of you if you don't use it that way.” At the same time, I wonder if this isn't a big mistake.

If a fairly respectable (is there such a thing?) DRM scheme like that used by iTunes is broken into, the MPAA/RIAA have even more of a case to argue that either (1) tougher legislation is required to stop thosenasty people that clearly want to use this for pirating purposes (indeed, many probably will) or (2) that the Secure Computing Initiativemust be sped up to make it so that hardware prevents people from doingthings like this. While I'd prefer no DRM, I wonder if in the long term this won't lead to worse DRM. No matter what, the law abiding citizens will get hurt while the companies go after the non-law abiding ones that make DRM attractive in the first place.

As I've said before, I think I should be able to do — so long as I follow copyright law — whatever I please with a file I've legally bought or obtained. If I pay $.99 for a song, I should be able to do absolutely anything to it on my computer (since that doesn't in any way cause a loss of value to the copyright holder — I'm still the only person with a copy).

On the flip side however, while I believe that such freedom shouldexist, I realize that iTunes Music Store could possibly serve to cause the inevitable expansion of DRM to at least be a lot more friendly that it might otherwise be. While the idealist in me appreciates someone providing more freedom to me for my legally held music, the practical side of me realizes that such a gain in the short-term will quite likely hurt the promotion of friendly DRM schemes in the future.

So what do you think?

Back!

I'm back… yeah, it was a short trip, but I just couldn't arrange things to get part of the week off. I went to Silver Dollar City yesterday and, as always, it is one of the prettiest Christmas displays you can see. I feel very refreshed at the moment — the Ozarks will do that to you. I'll post more about everything later.

In the mean time, I have a question for the Bourbonite readers of this blog: What's your favorite pie at the Hen House Restaurant? I'd had the French Silk and Chocolate Meringue before (and I have a to-go piece of French Silk in the fridge), but tonight I tried the Coconut Meringue and it was delicious!

Be Back Soon

I'm taking a few days off for some R-n-R in the Ozarks. I'll be back soon and try to post more afterwards (reflections on the Purpose-Driven Life will be one of my next posts — I just finished about an hour ago). I'll also answer the final set of questions on the 40 Days of Purpose small group (sorry, guys, for being missing the last week!).

Driving and My Digital IQ

How did you do? Post yer results (or your answers to the “Sunday Brunch” questions) below.