The First 100 Years Are The Hardest

COULD 'E-MAIL-FREE' FRIDAYS REPLACE KHAKIS AND KNIT SHIRTS? We all know that e-mail is turning into a huge time and productivity sink, but one lone crusader in Silicon Valley is trying to do something about it. Two months ago Jeremy Burton at Veritas Software decreed that Fridays in his marketing department were to be "e-mail free" -- employees who needed to communicate with each other were instructed to stop by and chat or use the phone. "E-mail is supposed to be this big productivity tool, but it's getting to the point where it is out of control," says Burton, who complains that he was regularly spending two hours a day just dealing with e-mail. The ban applies only to interdepartmental communications and violators are fined $1 per transgression, with the proceeds going toward charity (so far, almost $70 has been collected). Many workers have endorsed the ban, noting the advantages of face-to-face conversations, and Burton says he ...

Quotes Roundup (Newsscan): "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" (Lewis Carroll) "Never retract. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl." (Benjamin Jowett) "We shall not cease from exploration. And at the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time." (T.S. Eliot) Nowher so besy a man as he ther n¹ as, And yet he semed besier than he was." (Geoffrey Chaucer) "Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance." (Samuel Johnson) "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." (W. Edwards Deming)

Newscan Excerpt from 8/20/04: COURT ON FILE-SWAPPING: GET USED TO IT! A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the movie and recording industries can't stretch copyright law to block online piracy of songs and movies. If the decision is appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court could revisit its landmark Sony Betamax ruling that protected from copyright lawsuits products that have substantial legitimate uses. Whereas the same appeals court ruled against file-sharing service Napster in 2001 because it stored illegally copied files on its central computers, today's peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have no central computers -- and cannot even monitor users, let alone control them. The court urged the entertainment industry to adapt to file sharing the way movie studios did after losing the Betamax case: "The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well-...

Sanity Returns to the DMCA Debate The FCC ruled on Wednesday that Tivo's new "To Go" feature is not a violation of the Digital Millenium Copywrite Act. From the CNET article , "TiVo users will be able to share copies of digital TV shows through the Internet with a small number of friends and family members, the Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday."

Concerns Grow over the "new" Copywrite Debates I came across these these articles recently that concern the growing debate about the use of technology to enhance the way we live, work and play. The new "Induce Act" would virtually outlaw all forms of private P2P networks and would significantly dampen innovation for new consumer electronics like Apple's iPod, the Tivo, DVD writers, video on demand, and even "old school" products like the VCR. TiVo Battles Hollywood Over Copyrights Antipiracy Bill Gains New Ally (US Patent Office) Microsoft Research DRM Talk (Electronic Frountier Foundation on Digital Rights Management) Imagine life without the benefits brought about by the VCR over the past 20 years: home video rentals, home theater systems, big sreen/plasma TVs, Dolby Surround Sound, multimedia PCs, camcorders, MPEG, DIVx, etc., etc. The technology may be new but the debate isn't. What happened to " fair use " and...

Quotes Round Up "Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance." (Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary) "Beware the fury of a patient man." (John Dryden) "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." (Ben Franklin) "Things equal out pretty well. Our dreams seldom come true, but then neither do our nightmares." (Charles Kennedy)

FC1 Fedora Core 1 Linux Infrared Remote Control Project (lirc) I'm working on a homebrew lirc-0.6.6 receiver for Fedora Core 1. After extracting the source and running ./configure I immediately ran into complile problems with the following error: make[3]: Entering directory `/home/cwhite/download/lirc-0.6.6/drivers/lirc_serial' DIR=`pwd`; (cd /usr/src/linux/; make SUBDIRS=$DIR obj-m=lirc_serial.o modules) /usr/src/linux-2.4.22-1.2188.nptl/scripts/pathdown.sh: line 4: TOPDIR: parameter null or not set make[4]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-1.2188.nptl' make[4]: *** No rule to make target `lirc_serial.o', needed by `modules'. Stop. make[4]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-1.2188.nptl' make[3]: *** [lirc_serial.o] Error 2 After two days of reading the documentation and searching messages boards for related issues I found a similar solution by googling for lirc TOPDIR: parameter null or not set My problems were resolved when I...

Fun with Reinhold's Yeti More Fun With Tux

Video Codecs Xvid- The open source DivX Codec XviD Users Guide WinXP XviD Installer DivX HowTOs DVD-Video to XviD Conversion Guide VLC - VideoLAN Client 0.7.2 Multimedia player for various audio and video formats

The Way to Work How To Ask Questions The Smart Way RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines

Fedora Core 1 (x86_64) Multimedia Support Yesterday I finally got full multimedia support configured for FC1. I'm successfully running MPlayer 1.0pre4-3.3.2 and K3b 11.9 built from source and optimized for the AMD 64-bit CPU! I've been able to play every DVDs from my personal library without any issues. Thanks to Mauriat Miranda's MPlayer - Fedora Guide set up and installation was a snap! I really like the proton skin. Other skins (including the default Blue) can be downloaded from here . GOTCHA : When I rebooted kudzu attached my DVD/CD Writer combo to /dev/scd1 instead of /dev/cdrom. Therefore my symlink from /dev/cdrom to /dev/dvd was worthless and prevented me from watching DVDs. You can use dmesg after a reboot to figure out what devices the CDROM/DVD Drives are attached to!

