fuel pump

Posted on March 14, 2006 by ward

So I should be in Switzerland now. And I was underway, in fact the plane had just passed Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada when the pilot announced a fuel pump had died, and we had to return to Boston. Too bad we had not reached the point of no return.

So I’m on the (extra) 16.45 flight this afternoon instead.

They gave us taxi vouchers upon return to Boston, for a company called Town Taxi. However, that company doesn’t actually have a presence at the airport – so I was waiting a very long time for a cab. But I did get back home by half past midnight.

This is the first time I flew Swiss since vowing never to do so again 4 years ago, after they changed the date of my flight from Christmas day to Christmas Eve and refused to do anything about the resulting problems this caused for me due to with connections from another international flight. Not exactly the most flexible of airlines…

Better luck today, hopefully!

If you like Sudoku, check out Ironsudoku. It’s a well implemented daily puzzle – good example of a smooth rails ‘web 2.0′ application. Update: it’s PHP. Duh – my bad.

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OLPC

Posted on March 13, 2006 by ward

MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), i.e. the famous $100 laptop, is now planning to use LinuxBIOS! Check out the proposed hardware specs.

This is major : there are currently no laptops that can run LinuxBIOS. If this happens, there will be millions of them. Of course this will be just one very low-end design – but this might bring Turion64-based laptop LinuxBIOS support closer. I can’t wait!

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Open Standards | Leave a comment

Google Mars

Posted on March 13, 2006 by ward

OK, this is way cool: Google Mars. If you’ve ever read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, some of the names of geological formations should be familiar. Check out Olympus Mons – 21 km (!) above… above what actually? How do they determine the ‘sea level’ if there is no sea?

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

docking boxes

Posted on March 13, 2006 by ward

WordPress 2 uses Docking boxes which are pretty nice. I’ve integrated them into one of my projects, and other than the fact that there seems to be a limit of 10 boxes on the number of boxes whose state is stored in the cookie, they work very nicely. They’re pretty simple to integrate too.

My only other gripe with them is that when going to another page, the boxes go to the default state first, until the dbx code is loaded and the stored state is restored. That’s a pretty annoying visual effect. But maybe I should try domFunction by the same author to deal with that. To be continued.

April says I should just dump the ‘dropped’ document in the mail, and that the USPS will return it to sender since there is no postage affixed. I think I’ll do that – at least the thing will be off my plate. And those people seem too incompetent to respond to an e-mail, so I don’t really care anymore.

Off to Switzerland tomorrow. Woo!

Update: I’ve fixed the 10-box limit for dbx. Patch in the forum on the site, and in the mailbox of the author. As patching someone else’s javascript goes, this was surprisingly painless.

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lawst

Posted on March 11, 2006 by ward

We went to see the ‘parody 2006′ at Harvard Law yesterday. It was hilarious – even though I only got maybe 25% of the jokes, not actually being in law school. Recommended – the last performance is tonight, and I think there are still tickets.

In other news the people who drop documents (see my previous post) have not gotten back to me. Idiots.

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dropping stuff

Posted on March 9, 2006 by ward

I don’t know what it is, but I really often see people drop stuff when I’m walking the streets of Boston. Last sunday coming out of the supermarket, I had to run after someone who had lost a bottle of gatorade from her shopping cart. And today, waiting for the bus in Lechmere, this guy barely catches the 80 dropping what turns out to be a fully addressed global express mail package. No postage though, so I can’t just drop it in the mail. I traced the sender – Google is my friend, always :) – and sent them an e-mail asking what to do with it…

At least this should do wonders for my karma…

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useless AIM SDK

Posted on March 6, 2006 by ward

So AOL has released an AIM SDK allowing third parties to interface directly with the AIM network. Great news, right? Well, not really. The FAQ states:

Developers are not permitted to build Custom Clients that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network.

Not only that; you also need to get a ‘key’ from AOL to use the SDK, and there are licensing agreements involved, and limits on the usage of the key, etc. Lots of red tape. Oh, and while they say there are plans for a GNU/Linux/OS X SDK release, the SDK is currently Windows only. Yawn.

I’m filing this release under the category ‘completely useless’ and will happily continue using Gaim.

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greed

Posted on February 28, 2006 by ward

So now the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, a non-fiction book from 1982, are suing Dan Brown in the UK for copyright infringement. They claim he “lifted the central theme” from their work and used it in The Davinci Code. The contested ‘theme’:

The theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child, and the bloodline continues to this day, with the Catholic Church trying to suppress the discovery.

So even if he did, what on earth does that have to do with copyright? You can’t copyright ideas. Let’s just hope the court does not forget that.

Why are they suing only now? The Davinci Code movie will be released in May – these people are just opportunists.

Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks | 1 Comment

confiscating Firefox CDs

Posted on February 24, 2006 by ward

This article is simply unbelievable. A UK ‘Trading Standards Officer’ confiscated Firefox CDs that were being sold by a company in the UK. Key quote: ‘If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation’.

Somebody bring a very large cluebat please.

In other news, I’ve got the flu :(

Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks, Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

opensparc!

Posted on February 18, 2006 by ward

I missed this earlier in the week, but it seems Sun has promised to release the full chip design for their new UltraSparc T1 “Niagara” processors under the GPL. They’ve already released some more general information at the OpenSparc website.

The T1 is a pretty interesting beast. It has 8 cores with 4 pipelines each, which makes it appear as a 32-way CPU. It’s 64 bit, of course, and does not draw very much power. Having the design released under the GPL would take Free Hardware one (huge) step closer to reality. Free Hardware is our ultimate defense against the DRM that is spreading rapidly across new – proprietary – hardware designs like HDCP, EFI, etc.

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