We would rather be ruined than changed

In January 2007 I published the GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a simple comparison of the options available to GNOME users for handling their day-to-day playback needs. It proved to be so popular that in December of 2008 I did a followup, excluding some abandoned players and adding some new ones. Though it hasn’t been quite [...]

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§5650 · August 29, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , ,

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Starting August 15th, Amazon’s web service API started requiring all requests to be signed—that is, they must include a cryptographically generated key. This is important, because while the service as always required an ID to run, it was never a secret. In fact, the former developer’s access ID has been embedded in the Now Reading [...]

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§3966 · August 19, 2009 · 27 comments · Tags: , , ,


I have providing some light maintenance development for Rob’s Now Reading plugin; since WordPress 2.7 wholly changed its interface, the plugin need some tweaking to make it work. Up to this point, I’ve been hosting it locally, mostly picking at it whenever time allows. I just updated it the other day to add a new [...]

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§3904 · July 1, 2009 · 15 comments · Tags: , , ,


rev. 15 April 2009; get the PDF The laws that protect the creation of content are manifold and complicated—even byzantine. America has copyright protection, which applies to concrete expressions of information, trademark protection, which protects distinctive symbols or verbiage associated with a legal entity, and patent protection, which protects “(1) processes, (2) machines, (3) manufactures [...]

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§3801 · April 21, 2009 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , ,


I’m a big fan of 7-Zip. It isn’t the best-looking application ever written, but that could be because its creator, Igor Pavlov, is concerned much more with its compression methods than its interface. 7-Zip has its own container format, but more important is the LZMA compression algorithm that Igor wrote and put into the public [...]

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§3580 · February 9, 2009 · 1 comment · Tags: , , , , ,


It’s more than halfway through January, and I’ve made pitifully few posts. I’ve only one book in my meme so far (though, in my defense, I’m currently reading five books, with a sixth to be added soon). It’s a cop-out, I realize, but I’ve been terribly busy lately. This previous week was my fiance’s last [...]

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§3552 · January 19, 2009 · 5 comments · Tags: , , , ,