Older blog entries for Acapnotic (starting at number 39)

This entry is just here to express distaste at some of the so-called articles of late which simply ask old questions without offering any research or insight into the matter. Bla, I say to you, bla. I'm not sure whether or not it's better than the rebirth of the "trust system is broken" articles. The only thing that occours to me is that we need some kind of enforced comminity memory-- before you post an article on any subject, you must read all the previous articles and follow-ups that have been posted here on that subject in the past.

Yes, I'm just a snob who's grouchy because he can't find anything to eat.

[Later] "Some technical questions" appeared after I wrote the above. While graydon's article certainly isn't in-depth, I do have to give him at least a few points for originality.

Back from travelling adventures. The pictures are currently with the supermarket's photo shop (except for the first batch, because someone put SFW film in the camera). The bad news is, upon returning home and reassembling the computer, the monitor did a snap-crackle-pop routine and now smokes like a bong whenever I turn it on =(. So I'm using the spare monitor now, but it sucks rocks through a curly straw. This may limit the time I can spend looking at code...

Gone to visit family for a bit. If I'm not answering e-mail, that's why. Will be back soon enough.

So the President of the United States signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act into law. And the White House released a little fact sheet about it. But as this Reuters article points out, "The law itself does nothing to create federal requirements or repositories for signatures. That will be left to the marketplace, as will the issue of creating security surrounding digital transactions."

...so it could be a while before we see digital signatures catch on.

After signing it in ink, the president signed the bill with a smartcard. His password: "Buddy", the name of his dog. Aren't you glad the password the U.S. president uses to sign bills is broadcast in national media?

Also note that the white house publications server has a much better addressing system for referencing documents than congress does.

Whee. Adaptive Contrast Enhancement release finally happened. And I put up new example pictures too.

Yikes. Once more, Hans Reiser demonstrates he has all the social skills of an eggplant. In a message to Alan Cox titled "Re: New Linux 2.5 - 2.6 TODO (Alan Cox suggests delaying reiserfs integration)" he writes:

This is just a RedHat bureaucratic excuse to delay reiserfs. [...] The fact is, Chris Mason kicked your asses performance wise and now you want to employ some journaling standardization process to stall your competitors that you can't program as well as.

Why don't you help us with ReiserFS instead of standing in the way of people trying to program?

Aya. Naturally, Alan Cox told him to stop treating the linux-kernel list like slashdot. But the best response I've read so far is Chris Mason's:

[...] In other words, quit saying that I did a better job than ext3. We had different goals, and it will be a long time I before understand things as well as Stephen does.

Why don't you help us with ReiserFS instead of standing in the way of people trying to program?

You're right hans, at least once a week, alan comes over to my house and breaks one of my fingers. I've just been afraid all this time to talk about it.

This is not the first time that Chris has served as the Voice of Reason on the ReiserFS list. I hope we neven find out what would happen to the project without him.

As for my own doings... Well, I know I should have had that new release of adaptive contrast enhancement out by now, but the weather really has been terribly nice. In fact, it didn't even rain on the annual Rose Festival parade here, which is a serious breach in tradition. But there were a few rainy days, so when it does come out, it will be debianizable. Now anyone want to contribute an rpm spec file to gimp-plugin-template?

Preliminary investigations of mitch's gimp-plugin-template today, which resulted in some light dancing with autoconf. But more importantly, there are (unofficial) i386 Debian packages of GIMP 1.1.23 at http://yakk.ucc.asn.au/gimp/ (for aussies) and

deb http://download.sourceforge.net/gimp-plug-ins/ ./

for the right-side-up half of the world.

Many thanks to yakk for doing this while gimp's regular debian maintainer is swamped by his academic life.

I've experienced a dramatic drop in hacking time lately, with even times of the computer being off during waking hours. I blame the weather, you can blame Passions... though I've also had recent cause to be more attentive to my physical well-being.

The latest improvements to gimp-ace really deserved to be released before I get drawn away, though, so I'll have to get it together and kick out a new version soon...

Extracirricular activities include readings on massage and pressure points, Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, and recognizing that when it's been a year since you were last outside barefoot, you really take notice of those pebbles in the road.