I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Friday, August 22

Geek

Daily SCO

More hilarity in the ongoing SCO saga.

Bruce Perens got his hands on the full SCO presentation, and provides a detailed analysis here. He traces one of the alleged infringements back to its original published form in 1968, through its release as open source - first by AT&T and then by Caldera (the company that now calls itself SCO) - and explains how it in fact entered the public domain during the '90s.

He also points out that SCO is claiming ownership of IBM's JFS and SGI's XFS filesystems - purely because they are part of those companies' Unix distributions.

Linus Torvalds is more direct. He says:

They are smoking crack.
There's a short interview with the creator of Linux at eWeek.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Allison and the Samba team (Samba provides Windows file services on Linux and Unix) are just a little upset with SCO. They note that Darl McBride, chief weenie at SCO, recently said:

At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it's about destroying value.
At the same time, SCO proclaim the inclusion in their operating system of such applications as GCC, Squid, and Samba.

Guess what license GCC is released under? The GPL. So are Squid (a proxy server application) and Samba. So why are SCO deliberately destroying the value of their own product? Investors need to ask this question.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, August 21

Anime

Nanaka 6/17

I've haven't posted anything about anime for a while. I plan to correct this in a major way soon, but for today I'll talk about what I'm watching right now. Which is Nanaka 6/17 and Stellvia of the Universe.

Nanaka 6/17 is the story of a girl named Nanaka, who falls down a flight of stairs one rainy day and bonks her head. When she wakes up, she has lost all her memories of the past eleven years: she's a six-year-old in a 17-year-old body. To give her the best possible chance for recovery, it's decided to treat her as though everything is perfectly normal... Except that she has magically grown up overnight.

Which is pretty silly, but hey, this is a TV show, not Shakespeare. The result is the sort of good-hearted fun that is found so often in anime, without the nasty chemical-treacle gloss that American productions tend to put on such an effort.

I've seen three episodes so far (out of 12 available from AnimeSuki), and I'll give more details when I've seen the rest. As for Stellvia - which, as it happens, is not about a girl named Stellvia - I've only seen the first episode. But I like it so far.

Anyway, here you can find the opening credits for Nanaka 6/17. I've got it down to 8 meg with a certain amount of fiddling. I might end up buying DrDivX, because at least it does what I tell it to (a feature sadly lacking in so much software today).

To play the video, you may need to download a DivX decoder. You can find a handy pack of codecs* here. Or go to Kazaa Lite and download either the basic or full codec pack from their download page. (The link I gave is the basic pack.)

*Codec is short for coder/decoder; this codec pack includes both the decoders for playing files and the coders for creating them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:08 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 327 words, total size 2 kb.

Geek

Codec Cooties

The Ulead video editing software just plain doesn't do what you tell it to. Give it precise codec settings, and it ignores them. Change the settings radically between two attempts, get identical output files.

Bah.

DrDivX seems to do the right thing, but all it does is encode. So I have to load the encoded file into Ulead, edit it, re-encode it, save it, load the file into DrDivX and re-encode it again.

This is not a recipe for high-quality output.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 85 words, total size 1 kb.

Wednesday, August 20

Cool

Instalinked!

Heh.

Instapunditeers, click on the Movies link at left to find the whole story.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:53 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Codec Chaos

Foo.

My new DVD burner came with a library of video and DVD editing software from Ulead. This prompted me to try something I've wanted to do for a while. I have all these anime files on my computer, and I'd like to put up some little video clips to show people just what it is that I'm talking about - without them having to download entire episodes at 200 meg a pop.

The program found my collection of codecs just fine, which was a relief. Most of the files are in non-standard formats such as DivX (unrelated to the failed attempt at selling pay-per-view DVDs) and Xvid, which are variants of MPEG-4. The program read the files just fine, and allowed me to select from these and other codecs for my output.

However, the file produced for a 90-second clip came out to 25 meg. No matter what I set the bit rate to, it comes out at 25 meg. Except sometimes when it's even bigger.

The one success I've had was with RealMedia format, which produced a 1.5 meg file for the same clip. The picture and sound quality was... About what you'd expect. Awful.

I'm sure there's a trick to making this work, but I'm not going to find it tonight.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:53 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 218 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

No Go, SCO

SCO, the evil and irrelevant company that's been suing IBM for $3 billion and trying to extort money from everyone from yours truly to the U.S. Government, has finally shown their cards, that is, the code they allege to have been stolen.

They showed it in Greek.

No, really. At the recent SCOforum, they presented some of the claimed infringing code. It was printed in the Symbol font, so all the Latin letters were replaced by their Greek equivalents, rather like the menu Susie found on Mars. Someone took a photo of the presentation, and it was translated.

Turns out that the code in question dates back to Unix System 6, first released in 1976, documented (and indeed printed in full) by John Lions in a book that has since had SCO's official blessing, and apparently released into the public domain. At the very least, it is open source as part of BSD Unix.

SCO's case seems to be weaker - if more amusing - than even I expected.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 175 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

New Toy

I went out to lunch and came back with a DVD burner. Oops! The Pioneer DVR-A06, to be precise. Yay!

In fact, I bought it from the same store that's advertising the Pressit CDestroyer. I should have asked them about that.

Now all I need is a hundred or so blank DVD-Rs and I can back up my 3.4 million files...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:00 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

Tuesday, August 19

Geek

Then You Need...

Too many CDs? Too many CDs that work? Not enough time to ruin them yourself? No kids to do it for you?

Then you need the Pressit CDestroyer!* Designed specifically to destroy your valuable CDs!

Act now and we'll throw in this valuable bag of dirt!

* As far as I can tell, this is a real product.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:33 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 64 words, total size 1 kb.

Blog

No Respect

Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit writes:
THIS may well be true. That's okay -- I can live with being replaced by a robot.
He tosses this off without even a passing mention to The Blogfather.

And to think I serve in his Intelligence Corps. The shame!

Update: Heh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:52 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 49 words, total size 1 kb.

Life

It's What's For Dinner

Shepherd's Pie (made with real shepherds!), followed by apple pie with boysenberry ice cream. If anyone's still hungry, there's pistachios and chocolate frogs.

Yes, I do my own grocery shopping. Why do you ask?

(By the way, pistachios are expensive.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:46 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

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