brainwagon

As part of my preparation for the Hackers conference, I decided to use open source software to make a nice presentation, and instead of presenting it on a laptop, use a DVD player as my presentation medium. I’ve been experimenting a bit with vcdimager, a VCD authoring system, and have made a couple of nice [...]

Well, the World Series is over. Sigh. The Giants had their opportunities. Saturday’s game was in the bag. And then it wasn’t. And then they were behind. And then they lost. And then they lost again on Sunday. And just like that, the Anaheim Angels were champions, and Barry Bonds was scowling. Don’t get me [...]

I was toying around with GNU vcdimager this week, trying to make some nice interactive video CDs. I was looking for some video footage in VCD MPEG-1 format to use as a test, and came up with a couple of options The Prelinger Archives offers many films in VCD format, including such classics as A [...]

Slashdot is currently running a thread under the rather sensationalistic title The End of Minix. It declares that since the XFree86 project has decided to drop support for the Minix operating system, that it is dead. Andy Tanenbaum wrote Minix to educate students on the construction of modern operating systems. It is a microkernel system, [...]

After the Giants came from behind to beat the Cardinals on Sunday in a brilliant and exciting game, my wife decided that we needed to go to Game 5. Carmen and I have been to quite a few playoff games in the last three years with the Athletics, and have yet to see a victory [...]

Since my wife has endured so many of the movies that I wanted to see (mostly having the words ninja, vampire or cheerleader in the title), it was finally her turn to pick a movie, and she selected My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Despite it’s lack of gunfire, explosions, criminal masterminds or supermodels, I must [...]

Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a challenge of the Constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This act extended the term of all current copyrights by an additional 20 years. The net result of this is that no currently copyrighted works will enter the [...]

Thanks to Wayne Wooten, who sent me to this Ig Nobel prize winner. Surprisingly decorative and informative!

While tinkering around the house the other day, I remembered that my wife’s old laptop had suffered some kind of win98 related meltdown (it claimed it was missing a dll and could no longer boot) and was in need of a new operating system. Simultaneously, I realized that I had some of these little 3″ [...]