Fun Use Of Clip-Art

Get Your War On (also known as GYWO) is an amusing clip-art based comic.

This comic was in response to the New York Times “Ooops! We should have done something called Fact Checking instead of believing the Bush Administration’s horse shit for the last year. Our Bad!” editorial.

The Wal-Mart Prank

The Wal-Mart Prank (as seen on DrunkenBlog) is a hilarious story of revenge against the morons who work at Wal-Mart. Late night shopping at Wal-Mart is great. Where else can you buy a cartload of Pepsi at dirt cheap prices at 1am, meet fellow shoppers in inappropriate clothing and then see how far down the road a shopping cart will roll?

Bush Election Campaign Outsources To India

Apparently the RNC outsourced some of its telemarketing… errr… fund-raising for the Bush re-election campaign to a company in India. At least until the whole outsourcing thing in general became unpopular in the press…

HindustanTimes.com: Bush election campaign ran from Noida call centre

Is The Editor Trying To Say Something?

Today’s candidate for Best Article Photo Ever is: Boston.com: Russert BC speech stresses values.

It must have been exciting to be there!

Spring Weather

I have been loving the weather lately. It actually feels like spring for the first time in a few years.

For the past few days we have been having brief thunderstorms during the afternoons and during the early morning hours. I got back to my apartment shortly after 6pm just in time for a quick 10 minute thunderstorm with some light hail. The wind felt great and the air had that clean smell that I can’t really describe.

I’m hoping this weather keeps up…

Sirius on Dish Network

Dish Network now carries quite a few stations from Sirius Satellite Radio. They seem to be included in all packages starting at America 120 (the package I have) and higher. It looks like all the music channels are included but the talk channels are not.

After listening to various channels I have to conclude that Sirius sucks. Their choice in songs and programming in general is lackluster and boring. I hope this crap does not cause my rates to be increased in the future to pay for this. Of course this comes as no surprise as I did have the same conclusion after using their free 3 day Internet streaming trial.

Freedom 0

This blog entry on the recently announced new licensing terms of the Moveable Type blog software package discusses the importance of freedoms given by opensource licenses.

I’m very glad that I chose WordPress over Moveable Type weeks before these announcements. I didn’t like Moveable Type’s license at the time and I was afraid a future version would change the terms and pricing (surprise!). WordPress has met all my needs.

When I pick a software package I consider the following criteria: How much freedom do I have?, Is it a suitable choice? (does it get the job done and is it flexible enough?), and How much time and money would it cost?

Games are something I’m willing to buy under proprietary terms. They are a consumable that I can’t produce myself and what is available for free or is open have been historically unsuitable. As long as the games are licensed with decent fair use terms, entertain me, and are not too expensive, I’ll buy them. Games are a disposable consumable form of entertainment in software form. I’ve decided I’m willing to pay $X dollars for Y hours of enjoyable entertainment.

Blog software on the other hand is different. My website is something I’d like to tweak and be able to customize any way I want. I may wish to distribute any modifications in the future. I don’t really feel like spending money for something that I have the knowledge level to write myself. Purchasing a license for Moveable Type would mean giving up quite a few freedoms for something I could do myself. The terms could be changed in future revisions leaving me with an old abandoned version with no way to fork or easy way to collaborate with other people to maintain. With Moveable Type the cost of the loss of freedom and the monetary cost of the package did not justify paying for the functionality I would get.

I find myself valuing the freedom part of the equation more and more these days. But I still think proprietary software has its place… It just has to offer more value for the costs than many software companies and packages have done in the past.

Video Player Problems

The xorg X windows system seems to have problems with the xv extention. The symptom of this problem seems to be that you can get your desired resolution and color depth but when you try to use applications that use the “xv” extention these applications crash. A couple such reports are in freedesktop.org’s bugzilla bug #590.

Video player applications are the most popular users of the “xv” extention. I’ve noticed that mplayer and totem crashed quite a bit since I had upgraded to Fedora Core 1.92 and then the latest rawhide tree. I had blamed it on prelink and exec-shield issues caused by the fact mplayer and totem use win32 dll files to play some codecs. Then today I noticed that after leaving my system on for a couple of days not even video files with native codecs would play. After prelinking my entire system a few times with different opions and playing with exec-shield settings it became clear that prelink and exec-shield had nothing to do with it.

EDIT: The workaround didn’t work. The problem comes back after a couple hours.

Bush’s War On Cops

The International Brotherhood of Police Officers has apparently chosen to back Kerry in the 2004 election over Bush (Daily Kos article) after backing Bush in 2000.

“Bush’s War On Cops” is a great article that covers how Bush administration choices are ultimately shafting Police departments.

Excerpt from the article:

How can cities be so foolish as to cut their police forces and spark an inevitable rise in crime? Part of the problem is the state and local fiscal crisis that has hit communities across the nation. But faced with the need to trim budgets, most cities have first cut health, education, and transportation spending, and tried to preserve their police forces. The real cause of the police shortage is not in City Hall but in the White House. The Bush administration’s first budget eliminated all direct funding for street cops. The war in Iraq, fought largely without allies, has required the call-up of huge numbers of reserves, many of whom are cops. And instead of using the men in blue as eyes and ears on the domestic war on terrorism, the administration has, in effect, used them as glorified security guards. The federal government’s repeated directives to local police to beef up patrols at potential terrorist targets have taken officers away from their regular duties. And because the feds have not paid for many of these extra patrols, homeland security has stretched local budgets even further.

Interesting FPS Engine

A new FPS game is on the market called Far Cry. While I’m not a big fan of the FPS genre these days I found this video covering the Crytech engine to be very interesting.