If you’re still using DRM’d audio formats, you owe it to yourself to check out Ogg Vorbis. It’s not just a pretty name anymore. The FSF has set up the PlayOgg.org website to promote Ogg Vorbis (audio) and Ogg Theora (video) as high quality media formats unencumbered by patents and restrictions on your rights. There… Read More »
Tonight my wife and I attended a benefit for the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland featuring a menu designed by Alice Waters and music by Kronos Quartet. We’ve donated annually to Creative Growth for many years and purchased several pieces of beautiful art there. For over 32 years Creative Growth has offered fantastic creative… Read More »
After reading an article about Charles Wang and the “culture of fear” he allegedly instituted at Computer Associates, I fondly remembered a day over ten years ago when I overheard an amusing story about him. At least it was amusing to me. I didn’t have to work for him. I was working for ViewStar in… Read More »
I had been reading about Democracy Player as a cool new platform for Internet TV, so I thought I should check it out. I eventually got it working, but installing software shouldn’t be this hard. The problem is that as software packages get more and more complicated, developers need to rely on a lot of… Read More »
SoccerPhone is a speech application I wrote about five years ago so I could get live updates on Major League Soccer scores whenever I was away from an Internet connection. I wrote the application in VoiceXML, JavaScript, and Python. Since SoccerPhone gathers the live data by scraping information from the HTML scoreboard page on the… Read More »
Some parts of Biloxi look to have substantially recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Other parts don’t look much changed from when I visited in December 2005. However, the Mississippi Gulf Coast seems to be recovering faster than Louisiana. There was a big difference in what I saw in Biloxi and Gulfport from what I later observed… Read More »
I was back in Biloxi at the beginning of March to visit my mother on her birthday. While there, of course, I had to partake in one of my all time favorite meals, the shrimp po-boy. This is a very simple meal, just some medium-sized fried shrimp with shredded lettuce, sliced tomato, and mayonnaise on… Read More »
I went to the prologue for the Tour of California yesterday in San Francisco. The prologue was a 1.9 mile ride along the Embarcadero that ended with a climb up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. My wife and I managed to get a great spot about 200 feet down the road from the starting gate.… Read More »
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1 (improvements to the editor on the “Write Post” page alone are worth the time spent on the upgrade) and have run into an issue with get_links(). The first argument to get_links is the category id. If you don’t specify an argument or pass in -1, all links are returned.… Read More »
It embarrasses me to know that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales not only attended my alma mater, Rice University, but was actually granted a degree. Throughout his reign of cluelessness in the Attorney General’s office, he has made many statements that have left me cringing and wondering how he can say these things with a… Read More »