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Wednesday, February 28, 2007

RIAA Boycott: Congress Introduces "Fair Use" Bill; They're Totally With Us

Wait a minute… could this be… good news on the DRM front? Really? Somebody pinch me. Reps. Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced their "Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship" (or FAIR USE) Act today, one that aims to make crippled DRM illegal.



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Wiicade develops Wiimote API for Flash

We get the feeling that the Wii browser game scene is about to get awesome, thanks to Wiicade, who were already agents of Wii browser awesomeness. Their new Application Programmer Interface allows Flash developers to easily make use of every button on the Wiimote in their Flash games, even allowing multiple simultaneous button presses



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Organizing your emotions

You use a GTD system to "Get Things Done" for physical tasks. But is it possible to set up an emotional GTD system? This article explores the idea and how to deal with your emotions. Reality checks are now possible.



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The Web's Best Interface Design

"The amount of new web applications, features, and companies sprouting up is just astounding, and while some like to characterize "Web 2.0" design as involving lots of cliché diagonal lines and shadows it still takes a lot of skill to execute an attractive user interface." Author has list of Top 10 site designs and screenshots.



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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

200 year porn sentence stands

The US Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal by a teacher jailed for 200 years for possessing child porn.



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Wii plays burned games without chip, Video

Textbooks video of a wii playing burned games using an lpt cable on his computer



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Top 20 Less Known BitTorrent Sites

We all know about mininova, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz, but what few know is that there are a host of less known torrent sites that also have some great, and sometimes rare, content. Here are 20 of these less known torrent sites.



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Pics: NASA tests moon building

"As a start to its long-term program to return to the moon, NASA is testing a two-room building that could eventually serve as a base for workers and explorers." Insert Lisa Nowak joke here...



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Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?

Windows Vista has a radically different approach to memory management. Check out the "Physical Memory, Free" column in my Task Manager...



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Spoiler Alert! The most famous spoilers in history

A list of the most famous spoilers from film and literature. Who shot J.R., Who is Luke's father, Who was Deep Throat, and many more, all broken down in six words or less.



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Brittany Spears Straight Jacket Doll On EBay

A Brittany Spears doll with a shaved head and a straight jacket is on eBay....weird?



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Is Britney Spears suffering from post-partum depression?

Possible reasons why she's in rehab revealed.



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The queen of Scandal

From the time she burst on to the pop scene with her "...Baby One More Time" in 1998, Britney Spears has been in the limelight, usually accompanied by some sort of scandal or the other. It is amazing how this member of the ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ capitulated into one controversy after another. Her personal life, which has always been in the focus of



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What's New from Britney Spears

Doctors said Britney Spears might have postpartum depression. In the meantime, it is also reported that the homepage of the singer's official Website has a brand new look.



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How to build an inexpensive and powerful Vista PC (around $500)

For everyone out there claiming that you need a very high-end PC to run Windows Vista, this article shows that you don't need to break the bank to enjoy Vista to its fullest



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Because penguins need to play too.

In our chosen career we work hard, we work long and we suffer a lot of stress. So sometimes we need to unwind. The Windows camp have a lot of great games to play and a popular misconception is that Linux is lacking in games. That is not true. There are literally thousands of games for Linux.



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Mathematicians unlock major number theory puzzle

Mathematicians have finally laid to rest the legendary mystery surrounding an elusive group of numerical expressions known as the "mock theta functions." Number theorists have struggled to understand the functions ever since the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan first alluded to them in a letter written on his deathbed, in 1920.



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6 Tools for Web Design

Here are 6 useful mac and web related tools for web design.



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Turn your iPod in a FLASH based iPod.....

In this little proof-of-concept I was eager to try out if I could swap the Microdrive inside an iPod mini for a Compact Flash-card. These cards are getting bigger and cheaper by the day so my idea was, if this works out, we have a great way of extending the life of this little MP3-player.



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Science Vs Faith. A simple picture says it all.

This picture is funny and tragic at the same time.



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Will classrooms still exist in 20 years?

