AlexH

Michael Geist writes:

I’ve talked about the need for balanced copyright for many years, but we’ve never seen this much public engagement in copyright. That is because the real story is that copyright matters to people and they now have the tools to make their voices heard. I’m thrilled to have played a role in raising awareness, but the real credit goes to the thousands of people who took the time to write or call their elected representatives, to blog about the issue, to attend the Toronto or Calgary events, or to raise awareness with their friends, family and community.

I’ve been doing my part. On Monday night I sent a letter to my MP, James Moore, whom I talked to at his open house on Saturday. He said that he would pass on my concerns to the Minister of Industry. I’ve also managed to sign 16 people up to the Facebook group.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 105, in main
result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 287, in doCommands
self._getTs()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 85, in _getTs
self._getTsInfo()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 91, in _getTsInfo
self._tsInfo.setDatabases(self.rpmdb, self.pkgSack)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 529, in
pkgSack = property(fget=lambda self: self._getSacks(),
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 384, in _getSacks
self.repos.populateSack(which=repos)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 242, in populateSack
sack.populate(repo, mdtype, callback, cacheonly)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/yumRepo.py”, line 167, in populate
dobj = repo_cache_function(xml, csum)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/sqlitecachec.py”, line 46, in getPrimary
self.repoid)
TypeError: Parsing primary.xml error: Start tag expected, ‘< ' not found

For future reference and Google searches, this is caused by libxml2 being compiled without zlib support. >:-|

Wow, it was hot last night! So hot, I had to shut down the PVR:

Message from syslogd@ebi at Wed Jul 11 18:39:42 2007 …
ebi kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold

It seems like my plants are doing ok. There is a danger of the tomatoes dropping their blossoms before fruit has formed, but I don’t think that has happened.

And on a blogging note, there aren’t many times that I can have a post that’s in both the MythTV and Gardening categories!

B.C. swelters under record highs

Seven all-time temperature highs were set across British Columbia on Wednesday, with most of the records falling in the Fraser Valley, the Greater Vancouver area and on Vancouver Island.

New feature from Amazon EC2:

Paid AMIs allow AWS developers to charge other Amazon EC2 users for the use of AMIs they have created and shared. Sellers of AMIs set the price, and their customers then purchase one or more AMIs and are billed through Amazon.com for their use of these paid AMIs.

Right now, only a select group of people can create paid AMIs, but hopefully they will open it up to more in the future.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the presentation tonight.

I’ve put the presentation online if you want to download it. Hosted by S3, natch.
Here are some links with some more information:

• Amazon Web Services blog
• S3Fox Organizer for Firefox
• Web interface to AWS
• EC2 plugin for Firefox
• Amazon Web Services forums

Kids these days!

Police use Facebook to douse party plans

Ontario Provincial Police used the Facebook networking site to thwart an illegal bush party planned by teenagers over the weekend.

More than 700 teens had said they would attend the bash, on private property in the Tillsonburg area, about 175 kilometres southwest of Toronto. Party details had been posted on a public page of the social networking site.

Now get off my lawn, dagnabbit!

I cannot believe how cool this is! Photosynth combines flickr.com with an image processing algorithm to create an infinitely zoomable image.

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

People are drooling over Drobo:

Data Robotics, Inc. | Drobo Product Specifications

Drobo Product Specifications

Four Bay Disk Interface
• 3.5″ SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives
• Full or half-height, no carriers required
• Choose the drive manufacturer, capacity (mixed capacities ok), and spindle speed or cache that fits your current storage needs

It looks like a cool device, and at $500 USD, it’s a bit pricey. I’d rather go with a more open solution that doesn’t need special software to run on the clients. Something like Openfilter:

File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5.

Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.

Good news for people hosting with Amazon S3, wanting to do authenticated accesses:

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Improvements: Virtual Hosted Buckets and Object Size

The Amazon S3 team is excited to launch a significant enhancement to our virtual hosted buckets feature (also known as vanity domains). Customers who use vanity domains can now make signed HTTP requests against their vanity domains. Please refer to the updated Amazon S3 documentation for details. We’ve released updated code samples for this feature which are available in the Resource Center.

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Another step in my mouse reduction:

Francis Tang: Geek Stuff | Win2k/XP Ctrl-Caps swap

XEmacs/Emacs users will understand this well: the Ctrl key is in the wrong position on modern PC 102 key keyboards. A better place for the Ctrl key is where it used to be, i.e. where the Caps key is now.

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