cygweb

I rebuilt Cosmic with just one hard drive for now and removed its unused hardware. A stripped-down version of Mandrake Linux 8.2 has been installed; Zope, Squishdot, and other software was reinstalled. I exported the sites over to Cosmic from Maestro and got things back up pretty quickly. Thanks to the developers of Zope for making such a great product!

The upcoming NFL season should be an interesting one. The addition of the Houston Texans and the realignment of the league into eight divisions will definitely shake up things from a scheduling perspective. And I will probably play some fantasy football this year (I haven't played for the last two seasons).

The FCC has ruled that by 2004, all TV's sized 36" and higher are to include digital tuners. While this doesn't mean all TVs will have to receive high-def digital broadcasts (Fox is supposedly broadcasting digital TV at 480p, which isn't considered HD), I'm thinking that many manufacturers will offer digital tuners in their HDTVs only. (But what do I know?) I've been floored by some of the HDTV content I've seen while browsing at my local Tweeter. I've had my eye on 32" Sony and Panasonic HDTV-ready sets for a while now, but I don't know when my family will take the plunge. Probably when our current TV dies.
Heck, I'd like a larger TV (we currently have a 27") with more resolution just to make watching DVD's even more enjoyable.

We rented the "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" DVD this weekend and I think I enjoyed it more watching it at home instead of at the theater. I think watching the movie with subtitles on helped me to organize the story a bit more as I was watching; there are a lot of names, places, and situations mentioned during the movie. For someone like me who hadn't read the books, it seems like you need at least two viewings to really soak the whole story in.

I downloaded the new Winamp 3 the other day and installed it. It's actually pretty cool. My favorite feature so far is to minimize it to just the one bar, then strech the bar to 200%, set it to 30% opacity, and "always on top". Then it put it up on the top of my screen. Pretty cool. I really haven't played any videos with it yet or tried to use its media library functionality. If you're already a Winamp user and have some CPU cycles to spare for the new features, I'd definitely say "check it out."

Check out the right side of the page for new boxes. Today I was inspired by my buddy Don Becker (no, not the guy that writes the Linux Ethernet drivers, that's *Donald* Becker) to create a topicbox for his site, Radioactive Toy. Did I say "inspired"? I probably should have said that my arm was twisted, because he created a topicbox for this site on his site first!
I did some checking over the afternoon and found the excellent RDFSummary product for Zope would make it easy for me to code the box. Thank the 'Net for open source!
Expect to see a few more boxes added soon.

According to this story, the Recording Industry Association of America is suing several major Internet backbone providers for allowing users to access a site that is hosting digital copies of songs. I'm more than a little tired of hearing about the RIAA's promotional stunts every week. If they spent half of the energy they've expended attempting to fight online song swapping on some of their core business issues, perhaps they might be able to grow their business instead of continuing to watch it slide.

My take: how about some honest A&R scouting to find undiscovered talent and let them record their music the way they want to? (American Idol doesn't count, but it's entertaining.) How about growing the regional side of the market with respect to what's promoted on radio? How about acting as a conduit for the recording artist instead of as a cocoon or a coffin? How about just taking your unearned CD-R royalties and shutting up about how the growing CD-R market is theoretically reflective of growing music "piracy"?

I buy the CDs of the artists I like, period. If an artist is unknown to me, I have no problem borrowing digital copies of their music to see if it interests me. I have no problem with one-to-one, non-anonymous song swapping. The business model which dictates that you can't return a CD you end up disliking for a full refund is overdue for a replacement.

No, the NFL isn't getting a new team. The PA Thunderbolts are my new fantasy football team. I'm playing on Yahoo's Fantasy football site in this league.

I frequent the forums at Doom9.net for information about video capture and compression techniques. I'm about to attempt to start using XVID, an open-source MPEG-4 compliant video codec, so I've been reading up on it. When I went to the XVID homepage today, I noticed that they say they have proof that Sigma Designs has stolen their code for use in a video codec that Sigma Designs has released. I sent the news in to Slashdot and it was accepted and published. It's a sad day for open-source projects when companies steal openly available work and attempt to pass it off as their own. I hope the XVID team doesn't lose hope and is able to get SD to acknowledge their transgressions and the rightful authors of their codec. I encourage you to read the information available at the XVID team's homepage.
Update: According to this story, SD is going to release the source code for the project in question. That should answer some of the doubts.