Off you go… into the purple yonder!

Yep, this blog is now equipped with “Level 1: Gentle Encouragement” of Explorer Destroyer. For all you Firefox users out there (a whopping 87% of visitors!), nothing will be different. IE users will see a nice banner at the top of the page, encouraging them switch to Firefox - here’s a demo of the banner [...]

I’ve wondered for a while why so many laptops come with highly reflective screens. Today I found out why: I saw a guy on the subway actually using the screen of his laptop as a mirror to get his hair straightened out!

The Canadian Music Creators Coalition gets it. They believe that suing customers is not smart. That DRM is bad because customers don’t like it - because it causes nothing but trouble. And that cultural policy should support artists, not the major media companies.
Bravo, Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and many others. Speak up [...]

With a lot of help and several patches from the friendly folks over at the LinuxBIOS mailing list, I finally got LinuxBIOS working on the Tyan GX28 hardware.
I’ve put a Tyan s2881 LinuxBIOS build HOWTO on the LinuxBIOS wiki, describing all the steps required to get a stable LinuxBIOS on such a machine. It’s not [...]

In the category ‘completely clueless’ Verizon has decided to blacklist half the planet. Or the whole planet, maybe - it would not surprise me given the reports on Broadbandreports, Nanog, Slashdot, and even our local Boston
Linux and User Group.
They did something similar about 18 months ago where they blacklisted all non-US mailservers. That’s when I [...]

Received a phishing e-mail that made it through ClamAV. Nothing special about the message but the end:
Thank You ,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Management Stuff
I wouldn’t want to deal with any bank that doesn’t have stuff. Would you?

One of my favorite meat-substitutes is Quorn. It can be hard to find in the US but we picked some up the other day, and today I noticed this bit of text on the packaging:
Happily, Quorn products not only contain mycoprotein, but also have that great taste you’re looking for. That’s why, in Europe, where [...]

A picture speaks a thousand words. This article has 2 images that describe “a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture - the same page and picture”.
Just compare the two images, and you will instantly understand why GNU/linux/apache [...]

Debian released a security advisory on Horde yesterday, so I had to upgrade a bunch of machines.
I run Horde/IMP from source. Upgrading to a newer version is kind of annoying; I lost a lot of time doing it. In case you need to upgrade Horde and/or some of its modules, here’s a (relatively) easy way.
1. [...]

An update on the Da Vinci Code lawsuit I wrote about earlier. The claimants have lost the case, thankfully. The key quote from the Post article is by a Boston-based lawyer:
Copyright protects the expression, not the idea
That’s pretty much from copyright 101. Good to know that there are still some limits to copyright.