This article is one of many that point out the fact that learning with podcasts is fun, practical, and effective. Will classrooms still exist in 20 years?



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Hack Attack: Top 13 iTunes AppleScripts

Today I'm rounding up my 13 favorite iTunes AppleScripts, from simple "why isn't this already in iTunes" add-ons like automatically removing dead tracks to more interesting scripts that build playlists and search for your music in Wikipedia.



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How to Rip Off Best Buy, Circuit City, and even Fry's Electronics, etc.

Many stores use an illegal practice that goes undetected. When you find a store that does, scheme hundreds off your next big purchase and totally stick it to the man.



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Phil Harrison: PS3 Demand Is Unprecedented

Here's the latest from Sony's spin machine... "Talk to the people who run GameStop, talk to the people who run BestBuy, and they'll tell you that the demand is unprecedented and that they give us kudos for managing to keep a very sophisticated supply chain moving."



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NBA Launches YouTube Contest

The “Post Up the NBA” competition is asking fans to submit clips of their best basketball moves and rate clips posted by others.



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Free Swag for gamers - Is Konami RPG Stars worth your time for freebies?

Review of community site, Konami RPG Stars. Is all the time put into the site gaining points for items worth it? Check out our review to find out the answer.



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Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

It's no wonder recruiting good developers is difficult when (quoting the article) "199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever."



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miniAJAX.com - Amazing DHTML and AJAX Code

All for free, this site has some excellent DHTML and AJAX code you can download. Under Drag and Drop it even has the basics of an AJAX homepage!



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DuggMirror - We all use it every day - Time to show it some love by digging

Digg and DuggMirror allow all of these other sites to reach fame and fortune. How about giving duggmirror a little love and respect. We owe it to them to get as many diggs as possible. If it weren't for them, you won't have seen the Top 10 ways to XXXXXXX or the Google trick to XXXXXX. If this hits the front page, what will happen? Loops?



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James Kim's Body Found

Spotted from helicopter



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Apple Announces iPhone

Here is a pic of the iPhone from today's keynote. Runs OSX.



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Jon Stewart interviews the founder of Craigslist.com

From "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" (2/26/07): Jon talks to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark about how to build a successful internet company without selling out.



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Barack Obama "I Inhaled Frequently. That Was The Point"

Nice to see some honesty from politicians.



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Bill Maher on Scarborough Country -- Religion Debate

Bill Maher on Joe Scarborough's show discussing the validity of religion.



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What it's really like to switch to a Mac

Poke around the net for a while searching for information on what it’s like to switch to a Mac, and you’ll quickly get a face full of hyperbole, zealots, platform bigots, feature weenies, and naysayers - from both the Windows and Mac camps. But there are precious few places to get an honest word about what it’s like to switch...



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Fixing a PowerBook non-working ambient light sensor

A work-around for PowerBooks when the back-lit keyboard and ambient light sensor no longer function properly. This returns it to proper functioning without third party programs like Lab Tick and with the keys functioning—all with just a bit of tape.



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25 startups to watch

It's getting crowded on the Web 2.0 frontier, but there are still some startups that truly stand out. Business 2.0 Magazine identifies the ones most likely to strike gold in 2007.



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The buySAFE Revolution?

Brian Smith at Comparison Engines recently did a comprehensive post analyzing buySAFE's prospects in 2007.



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PICTURE: Geeky Girlfriend Makes A World Of Warcraft Themed B-Day Cake

"My a good friend makes kick-ass cakes as a hobby. Last year she started dating my old roomate who plays World of Warcraft a fair amount around his job; for christmas she aquired a "WoW stole my boyfriend" t-shirt. She is good-natured about his love of Warcraft, however, as shown by the birthday cake she made him three weeks ago"



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Run Windows Vista for 120 days without activation key

...turns out there's an officially supported way to turn that [Vista] 30 day evaluation period into 120 days.You can "re-arm" the trial period for another 30 days, and do so up to 3 times. Here's how it works



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Florida Appeals Court Rules Against Girl Based On Fantasized Future Events

Amber and Jeremy are too young to be listed on a sex offender registry, thank goodness, but there is no doubt that their privacy was violated, and there is no telling what kind of psychological effect this circus has had on them.



