Three years later and mozilla is still cool, and Apocalyptica still rock (and have a new album!).
Further updates as events warrant.
What I learned this week:
Oracle's database pooling implementation is not suitable for production, if by production you mean any application you want to stay up longer than 24 hours.
Jakarta's DBCP and pool libraries, on the other hand, rock. They will also save your ass when you make the mistake of using crappy closed source libraries.
A read this later link; although this jumps out: "Downtown Vancouver, B.C., is becoming a glittery, mini-Manhattan, but cleaner and far more livable."; which seems a bit of a stretch to me.
So, I bought the new Massive Attack CD, 100th Window, today. Once I brought it home, I started to rip it to mp3s (as I do with all music I buy), and the thing will not rip. I take a closer look at the packaging, which has this:
This disc contains copy control technology. It is designed to be compatible with CD audio player, DVD players and PC-MS Windows 95, Pentium 2, 233Mhz, 64MB RAM or higher, MAC 8.6-9 *with the carbonlib extension and mac OS X. ... This label copy information is the subject of copyright protection.
(Aside: dig the meta-copyright notice.)
Also, the disc doesn't have the CD logo, which I guess means it's not a real CD.
Now, this pisses me off on several levels, but the biggest issue for me is this: I own this CD, and I believe I should be entitled to listen to it for personal use as I see fit. If I choose to do it in the form of mp3s, I should be able to do so. To abuse the CD format on the assumption that I'm going to let others copy from me (which I don't do) is the kind of thing that will make me an ex-customer. If all CDs were to go this route, I will stop buying them.
This sucks.
Yesterday I received 602 hits from searches for some variant of smokinggun, all due to this post about my own accidental visit to smokinggun.com instead of thesmokinggun.com. The poor guy who runs smokinggun.com (where you can get some killer bookmarklets) doesn't seem to pleased with things:
There are no documents on Joe Millionaire, Michael Jackson or anyone else at this website. There never were. Don't email asking where they are.
You have come to the wrong place.
So many users have come here on accident that I am being charged $760 in service fees for last month. I normally pay $25.
I hope my post has at least helped some people on their way to the right place, which, again, is THEsmokinggun.com. Enjoy.
Went and saw the LAGQ (Los Angeles Guitar Quartet) at the Chan today. They can play - their (hilarious) deconstructed version of Pachelbel's Canon ("Pachelbel's Loose Canon") went from classical to latin to rock (complete with shouted PACHELBEL!) to jazz. And that was just the fun thing they did for the encore - the regular program was excellent. Check 'em out if you get the chance.