I recently saw an interesting article on the "Loudness War". Basically it's a sort of loudness arms race between competing music labels and radio stations to increase the loudness of recordings so they stand out. Wikipedia has an extensive article on the subject. The loudness of the entire recording is increased, but the maximum volume of a particular part of a CD/Vinyl recording is fixed so[...]

I just read this essay by Richard Stallman. While I think it's kind of old and while Richard sometimes seems like a conspiracy theorist his argument is compelling. Especially when reading documents and plans put forth by the Trusted Computing Group (the term trusted is a misnomer. The FSF uses the term treacherous computing but the phrase "Trusted Computing" itself is ambiguous because the su[...]

Recently I added a small applet which displays news stories that I am sharing from Google Reader. With Google Reader you can share news stories and blog entries that you think are important publicly. I thought it was pretty cool so I added it to the page here. The news stories that I tend to share will probably concern three topics, Environmentalism, Technology, and Japan related news. If yo[...]

Somewhat recently, Google released their online version of Microsoft Word and Excel. Essentially, it is a document editor that can import and export various formats and allow editing of documents on the web. I originally thought that the AJAX approach of Google Docs could never touch the feature set, speed, and usability of a native application. After all, documents can be big, and native app[...]

I was surfing the web earlier and found a link to elephantsdream.org. It's a project to create a movie short created with only open software like Blender. The production files are also available under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The content itself was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam and financed equally by the Blender Foundation and Montevideo in the[...]

Just recently Google Calendar has allowed calendar users to display their calendars publicly. This has been something I've been looking forward to since now people I know can see when I'm busy. You could do this previously with Yahoo Calendar and was lacking in Google's version. Though Yahoo allowed users to publicly publish calendars, Google went a step farther and allowed users to imbed ca[...]

I use b2evolution for my blog on my home page. Recently someone from work tried to leave me a comment here and got the message > `MySQL error!` > > `Unknown column 'comment_author_ID' in 'field list'(Errno=1054)` > > `Your query: INSERT INTO evo_comments( comment_post_ID, comment_type, comment_author_ID, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_author_IP, commen[...]

Today I'm messing with Google Calendar. I've been using Yahoo's Calendar which is nice and has features for everything I use and ties nicely into Yahoo Groups. It has the capability of providing 2 reminders, which I like. These reminders can come to you as e-mail or go to your cell phone. You can provide a location, along with other data such as a phone number and location name. You can sched[...]

Since gtk 2.0 has been out for like 3 years I figured it was about time for me to learn some of it. So I've been playing around with it, creating some demo programs. Now I'm looking for a project to work on and thought that I might try to make a gtk implementation of the keepass password safe. I wanted to do a strait gtk-2.0 implementation of this in C but it looks like some of the code that [...]

Yesterday I released jsXe 0.4pre3 Hopefully I'll be releasing new versions more regularly in the future. It's hard to maintain focus on Japanese study and jsXe and everything else all at once. I really need to redo the website jsXe website soon. It's pretty crappy. The guy that designed it did an Ok job but he didn't work on it for very long. Maybe I can come up with some design requirement[...]