It’s been one of those days, it didn’t start all that bad, but the little things that go one just build up. This track season has been mediocre at best for me, which is annoying me to death. I’m just not as fast as I should be, and some of those who are able to achieve the levels of performance that they, and I, should be at have become arrogant. In general their arrogance has become irritating. I found out that I won’t be competing on Friday, which means that I won’t compete for two weeks, as the competition I could participate in next week is on Thursday, which I will be on a road trip down to Texas for the Jeeper’s Jamboree. One of the two fans mounted in the heat sync for my 200GB hard drive is going bad and is generating noises off and on. The AC in my truck isn’t working correctly; it probably needs to be recharged since we didn’t put enough R-134a in when we replaced the compressor. Someone also told me that they are still getting errors when they try to post comments on my blog, which I fixed earlier, or so I though. The next two weeks are going to be hell as AP testing begins, I have the AP Calculus BC exam in one week, and the second week I have three exams.
Besides these problems, it looks like the standard RPC Ping method of displaying blog updates for Weblogs.us on the front page won’t provide enough information for what the new desired look is. This means I need to do allot of coding to make a received RPC Ping prompt a script to read the RSS feed from the blog and extract the information that we need for the front page. There has to be a better way of doing it, but right now it’s the only way I can think of that impacts existing blogs the least, since no additional code is needed for the individual blog. If any one knows of code that already does this, has a better idea, or is able to write this in PHP, then please leave a comment.
PS: I have a semi-working alpha of the new Weblogs.us frontpage located on my blog at mtekk.weblogs.us/weblogsus so check it out.
-John Havlik
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Five years ago, well make it six, the economy, Napster and music industry reached its peak. Then all hell broke loose, the industry became greedy and shut down Napster, and then the economy tanked. Who’s to blame? Naturally the RIAA/industry is to blame, but not according to the industry. When your sales are down 50% since your peak in 1999 you naturally blame the users, since they are never correct. Nor do the consumers know what is good for them; since they aren’t buy your product. Could it possibly be that the RIAA is suing its consumers? Or is it because they place DRM and copyright protection on their CDs? Possibly that Sony slip-up (the root kit that infested numerous computers and is prone to viruses) is to blame for the majority of consumer’s rightful distrust of the RIAA monopoly. Just maybe the lack of quality is driving consumers to stop buying the “crap” all together?
“File sharing and p2p networks are to blame!” This is a blatant lie. RIAA officials still claim that p2p is the reason their sales are down. Well her’s some news p2p traffic between August and October dropped 11 percent.
So go on, share and download all the music that you want to. Most importantly do not buy a CD from a RIAA artist this Christmas season. Visit RIAA Radar and make sure the CD isn’t an inferior RIAA product.
Here is the link: RIAA Radar
-John Havlik
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Well it seems that a certain principal (Fr Kieran McHugh) of a certain Catholic High School (Pope John XIII Regional High School) in New Jersey has decided that blogging is inappropriate for school age persons. This would be perfectly fine if the principle was talking about blogging using the schools equipment, but if this was true why would I be writing/blogging about it? EXACTLY! It turns out that the principal threatened to suspend and/or expel any student that has a blog. After hearing this some concerned blogger who attends the school posted in his blog that “pope john kicks you out once you think freelyâ€. Once the school administration found the comment on the internet they expelled the student.
First off even though the school is a private institution they are not allowed to infringe on another person’s rights to preserve their own. Therefore the school should be shut down by the federal government for the restriction of the first amendment. But the fact of the matter is that since it is a private school one is not required to attend that particular school. In the United States we have a particularly good public education system, well at least in my area, in which those whom want to do well are able to learn far more then in the local privatized institutions, and those whom are inclined to work at McDonalds for the rest of the lives are allowed to pursue their own destiny with out holding the more determined students back due to their lack of determination. The school brings up a good point in which I made a while back about blogging, blogging is cool and can be used to replace a hard-copy journal but posting too much personal information on your blog, including address, phone number, picture containing oneself and/or family/friends, and your full name are all not very smart things to do. In my case I post my full name to maintain my claim for the name/word mtekk and the ‘m’ logo which are both my intellectual property.
