Posts

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Lookin’ Good

I think I’m through with all the changes to the main page for now. I still need to edit all the other pages and update them to match. I’ve tested the layout in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, Mozilla 1.3b and 1.2.1 on Linux and Windows, and Konqueror 3.0 on Linux. It looks good to me in every browser I’ve tested now. Hopefully it will look OK on a Mac also. If you see any problems with the layout of this page, let me know.

Here’s what the updates did in case anyone’s curious. First, I changed the way the comments work so instead of popping up a new comment window, it opens a page in the browser where you can comment. I think this is much better. Pages that popup everywhere drive me crazy. Next I upgraded us to the latest version of Movable Type, 2.51. Also, while I was updating I decided to try some of their other features like TrackBack and Syndication through RDF files. These features make it easy for other people with blogs to link to our site.

These changes required a few modifications to the layout of the site, so I just went ahead and reverted back to Movable Type’s default layout. Of course then I had to tweak it a bit to make it look how I like it. The default font is a little bigger now, hopefully that’ll make it easier to read. It was extremely small before in some browsers.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the changes.

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Don’t Panic

Words of wisdom from the late, great Douglas Adams.

I’m making a few changes to the site right now, so things may look a little funny. Rest assured everything will be back to normal soon.

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My Christmas Break

I remember whenever we’d get back from a long holiday in school, we’d always have to write a paper about what we did. I’m not sure if they still make students do that today, but just in case, here’s mine:

The two weeks started off pretty wild. It’s a lot of work getting ready for Christmas – cooking, wrapping presents, keeping the cat and dog out of the tree, etc. OK, so Paige did most of that stuff, but watching her work really wears me out sometimes…

After all of the family visiting and stuffing ourselves silly on turkey and ham and everything that goes with it, things calmed down a bit. I feel like I finally got caught up on some sleep. We then started trying to organize ourselves a little better. I’m pretty much a pack rat, so for me organizing means going through all the things I haven’t looked at in years and throwing them away. I hope nobody needed a copy of Turbo Pascal for DOS, because I just pitched one in the dumpster. I think I made some real progress.

Of course, we also set aside some time for fun. We finally managed to defeat Baal on Nightmare in Diablo II. We took a trip to Sherman for shopping and Red Lobster. Geoff stopped by for a while. We also finally got around to seeing The Two Towers with Ben. It was even better than I expected, very impressive. The movie that is, not Ben, he’s still the same as always…

So after two weeks off I’m back at work, and next week I’ll be back in school also. It sounds like a bummer, but actually I’m excited about it. I’m taking three classes this semester. After that I’ll be just three classes away from graduating. I’ll even be able to take one of those classes online. So after this sememster I’ll only have to sit through two more classes. There’s a light at the end of my college tunnel and it gets a brighter every day. This time next year be living in a whole new world.

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Fits

I’ve been working hard lately on my Fill in the Site program. I’ve uploaded a new version, and added a lot of information to the web site. If you’re a network admin at a school district, and you’re interested in setting up web pages for all of your teachers, you might want to check it out.

This is all being done in anticipation of the upcoming article about me in The Paris News.

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Christmas, Geek style

I just saw a funny link over on Slashdot.org, LinuxWorld.com has a page with several classic Christmas songs rewritten with a “tech spin”.

Here’s a few of my favorite lines. This one’s to the tune of Silver Bells.

Dim the hall lights, use the street lights,
Gotta save all our green
We’ve run out of all our unemployment.

It’s the big crunch, we’ve a good hunch
That our 401K
Will be empty by early next year.

And how could you not love Microsoft is Coming to Town?

You better watch out
You better not cry,
“I don’t know where all my licenses lie!”
Microsoft is coming to town

You paid for it list,
You paid for it twice;
You paid even more for legal advice.
Microsoft is coming to town

They know when you run Windows
They know when you use Word
They treat a loyal customer
Like a lying, thieving turd.

If this doesn’t get everyone in the Christmas spirit, I don’t know what will.

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Grades

I just remembered, today is Wednesday so grades are out. I made A’s in all three of my classes last semester. That makes my cumulative GPA 3.909. That one B is going to haunt me forever…

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More DMCA Madness

Here’s another good article at News.com about the DMCA.

