Monthly Archives: January 2005

MGM DVD Settlement

By | January 30, 2005

As seen recently on Slashdot, MGM recently settled a class action suit involving the image quality of DVDs they sold under the classification of “widescreen”. The claim is that the image width of the alleged widescreen versions was no different than for the standard versions. As per normal class action settlement verbiage, MGM denies any… Read More »

Tasmania

By | January 30, 2005

Last week the San Francisco Chronicle had a nice article on traveling to Tasmania. Sandra and I spent a wonderful week a few years ago driving around the coast of Tasmania and through parts of the interior. I’ve had some photos from that memorable trip posted on this website practically from the day I first… Read More »

Backing up DVDs

By | January 25, 2005

I didn’t realize backing up my DVDs using Linux could be so easy. Time consuming as hell, but fairly easy. Dvd::rip is a front end to a big pile of libraries that do the good deeds. One of the key libraries is transcode, but there’s a lot of other great software underneath the covers that… Read More »

Devaluing Spam Comments

By | January 20, 2005

Sam Ruby has already posted a simple patch to MoinMoin that implements Google’s proposal for a new link type for the rel attribute for the HTML anchor tag. The HTML specification supports the definition of new link types, as long as the author implements a profile. Google has proposed a “nofollow” link type, which will… Read More »

Radiant Decay

By | January 19, 2005

Mark Faigenbaum, an old friend of my wife’s, is having an exhibition and reception January 21 (5-9 pm) and 22 (1-5 pm) at SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc., “also known as The Dump”, with two other artists. Mark is currently an artist-in-residence at the Norcal Waste Art Studio & Gallery. The pieces he will be… Read More »

Wicked Sick

By | January 18, 2005

And in a somewhat less productive use of my time, I earned the “Wicked Sick!” announcement in an Unreal Tournament 2004 Team DeathMatch tonight.

Computer Reuse and Assistance

By | January 18, 2005

Today’s Oakland Tribune has two good articles on computer reuse. One of the articles describes how Oakland Technology Exchange-West, or OTX, has supplied over 5,000 computers to families who would have otherwise found it very difficult to afford a computer. While much of the benefit to these families is financial, I suspect that a first… Read More »

Mice Ate My Car

By | January 8, 2005

Well, not the entire car, but apparently enough of the essential wiring to kill the battery and various other essential engine components. Apparently an industrious set of mice made a nest in the engine compartment of my Audi TT while I was on vacation and proceeded to chew through some of the wiring and miscellaneous… Read More »

Triple Disk Space

By | January 8, 2005

DreamHost, the company that hosts my website, never fails to amaze me. Since I started with them nearly three years ago, they have increased the amount of disk space and bandwidth for my account by a huge factor, while increasing the annual charge for my account by exactly $0.00. They just tripled the disk space… Read More »

WordPress Trackback Spam

By | January 7, 2005

If it’s not one kind of spam, it’s another. A mouth breather recently figured out to spam WordPress-powered blogs via the trackback mechanism. The first spam trackback I got was a bunch of pseudo-random letters. The next ten or so were nasty porn spam. I had to temporarily rename the trackback script to stop the… Read More »