One has to be smart while blogging, if a teacher can google for your name and find your blog within the top ten google results and then find a picture of you, or enough information that directly links you to your blog then you may be giving out too much information. In my case my blog, mtekk’s crib, happens to be the first result in google when searching for John Havlik and with a little research in my blog and in google results will turn up my state and the city in which I live. My age isn’t too difficult to figure out from previous blog entries and my interests well that one isn’t too hard to figure out, well some of them at least. The thing is that you don’t want to mess with me on the street, let alone try to break into my house. First off I can and will out run you on the street; second I can and will severally injure you in self defense; third I have several guns, including shotguns, with plenty of ammunition to break through even military grade body armor and I’m a excellent shot. Not only those but I’ve other ‘tricks’ up my sleeve to avoid abductors. I post no pictures of myself for obvious reasons, and the internet contains no picture of me. As for many people at my school the same cannot be said, even you-knew-who falls under the category of those whom share too much private information on her “blog†though she is too ignorant to comprehend that it is in fact a blog and what she is doing is blogging not xangaing, which degusts me.
Here is the link: Daily Record – Blogging Ban
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
If you haven’t seen the recent claims from the fraudulent law firms of Daniel Wallace and Maureen O’Gara it is advised that you check out Slashdot and read the article.
A note: The following is considered a rant of sorts, and may include indecent language and sexual/racial/other slurs that may offend members of my audience but because of my firm believe in no censorship I will keep the slurs and vulgarity in this post.
Well they claim that the GPL license is unfairly setting a price on GPL’ed software and that this hurts big business. They say that the FSF should remove the GPL and LGPL from its acceptable open source licenses. They claim that the price that the GPL sets is just ‘unfair’ for competition and is undercutting big businesses.
GPL is nothing more than a price fixing scheme designed to drive software vendors out of business
said Maureen O’Gara. What is this stupid bitch babbling about? So we are supposed to believe that the GPL is evil, eh? Well I think we should believe that this stupid bitch is evil. She for one should have her legal license revoked and then sued by the FSF, whom she is attempting to sue for the GPL, for slander. I would like to see the book thrown at this lousy excuse of a human.
The GPL is a license, an open source license that requires any works derived from the works that are released under the GPL to be released under the GPL. The GPL requires the developer and distributor of the program that is released under it to also provide the source code for free to anyone and everyone who may want it. This license is seen as communistic and evil by Bill Gates and others in Microsoft, but in fact their EULA is even more evil then the GPL, the EULA was designed to remove the user’s rights, the GPL was designed to give the rights to the people.
The EULA is closer to something of a dictatorship, such as Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, or Hitler since all these governments were by the select few, and for the select few. The GPL gives the power to the people, demos in Greek, and when the people have the power then you have a democracy, not a communism, since in communism the people aren’t allowed to participate in the government. It is technically illegal for one to take a CD of Windows XP Pro and a valid CD key that one owns and create a Windows LiveCD (or DVD) similar to a Knopix, or Gentoo LiveCD. Why? because the EULA forbids it by punishment of the law. The EULA is the real evil since it restricts the user’s rights. The GPL only says that you can’t claim the program, or any of it’s code as your own if you didn’t write it, and therefore if you include any of the program’s code into a application of your own, you new code must fall under the GPL because of the use of the GPLed code. You don’t like the rules? Then write your own program from scratch and then release it under any license that you choose. The GPL was never intended for profit of the code released under it.
What is wrong with the GPL? Really why does big business have problems with it? I mean, how can a bunch of amateurs really compete with a large corporate conglomerate such as Microsoft or IBM? Or do companies such as SCO want to use GPLed code but not release the product under the GPL out of greed? No one can compete with free eh? Then why did Novell buy Suse Linux? Novell is now using and supporting all open source software, and most of its old proprietary software has gone away. I believe that they use the GPL as their open source license. If a company is making money from a product that is also available on the internet for free then why is this lawsuit even close to being valid? I have just disproved their case.
The lawyers also dare to accuse groklaw of some things that are not true at all.
Groklaw’s article
-John Havlik
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WordCamp NYC