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I will not throw paper airplanes in class

See for yourself...



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Mother coached her kids to fake being mentally challenged to get paid.

Rosie Costello, 46, admitted in U.S. District Court that she collected more than $280,000 in benefits, beginning in the mid-1980s. According to the plea agreement, Costello began coaching her daughter at age 4, and later used the same ruse with her son.



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Microsoft Extends Windows XP Support To 2014

Microsoft on Wednesday extended support for its Windows XP Home and Windows XP Media Center operating systems through 2014 to match policies already in place for the business-oriented Windows XP Professional.



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Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez to Seize Foreign Oil Projects on May Day

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ordered by decree on Monday the takeover of oil projects run by foreign oil companies in Venezuela's Orinoco River region. "The privatization of oil in Venezuela has come to an end," he said on his weekday radio show, ''Hello, President.'' "This marks the true nationalization of oil in Venezuela."



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PlayStation 3 for $10! Holy crap! I can't belie-- wait a minute.

Maybe a PS3 is a little out of your price range, as it is mine -- but there's hope. Fortunately, some kind souls from Hong Kong have created a low-cost, high-sexy revision of the PS3 which, incidentally, only plays Famicom carts and has wired controllers. Also no Blu-Ray. Oh, and you can't connect it to the internet. Oh, it's a Famicom clone.



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New Borat DVD Packaging Makes it Look Pirated

The funny thing about the official Borat DVD Release is that there is not a word of English on it anywhere describing it. The DVD cover also appears like a color photocopy of an original DVD cover, complete with off color tones, slightly blured company logos, slightly blurry text and moire pattern



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OpenCongress Aggregates U.S. Politics

For those interested more in issues than politicians, the site offers a wide-angle lens look at the big issues such as health care or criminal justice as well as tracking of legislation before the House and Senate. The site is a must stop after reading any news article to give readers access to all the information the political reporters,



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"Cinegames" = Video games in movie theaters - coming to USA soon

This $390,000 setup involves entire modified movie theaters in Spain, which have been hugely successful when also tested in Germany and Canada. The plan for America is to replace the 20 minute movie previews with interactive games for the audience to play, including Battlefield1942 for teens, and Bingo for elderly.There's educational goals as well.



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India fences off Bangladesh to keep out Muslim terror

INDIA is accelerating construction of a 2,500-mile fence on its border. Gov't officials & western diplomats are alarmed by increases in terrorist attacks by groups linked to Al-Qaeda & by government’s failure to crack down. A group said to have links with the government claimed 500 synchronised explosions in 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts in Augus



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Apple adds Ms. Pac-Man iPod game to iTunes Store

New iPod games have been few and far between in recent months, but Apple just added another one to its iTunes Store. Ms. Pac-Man is the game, and it's a faithful conversion of the classic arcade game. Ms. Pac-Man has four unique maze designs, and 256 levels to chomp your way through. The game also features the original animated intermissions.



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Geek Squad Charges $415 Dollars To Replace A Hard Drive...

...and makes customer retrieve data files himself. Geek Squad: Price to diagnose was $69.00, OS Install $129.00, Back up transfer $99.00, NO Guarantee. Estimated repair time seven to ten days. "Seven days later, they hadn't even looked at the machine. After 8 days, they'd begun testing the laptop..." read on for more.



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Why Digg Didn't Add a 'Pictures' Section

Digg augmented the pre-existing categories on the site today with 'Microsoft' and 'US Elections 2008'. Conspicuously missing from the mix is the much vocally demanded 'Pictures' category. Here's a look at why this may be the case, and how it may ultimately be implemented.



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The Geek Ring: Binary Wedding Bands

This is probably the only ring I would wear. My wife was kind enough not to force me to wear a wedding band. But I would totally wear this one.



