brainwagon

While reading slashdot, you can’t escape the rants like this about the evils of the MPAA and RIAA. People respond in great numbers to postings like this, and everytime they do, I am baffled by the lack of clear thinking on the subject. This rant will try to isolate a few of the ways that […]

Well, as I place the sage and thyme stuffed bird into a toasty oven, I am reminded that it is Thanksgiving and that I have much to be thankful for. To all of my friends and the odd individual who happens here by random link, I hope that you can sit back and think of […]

I was reading memepool today, and they had an article on Dr. Michael Kelly, a guy who sells video tapes purporting to teach martial arts enthusiasts the dim mak, or Death Touch. What I want to know is “how do you practice enough to get good at it?”

One of my personal pet peeves is creationism: the bastard child of bad theology and bad science. I’m pretty familiar with most of their silly broken arguments, so it was interesting to see many of the worst ones drawn up in color to hang on your children’s wall. It’s hard to actually find anything on […]

Today BMG announced that they are going to stop producing CDs. Instead, they are going to produce specially encrypted CDs which have had problems in many different players. Want to stop this? It’s simple. Just don’t buy their CDs. You want to change the industry: change your buying habits. When you buy a CD with […]

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, […]

ZDNet UK is currently running a story about the comments made by Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer about Microsoft. This provoked the usual backlash of anti-Microsoft sentiment on weblogs like Slashdot, but one interesting point was raised. The ZDNet article says: Asked by one lateral-thinking MVP whether Microsoft planned to offer applications software on Linux, Ballmer […]

I was reading an article on slashdot that announced that OSI (presumably the company that administers Ultima Online) would begin to offer advanced characters for sale, and the resulting outcry from gamers who did things "the hard way" who feel cheated. This made me think.

I’ve been working a bit more on my weblog over the past few days, trying to clean up and remodularize the templates that I’ve been working on. As a result, I’ve got a stack of books on my desk regarding the various bits of web technology that I use. And it started me thinking. And […]

Damn. I love baseball. It didn’t use to be that way. I found baseball to be rather dry and slow paced and not very interesting. But about five years ago I started to go to games. And now I am hooked. And the Oakland Athletics have alot to do with it. Athletic tickets are fairly […]

Just like the talking Barbie who drew the ire of feminists everywhere by claiming that "Math is hard", I find myself asking more and more often "Why is programming so hard?"

Open source software owes its existence to the convergence of three technologies: Fast, cheap computer hardware Fast, cheap networking Cheap compilers Inexpensive PC hardware provides the raw grist for programmers. GCC provided a reasonable way to program this hardware. Cheap networking allowed the fruits of their labors to be propagated to people all over the […]

I love twiddling around with fonts, but let’s face it: most of them completely suck, especially for display on screens and in web browser. Without any doubt, the best widely available fonts were Microsoft’s core webfonts, which used to be freely downloadable from their website. Unfortunately, they recently announced that they were withdrawing free downloads […]