The Netizen's Journal

I have to do so much stuff to get my travel voucher... some of which is going to require some very clever paperwork.

I got to Charleston about two weeks ago - it's amazing. The weather is awesome every day, the base is beautiful, and it's a lot of fun to be in an operational C-17 unit. I still have tons to learn, though - even in my two weeks of in-processing, sitting at a desk, I've seen and heard so much stuff that I've started to understand just how much I really don't know. Luckily I'm only an airman, so I'm not expected to know all of this stuff.

mpd-libnotify 0.1.2 is now available for download. Fixed in this version:

• If a field (artist, title, album) contains special characters, they'll be escaped properly.

In the never-ending browser wars, Opera has one amazing feature that none of the other browsers have. Being creatures of habit, we have a handful of favorite websites that we visit on a regular basis. And everybody loves time-saving devices, so Opera built a speed-dial tool into their 9.5 release. In a 3-by-3 grid, you put websites that you are most likely to visit when you open a new window or tab. A screenshot of the website makes it easily identifiable, and the simplicity of the interface make it very easy to use. The end result is a fantastically quicker way to open up your favorite websites.

But my preferred browser, Mozilla Firefox, doesn't have this tool, except in an extension, and we all know how many system resources those Firefox extensions use up. So I built my own implementation of the speed dial tool.

MPD is an approach to music playing that is relatively unique - instead of having one program that plays the music, controls the playlist, and pauses and plays everything, mpd uses a client-server model. The actual daemon, mpd, plays the music, and you connect to it with any number of clients to handle the playlist and controls. (I like ncmpc for handling the playlist, and mpc for quick keyboard shortcuts.)

Josh Woodward, one of my favorite independent musicians ever, has had a policy of releasing all of his music for free, as well as selling CDs of his music for name-your-own-price. In keeping with my policy of publicizing things that I love, I'd like to recommend that you check out his new album - a two-part disc called The Simple Life.

On April Fool's Day, Youtube rickrolls you: http://www.youtube.com
Which one does not belong?: http://www.thinkgeek.com
Our big brother gets bigger every day: http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
Never having to admit that you forgot: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html
I thought my cache was really, really messed up: http://questionablecontent.net, http://qwantz.com, and http://xkcd.com

Over the entire course of human history, information, culture, and their movement have been controlled and regulated by the all-powerful minority. In the 14th century, it was kings and princes - in modern times, it's governments, publishing houses, and broadcasting corporations. If you don't go through the proper steps (usually making payment), you're not allowed to use or transfer information or bits of culture.

When you create a product that you want to release to the public, you can license it under any terms you wish. But we're not all lawyers, nor can we all afford lawyers to write the language that determines how our products can be used. This is where the myriad of pre-written open source licenses can help. But which license are we to use? What is the difference between the MIT (X11) license and the BSD license? (Not much.) What advantages do the LGPL provide over the GPL? (It depends on what the software will be used for.)

I quote the ClockingIT website: "ClockingIT is a hosted application for tracking all your tasks, issues, projects and time spent, with a focus on software development and handling large amounts of tasks." And it's absolutely amazing, too.