I would encourage everyone to visit ashtonshepherd.com and listen to her song “Sounds So Good”.

Wait for this gem: “’cause there ain’t nothin’ like the sound of a cooler slushin’ on the bed of your truck.”

Now I actually enjoy a lot of country music, but wow. I just can’t get over how truly bad this line is, both in terms of lyrics and sound.

I just got back from a talk given by Richard StallmanUniversity of Minnesota. It was about software freedom. If you’re looking for more information, I would encourage you to check out gnu.org and fsf.org. I’m not going to repeat all the points. I just wanted to note one thing:

I understand his push for “GNU/Linux” a lot more now. It’s one thing to talk about credit–there I disagree, because I don’t want to call it “GNU/Linux/X/GNOME/OpenOffice.org”. However, he made the point that calling the distro “Linux” points all the attention towards Linus, who isn’t pushing software freedom. I hadn’t thought about that before.

On a side note, RMS pronounces it “GNU slash Linux” or “GNU plus Linux”, where I think “GNU Linux” is a totally more reasonable… After all, nobody pronounces the slash in “and/or”.

I recently heard a story on NPR (well, technically I heard it on MPR) about registered Democrats receiving a Republican Part mailing. I realize that political parties engage in all sorts of election chicanery, but this one really outraged me… and not for the reason you think.

Don’t these people complaining know that since 1892, every Presidential election in every state has been done by secret ballot? Whether they are registered as a Democrat or Republican (which I fail to see the need for anyway) is completely irrelevant. Do people believe that if the Republican party were able to switch their registration (which they’re not and which didn’t happen in this case) that they couldn’t vote for Obama?

I was rather excited to see that Facebook has a (new?) feature where it can import blog posts (from an RSS feed) as notes. However, it’s been nothing but a pain so far. Somewhere between Wordpress’s edit box and Facebook, HTML special characters (e.g. ampersands and ASCII quotes) are being double-escaped. It seems to refuse to import stories at random. Perhaps there is some hidden maximum number in a given period of time?

Also, and this is a bit scary, deleting a note and re-importing it seems to keep comments. Does that mean they’re keeping that data forever even if you hit delete, or is this a symptom of distributed caches not being cleared and resulting in data re-population?

Apparently this post was the last straw. When trying to view my notes, I received a warning that I had written too many and was blocked from writing any more. Given that I hadn’t managed to get any new notes to display on Facebook, this must have been for trying the “Update Now” functionality too much. Annoyingly, the FAQ page linked to from the block message said before I was blocked, I was warned. Of course, this was not the case.

Check out my photos of an exploding Ubuntu CD.

Well, it has finally happened. I’ve created a Facebook account. As you can see, this is my first blog post in a couple of years. My plan is to pick up my picture scanning project and try to get everything imported into Facebook. We’ll see how that goes.

gnome-blog, version 0.8 has support for Wordpress blogs. However, it seems that selecting wordpress appends “wordpress/xmlrpc.php” to the URL. This results in silent failures if you enter, for example: http://coderich.net I ended up choosing Self-run Other, then entered http://coderich.net/xmlrpc.php as the URL, and everything works. Yay!

Update: Apparently gnome-blog doesn’t set the title properly with BloggerAPI. I switched to MetaWeblog in the options and now it works!

An article about Gaim hit Slashdot again a few days ago.

You can find the article here: A First Look at Gaim 2.0 [linux.com]

After several attempts with the linux.com comment interface (and three mispostings), I finally created this posting: Various Thoughts

The Slashdot article is here: A First Look at Gaim 2.0 [slashdot.org]

In general, when Gaim hits Slashdot, lots of users spend lots of time making lots of comments. Many of these comments represent honest questions, many are completely irritating, and a few can be very insightful.

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