The Design and Implementation of laffer1

 Justice is sweet. A certain mayor is going to jail.  At least some people aren't above the law.

55 Million and growing...

For many years, media companies have been pushing for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in consumer products.  Devices like Microsoft's Zune or Apple's iPod limit the uses of purchased content.  

With the upcoming transition to digital television (DTV), consumers will need to get cable tv, purchase a converter box, or buy a new television set with integrated tuner.  However, some people like me still have their VCRs hooked up.  You can play videos, but what about recording?  Analog recording of television is something we've enjoyed for over twenty years.  The new DTV standard will kill those devices.  It's possible that a digital converter box would allow you to record a down sampled version of the signal over the air, but for people like me who bought a new tv, it spells the end of a era.  

Some people use set top boxes such as the tivo to record television.  They have newer products with DTV support.  However, without using some hacks most of those devices do not allow you to keep recordings forever.

Unless the general public wakes up, DRM is here to stay. 

Bill Gates has been Knighted. 

The UK cracker is getting tried in the US after all.  I can see why he didn't want to come here and I don't know the evidence against him.  If he's guilty, he deserves this.   

Remember media.. it's cracker, not hacker.  Learn the difference.

Closing businesses.  The republican party pushed for war which spurred increases in oil prices.  The democrats love the high oil because they can push their environmental policies that part of the party loves. The net result is an even worse economy as more americans lose their jobs.  With so many positions outsourced overseas, and higher competition in many sectors, retail and service industry jobs is all we have left.  Now those are going bankrupt.  Way to go. I feel change

While it's interesting he wasn't at fault, the report still said he was driving while intoxicated. How many close calls will this guy have before he chills on the drinking.

hello nurse.

I'm experimenting with some new blogging features on just journal.  We'll see how it goes. 

 Microsoft is offering a free service to stream video via Silverlight with ad insertion.  I think that might be a nice service for sites to add streaming content.  The only problem is that you need Microsoft Expressions software to actually create the content.  If I've got to buy software, I might as well go with Flash which is supported on more platforms.  There are also a few programs that can create Flash content in the open source world.  Microsoft needs to get Silverlight support finished on Linux/BSD.  Novell is working on this for Mono.

 I found a website that tracks users and topics of IRC chat rooms.

 I've been using Google for several years.  I'm thinking about trying some alternate search engines.  I just realized you can't easily change the default search in safari like you can in Firefox and even IE.  

Apple doesn't seem to have a preference for it and cuil's FAQ incorrectly suggests there is a setting.  I can't find it.  A search on cuil returned one useful hit, but the site was pulled down.  They also don't seem to cache pages like Google.  I decided to use Google to look for an answer.  There are two options.

1. Use http://www.inquisitorx.com/ to configure your search.  I don't know if they log searches or use any form of spyware.  They probably don't, but I consider search very important and don't want to trust this.
2. Some people have reported success hex editing safari.  I could do this, but I don't know what would happen when software update tries to push/install a new version.  Best case, I'd have to do this every time Safari gets a security update.

Oddly enough, it's easier to change on the iPhone where apple could lock users in.  I may stick with Google, but now I feel like I'm forced to.  It's sad as I like Safari in my any other ways and have even been using WebKit in BSD for browsing.

 WSJ article

Google finally has some new competition.  I predict that they will end up like Yahoo down the road.  It might not be this engine, but someone will de-thrown them from search.

cuil.com

I just read a strange slashdot article about Comcast responding to blog entries.  Apparently, Comcast is hoping that this will help their image with customers. 

We've had better experiences with Comcast than some, but I long for the days of Charter Internet access.  One upside is that Comcast offers business packages in residential areas (within reason).  I suspect that's why I've had better luck with them.

I've noticed shaping with Bit Torrent traffic like others and with video streaming.  The latter pisses me off as I've got a Netflix account that I like to use for streaming.  I'd like the terms clearly identified and a way to cap yourself and or do QoS yourself.  Actually, I've wanted a good QoS system for home for years.  My switch priorities traffic from certain systems, but I'm unable to do protocol prioritizing.  Since we have a comcast router, I can't do much on that front.  My old charter setup used a freebsd box as a router and then used ipfw pipes to dedicate bandwidth for VOIP and other traffic.  It wasn't perfect, but not to bad. 

I've been experimenting with different frontends for Webkit.  Midori is a work in progress and found to be very limiting.  You can't download files yet.  Today, I started experimenting with Epiphany built on Webkit.  It is very promising.  It passes acid2 and most of acid3.  Newer versions supposedly pass acid3. 

However, it dies creating blog entries on just journal.  I'll have to try a newer version of Webkit. It's still fun to play with as most sites render better thant they do with Konquerer.

 I had a problem with a server at work recently.  I used to use a hint from the macosxhints site to reverse ssh into my home mac.  However, I can't do that anymore because my mac is behind NAT.  What I needed was a way to connect to the mac at work which was behind a firewall (but not nat).  I had another machine running FreeBSD with SSH open.  

Solution:

Connect to machine one

ssh -C -4 -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5900 remotehostyouwant  Connect to work mac: 
ssh -C -4 -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 macatwork   

Yet again, nfsd refuses to work properly on OS X server.  I'm getting sick of this on and off bullshit.  The exports file has not been modified.  The server was rebooted after a security update and now nothing will mount via the xserve raid partition. 

This is just sickening.

CNN is reporting that Detroit Mayer Kwame K. was texting several women with "romantic intent."  He's been charged with purgery and misconduct in office.