MindlessCode.net

Wired News: A Hacker Games the Hotel

Very interesting article…talks about how you can access all sorts of information (including billing information) using the TV and remote control in your hotel room. Read it, and think about it next time you’re in a hotel room.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day!. Check out the pics, they’re pretty funny.

Mike Hearn recently set up a page called “Who are we?”, listing the developers of the Autopackage project, along with a little info about them. It’s a great little rundown about each developer (along with a few “personal blurb sentences” that Mike wrote–which he said “for some people they are total crap”). Check it out!

We’ve got a Wiki (sans-content). It uses MoinMoin, which is written in Python. Also, Dave Wickham wrote some code to gather the number of downloads of the Autopackage support code. Those are some pretty big numbers we’re seeing.

As reported by Yahoo News.

But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces.

“Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation’s energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment,” according to the study by Cornell’s David Pimentel and Berkeley’s Tad Patzek. They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy.

The only thing I can say, is “Well, duh!”
Isn’t this what people have been saying to all the folks in Washington who are on the ADM payroll? ADM gets huge subsidys for ethanol, for every dollor that ADM makes off Ethanol, the US taxpayer pays out $30.

I just back home from a week in Mt. Shasta, CA at the Mt. Shasta Fiddle Camp. It was put on by Tristan and Tashina Clarridge, who brought together an amazing collection of teachers and students.

On Monday-Friday we had 3 classes a day, each a hour-and-a-half long with some amazing teachers, including Jeremy Kittel, Billy Contreras, Aoife O’Donovan, Rob Diggins, and Tristan and Tashina Clarridge. Our class was small, with 10 students, all of whom were very into music. The instructors at this camp taught a wide range of styles, including Irish, Texas Style, Jazz, and Blues.

After classes, we usually went swimming in Lake Siskiyou, or hiking around Mount Shasta. On Tuesday we hiked up to snowline, and the small lake at that elevation was warm enough to actually swim in–amazing!

Some bands you may want to check out are Old School Freight Train, Nickel Creek, and Crooked Still. They all are totally awesome. You can listen to snippets of their CDs on Amazon–but if you do end up buying them, I would suggest buying them from the bands website, as that way Amazon doesn’t end up taking a big, juicy cut and the people who actually play the music get some money.

The camp was held at Mount Shasta City Park, which was a very nice park with the head-waters of the Sacramento River coming out of the ground. The best part of it, however, was a flower-bed with a chain around the perimiter, and a sign reading simply “Flowers”–telling you that the things inside the chain were, in fact, real, live, breathing, flowers.

The whole camp was a blast, with tons of great people at it–thanks to everyone who was there to teach, learn, and jam with (even through you probably won’t read this :)–if you do, however, please leave a comment below and say hi!).

EDIT :: In the future, photos will be here.

Yay! The EU Parliment has Rejected Software Patents with a margin of 648 to 14 vote with 18 abstentions. Of course, Nokia and Siemens will probably push even harder for the bloody things, but at least it’s been put off for now :(.

Pullquote:

Many members of the European Parliament feared the bill would limit the development of new software in Europe, especially by small businesses. They also wanted more clarity on the criteria for what types of software could and could not be patented.

I often use Merriam-Webster to lookup spelling, usages, or origins of words. I went there today to lookup multipuropse. I was given the following definition:

Main Entry: multipurpose
multipurpose is one of more than 1,000,000 entries available at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com. Click here to start your free trial!

That means that I need to shell out $30.00 a year to use a bloody online dictionary! Look, I own a hard copy of Merriam-Webster (OK, so it’s a 1979 copy, but still…)–why should I pay to use the online version?

Currently looking for a new dictionary–no “google: define multipurpose” doesn’t cut it.

On a very different note, we went to a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel by our local household acting group (AAA). It was totally awesome, and I was very impressed!

On another note, I can officially say that Qt absolutely rocks! I’ve been playing around with writing KDE applications, and have found Qt very easy to program in. Compared to GTK+, Qt totally wins for ease-of-use. You don’t even need to know C++ (I am a living, walking, and talking example of that!) Look at this code for opening a file and reading it into a QTextEdit (yes, it’s susposed to be indented, but WordPress is screwing it up):

QFile file;
QDir::setCurrent("/home/taj");
file.setName(".packages/openttd/eula");
if ( file.open(IO_ReadOnly) ) {
QTextStream t( &file );
line = t.read();
editEula->setText(line);
file.close();
}


Tell me that isn’t easy! I’m sure it could be optimized some more, but it sure is nice and clean.

Yay Qt!