I guess the thing that bothers me the most about how the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is being used is the fact that companies can deny me the use of things that I’ve purchased. For example, it is illegal for me to write a program that lets me watch a DVD that I’ve bought. When you buy a DVD, you aren’t really buying anything other than the right to watch that movie on an approved player.

There was a story just the other day about how you can buy DVDs in China for about $1 each. There, the disks are mass-produced by companies with disk duplicating machines just like the ones used by the movie studios. But Hollywood doesn’t seem to mind that very much. Instead of going after the big-time thieves, they chose to attack a teen-aged kid.

Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, is on trial right now for writing a program to let him to watch DVD movies on Linux. This program, called DeCSS, breaks the encryption or Content Scrambling System on DVD disks. He wrote this program when he was only 15 years old. Here’s an article about that trial. The verdict has not been given yet.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), filed a complaint against Jon Johansen saying that his program allowed illegal duplication of DVD movies. But the funny thing is, DVD players only play encrypted movies. If you’re going to make a copy of a DVD, you don’t want to decrypt it. Otherwise it won’t play.

Some of the regular visitors to our site may be wondering why I’m posting all of this stuff instead of pictures of our pets. The reason is I feel like big corporations are walking away with all of our personal freedoms. The only way I know of to change this is to educate people about what’s going on in the world. Hopefully if enough people read about the DMCA, and how it’s being abused, we can make a difference.

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Digital Millenium Copyright Act

All my life I’ve been curious about how things work. One of my favorite activities is tearing things apart and putting them back together. That’s how I learned everything I know about computers. The process of tearing things apart to figure out how they work is usually called reverse engineering.

Recently, Hollywood passed a law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act or DMCA. This law supposedly provides copyright protection for digital media. What it actually does is make it illegal to reverse engineer most software. The DMCA has been very controversial from the beginning and has never been used in a court case until now.

A Russian software company called ElcomSoft had written a program to open and read eBook files. Normally this would be no big deal. For example, Microsoft Word can open WordPerfect files without violating the law. The catch is, these eBook files were encrypted in order to protect the copyright of the original document.

Instead of being praised as a clever guy, the programmer who wrote the software, Dmitry Sklyarov, was arrested and jailed as a criminal. Luckily common sense prevailed in the trial and ElcomSoft was acquitted. There’s a pretty good article at News.com about the verdict.

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Star Trek – Attack of the Clone?

We finally got around to going to the movies Sunday afternoon. I like going when it’s only $2 per person, that way I don’t feel quite so bad about paying $6.25 for a medium coke and popcorn.

Anyway, we saw Star Trek – Nemesis. I can’t put my finger on it, but there was just something missing. Some reviewers have said that this was the worst Star Trek movie of the 10, but I didn’t think it was that bad. It was kind of neat to finally see Wil Wheaton on the big screen. That poor guy just can’t seem to catch a break.

I’m sure we’ll be going back to see The Two Towers sometime this week. That should be a lot of fun.

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Free advice

Here’s some information that might be useful to you if you’re trying to upgrade your motherboard or move a hard drive from one computer to another. I spent most of Sunday night doing this, so maybe by posting it here I can save someone out there some grief.

Back in the “good old days” of Windows 9x, all you had to do was pull the hard drive from one machine and plug it in to the other. Of course you then had to spend a few hours installing drivers for all the new hardware, but that’s another story.

Now with Windows 2000 and XP, this procedure is a little more complicated. If you pull a Windows 2000 hard drive out of one machine and plug it into another you’ll get a nasty blue screen of death that says something like “INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE”. To my knowledge, there’s no way around this message. Windows 2000’s repair process won’t fix it, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it at the recover console.

So here’s what you do. Before you remove the hard drive from the first computer or take out the old motherboard, change your IDE controller driver to Standard IDE. Here’s how to do that on Windows 2000:

Go to Start, Settings, Control Panel
Double-click System
Click the Hardware tab
Click Device Manager
Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Double-click the IDE controller
Click the Driver tab
Click Update Driver
Click Next
Choose Display a list…
Click Next
Choose Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
Click Next
Click Next
Click Finish

Now instead of restarting your computer, shut down and move the hard drive to your new computer or swap out your motherboard. Your computer should now boot all the way to the desktop so you can start loading all the drivers for your new hardware.

I can’t wait to see how Microsoft improves their OS next…