Helpul Fedora Core Multimedia resources ESR's Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO (ESR's books and other HOWTOs are entertaining and worth reading!) nVidia display drivers for Linux K3b 0.11.9 CD and DVD burning application for Linux rpmBone locate and resolve source and rpm dependencies rpmSeek Fedora Forum Fedora Chat

Fedora Core 1 / WinXP Dual Boot I've configured my new Shuttle AMD64 XPC to dual boot between Fedora Core 1 (FC1) x86_64 and the Windows XP 64 Bit beta . I'm actually trib-booting my sytem with grub . Unfortunately WinXP-64 was virtually worthless since I couldn't install any of my Win32 programs (installation fails seaching for files sush as windows/system/wsock32.dll). Here is a copy of my /etc/grub.conf: # grub.conf generated by anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file # NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg. # root (hd0,1) # kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2 # initrd /boot/initrd-version.img #boot=/dev/hda default=0 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2188.nptl) root (hd0,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2188.nptl r...

Useful Quotes : "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." (Hunter S. Thompson) "The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it." (Laurence J. Peter) "Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death. (Rollo May) "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." (John Maynard Keynes) "Life Shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." (Anais Nin) "Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities." (Lord Dunsany) "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thi...

Hardware Configuration Updated 5/7/04 : Be sure to use a passively cooled video card if you want to minimize system noise. I replaced the PNY nVidia card with one from XForce (XFX) which is built on the same nVidia GeForce FX chipset. The XFX is passively cooled and uses DDR333 (vs DDR400) SDRAM. Otherwise the XFX is identical to the PNY model. The fan on the actively cooled PNY video card doubled the noise from the Shuttle XPC! Luckily, Tiger Direct agreed to RMA the card with no restocking fee and even paid for the return shipping. What started out as a PC upgrade has become a full scale replacement. Here are the specs for the system components that I have on order from Newegg and TigerDirect . All items are being shipped either UPS or FedX and should be delivered by Sunday! Shuttle XPC SN85G4 Barebones kit AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 512KB L2 Cache, 64-bit Processor XFX nVIDIA GeForce FX5200 Video Card, 128MB DDR, TV-Out, 8X AGP (Updated!) Corsair ValueSelect 184 ...

Thinking About Data Retention on CD/DVD Medias The question of data retention becomes more important as I burn more "stuff" to CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, DVD+R, DVD-RW etc. I found the following articles helpful: CD/DVD 'Longevity' Update Under The CD Covers A Dye To Die For -- Data Preservation Thoughts Understanding CD-R and CD-RW Quick Reference Guide for Care and Handling Guide to Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs (Very informative, excellent diagrams and extensive glossary!)

DVD and Video Support for Linux is quickly evolving. I wouldn't suggest anyone use the VCD/SVCD formats unless disk space is an issue, and disk space if finally getting reasonable. I just picked up a 200GB Seagate drive for $99, after the in-store special and mail-in-rebate. Follow these links if you are looking for more references: DVD Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers) DVDRHelp YoLinux Tutorial: Video, DVD, TV and Multimedia VideoLAN LVE- Linux Video Editor Kino

PVR UPDATE I received the Hauppauge WinTv-PVR 250 from NewEgg - $139 for the retail edition, which includes the remote control, bundled software and free shipping! I installed it on my son's 2.6GHz eMachine running WinXP on Friday night. Everything worked nicely out of the box. I was able to use the bundled software to edit the MPEG capture files and compare recordings from LiveTV as well as the home videos from my Sony Camcorder (which connects to the card's composite Video-Input). The Hauppauge bundle includes Ulead DVD MovieFactory (a $99 value if you need to order it directly from Ulead). MovieFactory has the ability to create custom menus with individual titles, chapters, etc, select film clips for each title, edit the menu soundtrack, back ground, etc. This is a nice piece of software in that it allows you to burn directly the mpeg files directoy to the DVD writer, to create a DVD-ISO image, or to save the raw IFO and VOB files directly into the standard Audio_...

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock TS Eliot was one of my college favorites.

Homebrew PVR - Intermediate Progress With the birth of my daughter Ava last week time is running short... so I've taken the dreaded Windows shortcut till I can get the remaining parts ordered. I purchased a V-Stream USB2800 Xpert DVD Maker video capture card from newegg for $50. It was cheap enough and supported MPEG 2 video with stereo audio encoding (44.1 or 48Khz). I didn't think it would work on Linux (it didn't) but I figured it would be ok on WinXP for capturing some VCDs (320x240) of Ava for the grand parents (it did). Even though the USB2800 technically supports 720x480 mpeg capture, the encoding is done all in software and the USB 2.0 interface significantly restricts the video capture bandwidth (6-8 mb/s variable bitrate (VBR) is required for DVD quality captures). I believe a hardware encoder simliar to the ones used in the Haupguage WinTV 250 PVR cards would produce better quality videos. After several test runs I've determined I'm better ...