A couple of blog entries I plucked from Linux Today have really caught my attention. Its news like this that makes me feel warm and squishy inside as more people recognize and utilize the advantages of Linux and Open Source Software.

The Brazillian Election Supreme Court Migrates 430 Thousand Voting Machines to GNU/Linux: “The Brazilian Election Supreme Court announced at April 4th 2008, that the 2008 elections at Brazil will use GNU/Linux electronic voting machines with software digital authentication…” Appearantly, while we’re recounting, they’re making real progress in Brazil.

Open Source the Biggest Potential Game Changer for Government: Senator Lundy: “Senator Kate Lundy hosted a pre-2020 Summit event in Canberra last week to generate ideas on how open source technology, open standards and open access to information might transform the way government departments and the business world operate.”

9000 PCs in Swiss Schools Going Linux Only: “9000 computers in Swiss schools have been dual-booting Windows and and Ubuntu for some time now in anticipation of guidelines from the Switzerland’s Department of Public Instruction, whose motto is ‘Long Live Free Software.’” That’s the spirit!

At any rate, the impact of seeing these stories, one right after another, seems pretty big for me. And I feel confident that Linux isn’t going away any time soon- and Open Source will probably remain the trend for many years to come.

I wanted to share this blog: Flying Spaghetti Monster Lands Outside Tennessee Courthouse

The FSM is quite a monster- and quite a spaghetti as well. What started as a satirical letter has captured the plate of quite a few noodles. Some of us (like myself) thought the whole business of trying to get evolution banned from schools and, when that didn’t work, the addition of creationism to “balance the science classroom”, quite absurd, really- and I can’t think of a meatier way of making the argument than the Flying Spaghetti Monster touching every child, eager to learn, with the science involved in how He created the world and everything in it (and some stuff not in it as well).

I hope everyone can appreciate this as I do- and be profoundly sauced by the wisdom that He, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, reaches out and shares with us all!

BTW, read the commends on this one too- apparently I’m not the only FSM activist sliding around this sauce we call life!

I decided I wanted a barcode of my very own and started playing with an Online Barcode Generator… and my first barcode was:

What I think would be REALLY awesome though, is if one could do cute little barcodes like these automagically on a website:

Source: Functional, Creative Barcode Drawings

In a post earlier this week, I commented on Creative Inc.’s self-destructive attack on a user who was modding their sound card drivers to make them work better and redistributing them. Though I won’t take credit for it, the general buzz put Creative in a tough spot, and so they have backed down and restored the posts they had previously pulled down. In today’s marketplace, companies can’t afford to ignore their clients- it’s suprising to me that there are those who still make these mistakes anyway.

Almost all religions have embedded within them a “code of conduct”. Some are simple, such as the Wicca “Do as ye wilt, ahn it harm none”, or the Christian 10 Commandments- and some are more complex and verbose as in Judaism’s 600+ rules they are to follow. The point is to distinguish between right and wrong, and they boil down to pretty much the same end-result.

In an effort to become a better friend, family member as well as a better, more “awake” person, I have tried to remove those things that are destructive and malicious. Hate, anger, vengeance and fear are all things that can wind up hurting yourself or others- and so I’ve tried to rise above these and see things with clearer eyes. But, alas, it is difficult, very difficult at times.

Impatience, frustration, or someone else being malicious generates these feelings, and though I wouldn’t act on them, I would prefer for them to no longer arise. I’ve known people who, seemingly, were incapable of hate or acting malicious towards another person. This is something I would aspire to, though I haven’t always been successful in this venture.

Why do I write about this? I do not know. Perhaps there are too many things surrounding me, beating on me, to where I start to question my own spiritual center. I simply seek the strength to persevere.

An article I read recently, Creative Labs Stops Guy From Making Its Technology Work Better, discusses their recent hunting expedition- to track down people who write new or modified drivers for their sound cards.

Creative has long been a favourite of mine- they Sound Blaster series of audio cards used to be “the sound card”, and the hardware is of a high quality nature. However, I think some of their business practices could be more user-centric and their software and hardware more open (nVidia and Intel have already been mentioned as companies that reside on the other end of the spectrum).