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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

LCA 2007 My Day 3

Yesterday was the last day of linux conf au. As usual it was the mad rush from work to get to my first session, at least this time I wasn't late. The session was Robert McQueen's "Telepathy - Unifying IM, Voice and Video Communications". This was very interesting and after seeing the video demo using a Nokia N800, apart from wanting one, I will be keeping an eye of this project.The next was Andre Pang's "Erlang and Concurrency" talk. Andre is an excellent and entertaining speaker. This talk investigated everyone's dislike or fear of threading, and then explained the advantages of Erlang's message passing distributed model. Every year I try to learn a new language, maybe it will be Erlang this year or maybe I should just look at Stackless Python.After lunch, it was Rob Collins, Erik de Castro Lopo, and Peter Miller's "Do it our way" presentation. After attending their tutorial on Thursday, I was looking forward to this talk to hear about the other testing patterns they feel we should be using. Learnt a little bit more and looking forward to the release of the paper. They also intend to create a website to allow sharing of these testing patterns.The last session I attended was Valerie Henson's "Choosing and Tuning Linux File Systems". Picked up a couple of interesting things, but the main take home of the talk was "use ext3 unless you know you need something else".The day for me ended with the closing ceremony. Two of the conference attendee's went home with a olpc after being selected based on their submissions for a olpc software project proposal. Others who submitted a proposal were told not too cry as it was likely that a olpc was coming there way as well. I intend to have a play with the olpc emulation soon.Thanks to the 7 team for a great conference and to all those who took the time to discuss OSS stuff with me.

SyPy Social Meetup

Last night was the second meeting of the Sydney Python Users Group for 2007 and we had a good turnout.There was a wide range of topics discussed including:
Unit Testing
Software Deployment
Distributed Version Control
Apache and WSGI - more about this in another postSo if you are in the Sydney and are interested these types of topics, why not join us the first Thursday of each month. Details of the next meeting can be found at:http://groups.google.com/group/sydneypython/web/sypy-homeHope to see you in March.

mod_wsgi - simple and fast apache wsgi serving

There are a many ways to serve a WSGI application via Apache with FastCGI appearing to be the favorite. If you have to support many diverse operating systems running different versions of Apache, serving a WSGI application via CGI is a guaranteed but not fast deployment method. You may be wondering why I haven't suggested the WSGI mod_python adaptor as a solution. I am sure it is a workable alternative but it requires mod_python and I have had lots of issues getting it to compile for some platforms and to work with a specific Python interpreter. Now there is a new solution.Graham Dumpleton has been working on an Apache module called mod_wsgi. Quoting from his website:"The mod_wsgi adapter is an Apache module that provides a WSGI compliant interface for hosting Python based web applications within Apache. The adapter is written completely in C code against the Apache C runtime and for hosting WSGI applications within Apache provides significantly better performance than using existing Python based WSGI adapters for mod_python. The module can be compiled for and used with either Apache 1.3, 2.0 or 2.2."I have been lucky enough to get early access to the code and try it with my WSGI applications. I able to compile, configure and have mod_wsgi running a simple WSGI application under Apache 2.0.55 and Python 2.4.3 in under 5 minutes, Certainly a much better experience than I have had with mod_python. Since I have been testing it on my "gutless" laptop rather listing the results of my benchmarking, I will leave Graham to publish his more comprehensive benchmarking results. But I will make some observations. It appears to run simple WSGI applications at least twice as fast as mod_python and 15-20 times faster than using CGI. I was also able to run a number of my WSGI applications that use either Pylons or combinations of WSGI middleware with no problems. At yesterdays SyPy meeting, Graham showed it running Django. The official release will hopefully be in March.

mod_wsgi Performance

Graham Dumpleton has published his benchmarks for mod_wsgi.

Blog of Note?

Today this blog is Bloggers "Blog of Note". Well that explains the abnormal traffic statistics.

FePy now shipped with Mono 1.2.3

From the Mono 1.2.3 release notes:"In this release, we are now shipping the IronPython Community Edition (IPCE) from Seo Sanghyeon. IPCE includes a number of preconfigured libraries with IronPython to improve your IronPython developing experience."This is release 5 of IPCE but Sanghyeon continues to improve it and the latest can be checked out from IPCE repository.