Further indication that the record biz is evil

From The Economist:

According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. No-one knows how much weight to assign to each of the other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself. But creativity doubtless plays an important part.

But, of course, they talk about on-line piracy as being the primary cause of their revenue problems, and they're suing random grandmothers and lobbying congress to create new intellectual property protections.

But go read the whole thing anyway.

Some kid movies

Here's a movie of Laurel completing her first road race - a quarter-mile run, done on October 24th. Note how she dashes around the two kids ahead of her when they lose steam...

Laurel's Race

And here's one of Bea on her baby jungle gym, batting at dangling stuff. She's around 9 weeks old in this movie.

Bea's Baby Gym

You'll need Quicktime 6 to watch these. Click here to get it:

Back at work, and fun with security

OK - after 3 months, my leave of absense from my employer is over. Unlike the first time I tried this, they have neither folded nor laid me off, so I'm back at my desk. And the first order of business is, of course - baby pictures! And while that's going on, I'm doing windows update on my Windows 2003 Server box. Almost 70 megs of updates to download since I left, a lot of which is updates for Office 2000.

Jeez... I remember when 70 meg was a really big hard drive to have in a machine. And now that's not even the size of the OS - it's just the size of 3 months worth of patches to the damn thing.

"Oh beautiful, for purple states"

Found these maps on a link from Lessig's blog.

If you ignore the 'winner-take-all' distortions of the electoral college and want to get a feel for what sort of "mandate" has really been given to the President, an interesting exercise is to color the US map, county-by-county, on a sliding color scale - 100% kerry is all blue, 100% bush is all red, and a 50% Kerry/50% Bush vote would be colored purple. You get a much clearer picture of how moderate the country is. The link also has maps that adjust the shape of the map to correlate size with population, rather than correlating size with geographic area.

Here's the picture the Bush-ites like to show to demonstrate their "mandate":



And here's the picture with the sliding color scale, showing a much clearer sense of moderation:



An interesting tangent is to be found at this blog, which compares the map of red vs blue states to the map of free vs slave states as of just before the civil war. Guess what - there's a pretty close match. It's probably not fair to draw too many conclusions from that; some places like Kansas had a period around a hundred years ago of pretty impressive social radicalism. But not anymore...

These images are (c) 2004, Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, at the University of Michigan, and are used under a Creative Commons license.

Beginnings of a student revolt?

From wired.com:

"Students at a dozen colleges around the country are organizing to teach their peers about the consequences of overly broad copyright law, hoping to prevent creative freedom from being stifled."

About time!

Read the article, and then decide whether to get involved at Free Culture or with the EFF.

More giving credit where credit is due

Annoying little bit of annoyance - Microsoft Virtual PC 7 for the mac doesn't support Windows 2000 server. Win2K Server appears to run reasonably well, but MSFT doesn't support it. Running Win2K Server is actually the *only* thing that I need Virtual PC for.

Wankers.

Palm Tungsten|T sadness, and then happiness

I had to do a hard reset on my tungsten|T. After re-syncing on the mac, I'd get a message that said "Launch Error - The application cannot be launched because it is missing localization information" when trying to click on the 'home' icon.

After some googling, I found the answer. Credit goes to "blueztelecaster" at the palmzone.net forums.

Here's what you should do to fix the problem. FIx make sure that you've HotSynced, so that the information you had before this problem happended is stored on your computer. Then, do a Hard Reset, which means holding down the power button while pressing the reset button on the back. Then remove the Backup Folder from Users>Your Home Folder>Documents>Palm>Users>Your Palm User Name. Take the Backup Folder and put it on your desktop. Hotsync again and everything will be fixed, but you will have to install any extra programs that you have installed over time.

Another option was also given, if you happen to have filez installed:

I had FileZ on a memory card. I mapped a button to launch filez, and deleted the launcher.prc from the internal palm card. That fixed it as well, without doing the backup procedure.


Good to know.

Giving credit where credit is due

I'm retagging some of my mp3s, to add album art. Hoping for an iPod Photo at some point in the distant future...

Although I'm not a big fan of the MusicMatch jukebox program, the MusicMatch super tagger is a pretty nifty app for doing bulk tagging, and adding album art. It also looks like they spent some time cleaning up their database since the last time I used it - the genres are much more consistent than they were a couple years ago.

When I first got my 3rd generation 30gb iPod, MusicMatch was the default app for managing the iPod. This was before iTunes came out for windows. It looks like if you want to use the super tagger now, you have to pay. Luckily, the old version that came with the iPod still works, and does have access to the database.

Update - it's annoying that some of the genres don't make sense - Rush is listed as "hard rock" rather than progressive-rock, for instance. In my experience, whenever someone talks about prog-rock, the canonical bands used to describe that genre are usually Rush and Yes. Perhaps MusicMatch will need to revisit that...

Northern Lights on Sunday

We had noticable northern lights on sunday (Nov 7th). Normally, the aurora isn't even visible in Saint Paul. According to my folks (and the Duluth News-Tribune), they were amazing. Here's a picture (credit to Bob King of the Duluth News-Tribune) taken outside Duluth.

XHTML, CSS, JRun, Apache, and mime types

For one of our consulting clients, we have a site hosted by einsof, who use JRun integrated with Apache 1.3.27 on Linux. We've started doing XHTML JSP templates, and discovered that Mozilla-flavored browsers (including mozilla, firefox, and the Netscape/AOL browser all seem to require that CSS style sheets be sent by the web server with mime type text/css. A little googling turned up a number of discussions of this fact, for instance here and here.

Einsof made the appropriate changes to the Apache mime.types file, but the css files were still being sent as text/plain rather than text/css. Turns out that since they're using JRun 3.x as a servlet engine, a change to the JRun configuration was also required. The change was to add a line to the /usr/local/JRun/lib/global.properties file, like this:

webapp.mime-mapping.css=text/css

Once that change was made and JRun bounced, the style sheets got the correct text/css mime type, and everyone was happy.

Well, thank heaven for small favors

Rumors abound that Attorney General Ashcroft won't be around for a 2nd term. I've remarked in the past that Ashcroft wants to be Santa Claus - he sees you when you're sleeping, and he knows when you're awake. I only hope that his replacement isn't even more of a problem than Ashcroft has been.