I don’t want to play the defend/attack role of Creative, but I think their actions are justified to an extent from a business sense, though they probably could have handled things a bit more Creative-ly (yes, i went there).

It costs money to run a production line of a particular piece of hardware. Suppose you had the opportunity to consolidate two lines into one, it makes sense to do so. Suppose you have a line of Gigabit adapters and another of 10/100 NICS. The Gigabit adapter includes all the functionality of the 10/100 product, with the additional, faster, mode. So, if you can sell a Gigabit card at a 10/100 price and still maintain a big enough margin of profit, then it would make sense to collapse the two product lines into one, differentiating the two devices in one of three ways:

1. Make a hardware change, post production to disable the Gigabit functionality and reduce it to simply a 10/100 NIC. This could be done by something as simple as shorting two pins on the board.
2. Flash the two versions with two different firmware images. This assumes your device uses firmware, of course, but the firmware can allow/deny access to certain functionality.
3. Include a different hardware driver with the device, doing something similar to the different firmware images, only at the operating system level and not on the device itself.

If only a driver modification/rewrite was necessary to enable/unlock features of the card, then it would appear Creative may very well being using the third technique to streamline their manufacturing process- saving them money (and potentially passing those savings onto their customers). The problem is, if people can buy the cheaper card and enable all the features of the more advanced card, what reason would customers have to buy that more advanced device? The latest and greatest is usually a company’s bread and butter, its where they make the most profits and circumventing their sales structure smarts… it smarts bad.

A similar situation comes to mind from a few years back when DVD drives were starting to become commonplace and CD drives were dropping sharply in value. A manufacturer (I don’t remember which) was producing a single line of hardware for both their DVD as well as their CD line of products and the only difference was the firmware on the device. A user could pick up a “CD drive” on the cheap and enable all the features of a grossly more expensive DVD drive simply by downloading the firmware and flashing the device. I’m not certain if any action by the manufacturer was taken to stop people from passing around these firmware images, but they’d be justified in doing so.

I think Creative would have continued allowing (or encouraging) the rework of device drivers if it simply made the features work better and more cleanly as long as it didn’t enable features the customer technically didn’t pay for.

Creative could obviously prevent this in the future simply by making the lock-out in hardware, but again, that costs them more money than a simple enable/disable flag in their driver source, so I can definitely see why they’d take the route they did, but the end result shouldn’t come as a surprise, in today’s tech world, people are becoming more and more interested in hacking- not for malicious ends, just to learn how things work and attempt to make them work differently and/or better.

With any luck, I’ve spoken to this topic in a way that’s clear- if not, let me know so I can rewrite pieces or append to this.

EOT

I’ve been hearing a lot of people complain about Yahoo mail recently- blocking legitimate emails and entire mail servers (without good cause) and so I thought I’d have a poke around Google an see what I could shake loose. To my suprise, I was overrun with search results- many of which reflected the things I have been hearing from friends and such. Though the list is seemingly endless, here are a few results from the first page that seemed to tack it down fairly well…

• Market Watch - Yahoo blocks FTC do-not-call mail
• abi Forums - Yahoo Blocks Email Verification
• AH Digital FX Studios - Compelling Visual Content - Yahoo Bouncing Email - 451 Error

Please, if you use Yahoo, you’ll need to pay attention to possible missing messages- as its hard to know what will and will not be blocked by their overly aggressive spam filtering.

Also, please share any other interesting and relevant links- this problem needs to be made widely known.

So lets see, someone thought it a brilliant idea to give the various meeting rooms at our new office names- that’s all fine, well and good, but the names they chose, were… well… STUPID. Needless to say, I can’t keep them straight… heres what they came up with:

• Bottom Line
• Old Ebbitt Grill
• The Exchange
• Mackey’s
• Eye Street
• Board Room
• Swann Street
• Dupont Circle
• Pennsylvania Avenue
• Conference Room Katie
• Arundel Street

Now, this was months ago- but it still screws me up… just give me a bloody room number, alright? Only one sane name in the lot- “Board Room”.