Monthly Archive for May, 2005

Domain Name Greed

Published on May 30, 2005 in Geek. 1 Comment

So I did a little more research into the gottlieb.* domain names. I had considered something along those lines before ending up with malkier.com since all the appropriate gottlieb stuff was taken. Most are held by legitimate parties (ie people/businesses with the name gottlieb), but gottlieb.net is actually being squatted on by a rather shifting looking domain service, buydomains.com. Turns out these scumbags run around buying up domains with the hopes that someone would buy them for a pretty penny. For example, when I checked out their “request price” form, by submitting the form you are agreeing that you would be willing to spend at least $1k on the domain and possibly well over $10k. Not sure quite what that means (aside from the fact that they’re doing their best to milk businesses for all their worth) since you’re not agreeing to actually buy it if it’s at their $1k minimum.

After googling a bit, I see that this place is even scummier than all that. Turns out if you search for available domain names through their site, they’ll promptly buy up everything you search for in the hopes that you’ll buy it off them. They’ll also automatically jack up the price once anyone’s expressed any interest in a particular domain. Stinky buggers! But who knows, I may one day be able to snag that domain if they don’t renew it when it expires…

Kitty soup!

Published on May 30, 2005 in General and Photography. 1 Comment

I got some more of the disposable cameras from the wedding processed. Nothing too interesting aside from a few shots of the cats I took to use up film that I’ve put up in the usual place. Here are a couple of highlights:



Merry likes to play in the laundry

Spooky likes to play in the big soup pot
Silly kitties! And now that my folks have come to visit the grand-kitties (don’t ask… I didn’t coin the phrase), they have all sorts of new cat toys to play with.

Wedding, wedding, and more weddings…

Published on May 30, 2005 in General and Work. Closed

Been rather busy lately. Went to my cousin’s wedding 3 weekends ago in Missouri/Kansas. Then flew down to Amanda’s cousin’s wedding in Texas 2 weekends ago. My folks have been visiting this past week and just left on Sunday morning. To top that off, I’ve had some sort of nasty sinus infection for the past week. Next weekend we’re off to Iowa for Amanda’s coworker’s wedding and on the way back I’ll be going to ISCA ’05 in Wisconsin for a few days.

Revenge of the Sith

Published on May 19, 2005 in Film, Geek and General. 1 Comment

Star Wars: Episode III is out! And it’s supposed to be good. Very dark, but good. I’ve heard it actually does a good job wrapping things up and bridging the new with the old. Hopefully I’ll get to see it before too long (headed out of town to go to Amanda’s cousin’s wedding tomorrow and my folks will be here next week). Of course, I’ve heard a fairly high quality work print has been leaked.

E3 Highlights

Published on May 19, 2005 in Gaming and Geek. Closed

The big E3 entertainment expo featured the first real info on the next generation game consoles. Xbox360 features a PowerPC with 3 cores, graphics by ATI, some backwards compatibility. PS3 features a beastly PowerPC-based Cell processor (ie roughly twice the flops of the Xbox360), graphics by Nvidia, Blu-Ray support, and full backwards compatibility (PS1 and PS2). Very limited details on the Nintendo Revolution: backwards compatible with Gamecube games, support for downloading old school Nintendo games (NES, SNES, N64… not sure how the pricing scheme will work for this). Looks like they’ll all come standard with WiFi, wireless controllers, and I suspect will all have some sort of support for hard drives (PS3/Xbox360 for sure, guess on my part with Revolution since you can download games).

One thing I found particularly amusing: Xbox360 demos were running on a Power Mac G5 (see here and here). I knew the development machines from MS with the Xbox SDK have been Power Macs, but I’m amused the E3 demos aren’t running on prototype hardware.

Tiger X.4.1

Published on May 19, 2005 in Geek. Closed

As I suspected, the 10.4.1 update for Tiger has been released. Looks like they’ve fixed quite a number of things (seems to have possibly solved some of the crashes/lockups I’d experienced so far… at least, don’t think I’ve had one since I updated).

Best blog ever!

Published on May 12, 2005 in General. Closed

Ran across the best blog ever this afternoon. The Daily Kitten! Go there. NOW!!

Playing tunes on OS X

Published on May 12, 2005 in Geek. Closed

So it would seem that the release of iTunes by Apple largely killed off the other music playing apps (ie mp3 players). Which is lame because I find the interface a little bulky, doesn’t seem like I can have it sort based on directory structure, and I find it a little annoying that by default it wants to copy all of your music to a “My Music” type folder when you import new stuff. This behavior can be changed (which is good since I store my music on a network share on another machine and don’t have enough storage on my mini to copy it all over), but seems a bit odd for default behavior. Guess they figure they’re being helpful by organizing your music for you in a central location. Also, iTunes only supports MP3, and Apple’s formats (AAC) out of the box. I’ve found a program/plugin that provides OGG support (both playback and encoding). Somewhere I also found iTunes-LAME, a plugin that’ll let you use the LAME MP3 encoder in iTunes. But I haven’t had much luck for some more unusual formats, in particular lossless formats such as Shorten and FLAC (commonly used online to distribute live recordings). Which brings us to… XMMS.

XMMS will build as part of Fink. There are input plugins for XMMS for just about everything under the sun (MP3, OGG, Shorten, FLAC, etc etc etc… even AAC). By default, this build uses the esound output plugin, which sucked pretty hard on my machine (maybe it’s ok on faster machines, but there’s all sorts of ‘books out there with similar specs to the mini). Fortunately, I ran across the DBMix project (MP3-based DJ mixer as far as I can tell). They’ve developed a native OS X XMMS output plugin, which seems pretty solid (at least on Panther). Sweet!

Question remaining… can I get xmms-scrobbler (for Audioscrobbler) working under OS X? It builds and appears to work, but it’s not submitting songs to the site at this point. Anyone’s guess whether there’s a problem with my build, or the site’s just getting bogged down again (as it frequently does).

More burger news

Published on May 11, 2005 in Geek, General and Tales of the Weird. Closed

Ok, it’s not exactly news. But I’ve randomly run into some more food oddities. I say randomly because I ran across it on this guy’s del.icio.us bookmarks (he wrote Cocoalicious, a slick del.icio.us client for OS X). Anyway, here’s the link. Featured are the Luther Burger (a bacon cheeseburger served on a toasted Krispy Kreme bun) and the Hamdog (a hot dog wrapped in a beef patty that’s deep fried, covered with chili, cheese and onions, and served on a hoagie bun topped with a fried egg and two fistfuls of fries). Reminds me a bit of the garbage plate at Nick Tahoe’s in Rochester! Although somehow more disturbing.

#define “prairie restoration project”

Published on May 10, 2005 in #define. Closed

I’ve seen a few of these around town. Apparently the park district is spinning them as restoring some of the land controlled by the park district to it’s original “prairie” condition. In practice, I think this largely translates to “um, this is too much work, so we’re just going to stop mowing some of these and put up a sign.” I’ve always found the park district to be rather interesting around here. They’ve got all sorts of little plots scattered throughout town that they’re responsible for, some as small as a few flower pots sitting on a sidewalk (think they called that a “flower island” or something like that), many of them not much more than a 5-foot x 5-foot square (think they call them “mini-parks”). They have a number of more substantial parks scattered about town, much more than I would really expect for a town of this size, which is cool. I still find some of it a little absurd though.