Doug Kaye reports that Magnatune proprietor John Buckman considers podcasts to be noncommercial uses under the Creative Commons, and as such you can use their catalog freely within podcasts. I’ll be sending him and his artists some of my money very shortly.
Monthly Archives: October 2004
Bring Dead Art Back to Life!
Awesome! Undeadart.org (a division of FreeCulture) is having a contest to remix clips from classic zombie flicks! What an awesome idea! Since the public domain includes the classic Night of the Living Dead, one imagines that you could do a fairly good job of it. They also include a link to the movie Amid the Dead, which I will have to watch when I get home tonight.
Just in time for Halloween!
Boing Boing: Knitting patterns under Creative Commons license
Materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses are becoming more and more popular, and more and more mainstream. As reported on BoingBoing, Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine, and for a special breast-cancer awareness issue, they decided to publish their patterns under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license. Check out the patterns: I’m more of a crochet guy myself, but can knit in a pinch. The socks look comfy.
Happy Anniversary Honey!
Ten years ago I had a job interview with SGI, and afterwards went on a first date with Carmen. I didn’t get the job, but I did get to meet a marvelous woman, and in 2000 I made her my wife. Her patience, kindness and humor all work to make me a better man, and I love her more each day.
Happy Anniversary Honey!
Podcast #25: Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting, Two Reviews and Picking a Linux Distribution
Where your host introduces you to his brother’s venture Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting, reviews the Iogear MiniView 2-port KVM switch, gives his brief thoughts on the movie The Grudge starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, and tries installing three different Linux distributions in a weekend, only to end up back where he began.
Other cool items mentioned:
- Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors
- Max Fleischer’s Superman shorts Billion Dollar Limited and The Arctic Giant
World Series Preview
Well, it’s time for the Series, and it’s Red Sox versus the Red Birds. Here are some pre-series thoughts, along with my prediction.
- Defense: the clear advantage goes to the Cardinals. Manny may be able to swat the ball, but he’s no great shakes in the outfield. The Sox are going to play Ortiz at first when they go back to St. Louis, which may make sense for the offense, but I’m not sure that now is the time for him to try to shake the rust off.
- Catching: Both Matheny and Varitek are terrific defensive catchers, but you’d have to give the edge to Varitek for his ability to crush the ball.
- First Base: Nobody is better than Pujols. Advantage Cardinals.
- Designated Hitter: Doesn’t get much better or hotter than Ortiz: advantage Sox.
- Pitching: The Cardinals may lack the star power of the Red Sox, but can Schilling really come out and pitch another game? Can Wakefield? I’ll still give the Red Sox the advantage in starting pitching, but this is probably what will decide the series.
- Bullpen: If the starting pitcher tonight can go fairly deep, the Boston relievers should be rested enough to carry the rest of the series. I think the advantage will likely go the Sox.
- Manager: It doesn’t get much better than La Russa. Advantage to the Birds.
- Intangibles: I don’t believe in ghosts, and neither should the Sox. If they fail here after their historic 0-3 comeback, they will be hanging their heads forever. They aren’t going to hold anything back, and neither will their fans. Advantage Sox.
What’s all this mean? I really can’t pick between the teams, so I’ll just go with what I would like to see happen: Sox in 7.
Enjoy the series.
Essence of Brainwa…err.. Emeril
Today is kind of a rainy, wet day, and I am stuck at home. My son is off doing something, and my wife is in class all day. A perfect time to cook! I was watching food porn this morning on the Food Network, and caught Emeril’s Orange Pumpkin Soup which sounded just like the thing to warm me up, so a quick trip to the market for ingredients, and the vegetables are roasting in the oven as we speak. It’s beginning to smell pretty damned good.
I’ll let you all know how it turns out.
NASA Crash Tests
You can view all sorts of aircraft crash videos from NASA including the rather famous one of the fuel that was supposed to resist ignition pictured at right. If this is an example of what anti-misting kerosene would do, one is left to wonder what the traditional misting variety could do.
Silly Patent of the Week
In the realm of patents being issued for the obvious, Phillip Torrone of the Edgadget website mentioned in his podcast that photomosaics had been patented in 2000. Sigh. Surely there must be tons of prior art to this idea?
In a brutal act of defiance, I present my own photomosaic of myself. Take that, evil stifling software patents!
Boston vs. St. Louis in the Series…
Okay, I’ve been boring people with baseball talk in the podcast, so I’ll just briefly mention it here: St. Louis defeats the Houston Astros 5-2 in game 7 of the NLCS, and goes to the Series for the first time since 1987. I originally had picked a Red Sox/Cardinals Series, but was dismayed by the 0-3 start by the Red Sox. That will teach me to doubt my powers of precognition.
Joke of the Day…
Contributed by Tom Duff:
Q: What’s the difference between Iraq and Viet Nam?
A: GWB had a plan to get out of Viet Nam.
System Downtime
Something occurred this morning that I have never seen on a FreeBSD-stable box: something glitched and my webserver was hung (I suspect for a very short time) and the webserver was offline. If this affected your ability to read my blog or listen to my podcasts, my deepest apologies.
Podcast #24: The Sox Win! The Sox Win!
Where your host apologizes for his haste in deserting the Red Sox and congratulate them on a terrific ALCS victory in game 7 over the hapless New York Yankees.
Links:
- The Baseball Archive — a downloadable database of baseball games from 1871-2003
- The MySQL Cookbook has many examples which use the database above.
- Retrosheet has play-by-play for all games from 1973-1984, and many others before 1973.
Podcast #23, Go Sox!
Wherein your host is once again proven wrong and the Sox go on to fight another day.
Other items of interest:
- Curt Schilling — hero of the game. Ob. trivia: I believe that Schilling is the current major league player with the most at-bats without getting his first career home run.
- Stellarium — a realistic sky simulator
- Asterisk — an open source VOIP PBX
- Aftermath of Jon Stewart’s appearance on the reality show that is Crossfire.
To Tucker Carlson: you should thank Jon for breathing life into the corpse that is your show.
Stellarium
Today’s cool bit of software is Stellarium: a realistic sky simulator available for both Windows and Linux and Mac OS X (thanks mneptok!). While it is unlikely to fufill the needs of a serious observer of the heavens, it is a dead simple application which provides beautiful views of both the day and night skies. It is supposed to have over 120,000 stars in its database, but the catalog itself seems fairly weak to me: it didn’t seem to have appropriate double star data. But if you are just a skygazer or you frequently scan the sky with small telescopes or binoculars, this program might be just what you are looking for.