2008
08.29
I don’t really have anything to blog about right now, but I did want to just say that I am still around and as busy as ever. School has started once again; I have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7-8:15pm and Sunshine has class on Mondays from 7-10pm. I’m also officially on “mandatory overtime,” which to you lucky stiffs in the non-government sector means nothing. To me, it means “we want the whole department to work overtime to pull in contract sales faster, so we want you to do 10% extra a month.”
On top of all of that, we are in the process of buying a house. I’ll do another write-up this weekend about my experiences doing so, since there may be some other first-timers out there who’d like a scientists’ point of view.
Anyways, I’ve got a few posts scheduled for the weekend. I also have regular maintenance on erebus scheduled (cleaning, updates, security, etc). Lastly, I am going to update zero-blog and finish setting up the photography section already. I’ve been screwing around with that for a year and it’s time I just hurried up with it (I spent the few hours organizing and labeling my photots, so I don’t have any good excuses not to finish).
Don’t touch that dial; it’s a three day weekend coming up!
2008
08.16
I have long been fascinated with copyright law and the various legal abuses of power that come with creation of original thought. In case you haven’t heard, there has been much talk about the recent appeals court ruling that the Artistic License is a copyright agreement and not a contract or covenant. Here are some of the pages discussing the landmark case:
Needless to say, this is an extremely important win for open source. Actually, it’s even more important to Perl because of its use of the Artistic License (version 2). This basically validates everyone’s effort in open source as a valid (collective) copyright holder even though no currency exchange is required by the license.
So now that the courts have validated the GPLv2 license in the SCO versus everything Linux related and the Artistic License has been validated, it’s safe to say that these are legitimate copyright notices. More importantly, copyright is still enforcable even in an open source community.
It’s ironic because if I tell non-technical people that I contribute to open source, they usually think I am an idiot for “giving something (anything) away for free.” They usually cannot wrap their anachronistic brains around the idea that perhaps it’s possible to have a passion for something that extends beyond any corporate interest.
Not all that glitters is gold.
2008
08.01
To those of you who have not heard yet, Diablo 3 was announced this week at a Blizzard event in Paris. That’s right, 8 years in the making and they finally have a tech demo to show off what we all knew was eventual: a sequel to a game that was just that good.
Go on, head over to their website and watch the entire thing. Then go change your pants because you’ve most likely messed them by time it’s over.
The only downside is we all know that Blizzard is notorious for being VERY slow in their development. In fact, only World Of Warcraft has been deserving of their lethargy. Let’s hope Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 come out soon enough for my grandkids to enjoy (I’m not exaggerating, they started in 2003, that’s a long time for a project that picks up an existing physics engine).