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Where oh where does the time go? For those who read this blog for the technical content, I noticed Simon Willison’s Weblog in my referer. If I updated my blog regularly, this is the kind of content I’d want to put up on it.

Simon has also recently started beta testing a searchable css-discuss database. This thing is really great. Really, really great. No, make that Insansely Great™. Now I can delete my old css-d messages without feeling like it might come in handy the next day.

Simon also links two other neat blogs: Mike Pletch’s Daily Scribbling, and Column Two.

Mike Pletch talks about an interesting Business Week writeup on Macromedia and its financial woes. While it’s sorta non-sequiter, I have to take that counterpoint and bitch about Flash MX. The reason it’s not going to catch on is because it just doesn’t cut the mustard if you need to do any real programming on it. Simply put, it’s a huge pain in the ass to do anything vaguely useful with it (see previous rant).

Earlier this week, I did some work on the PowerPoint to Flash conversion. I thought that was it, but since the timings were way off and I wasn’t anyone else to do it, I ended up spending the afternoon manually retiming the slide timings. In any case, here’s the result (it’s an exclusive for now boys and girls!):

• Lawrence Lessig – Free Culture [Flash 5+, 8.4MB] – Keynote given at OSCON 2002, slides synced with audio

Oh, do me a favor and don’t submit this to /. — Larry will be doing that w/ his own servers soon enough.

Yesterday, I walked two blocks up to the local Kia Dealership and took them up on their free LOTR DVD offer. They asked me if I was interested in the certificate or the test drive, and in the interest of saving everybody’s time, I answered the former and walked out a few minutes later with a neato holographic certificate. I called in the number while I was walking home, and that was that. If all goes well, the DVD should be coming in the mail in a few weeks.

I’ve been spending more time than I probably should be on VWvortex recently. And, while the forums are active and sometimes even useful, the articles are great too, like this article on The Clean Future of the Diesel Engine. Volkswagen’s Lupo 3L TDI is pretty crazy, averaging 2.38l/100km at an average speed of 85km/h on a 33,333km trip. Running that through the ol’ converter, that’s 98.8mi/gal averaging a speed of 52.8mi/hr on a 20,700mi trip.

Also, some great eye candy: Silver 16v, Hooligan Hybrid, and RS-4Door among them.

Wow, today’s Mozilla build is the worst I’ve tried in quite a while. It’s crashed 5 times today already, 3 times in the past 20 minutes.

Invoking Godwin’s Law on DRM: Hitler, It Seems, Loved Money and Died Rich.

I’m reading the comments attached to the /. poll on Living off the Grid. There’s some good stuff in there.The thread revolving around one person’s (incorrect) calculations is very interesting. The corrections are very informative. Also good are the threads on hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, ac-dc hacking, solar howtos etc. It’s also just fun reading about people’s setups.

Related: Wireless Internet In An Off-Grid House, Renewable Entergy Policy Project, Home Power: The Hands-on Jounal of Home-made Power, Maine Solar House

I’m up later than I wanted to be because the timed PowerPoint/MP3 -> Flash presentation transfer I agreed to do for a friend ended up taking longer than I thought. The PowerPoint part of it wasn’t bad. MSDN turned up a nifty object model chart and reference and the VBA debugger does everything you’d expect and want it to do. While I suppose Flash MX is an improvement, the development environment is still woefully lackluster. The included ActionScript Dictionary is shitty, there’s no object model chart (I still don’t know what the built in objects and collections are), and the debugger is weak sauce. Not to mention ActionScript itself still sucks. Oh sure it’s mostly ECMA on the outside, but it’s still a hacky Lingo-ish bastard child on the inside. I spent a while looking for a proper timer/sleep function (it’s not there), and also under the false impression that I’d be able to implement a controller model / actionscript without having to attach it to a frame (also not there). I ended up hacking it together with nested clips and gotos. Que lame-o. I should probably start throwing up full write-ups of these things on their own pages…

On the bright side, I thought up of some things related to this that I can add to Rasmus’s presentation system. I’m actually still sitting on some code that I should check in. It’s on my todo-list, but I’m just so busy right now that I’m not even thinking about anything other than making it through the next few weeks.

Obvious tip of the day: when installing VPN software, it’s advisable for said installer not to be on a networked drive.

After getting the last parts, I finally got around to setting up my SCSI array. The IBM ServeRAID cards pulls from Computer Geeks. These are pretty monstrous cards. They’re full length with 5 orange status LEDs on the back. The actual board has 3 Adaptec AIC-7880P chips, a PowerPC 403GC controller, and 3 other custom IBM chips. It apparently supports up to 45 SCSI-2 fast/wide drives, configurable in RAID 0, 1, 5, w/ failover and hot-swapping. (Newsgroup discussion of some of the particulars) The ServeRAID Manager software is also rather nifty.

Coupled with the pair of Ultra SCSI 5GB Fujitsu drives I picked up on the cheap, it runs louder, hotter, and transfers slower than the Western Digital 120GB drive I’ve been using for the past few months (being moved to my file server system), but um… that’s besides the point, right?

Everyone at USC has been getting a lot of Korean spam lately. Apparently sometime back, USC’s directory was harvested. Of course, these spammers don’t care that 99% of the people receiving these messages won’t even have the proper character set to decode this, much less be able to understand it, after all, it’s not their resources that they’re consuming. This, incidentally is why Cory is dead wrong. This current trend is untenable because spam doesn’t just cost the time of the person receiving the spam, but there are real costs involved along every single step of the way.

Ultimately I believe that the only way that will be feasible is for there to be some sort of sender-based fee, whether it be virtual, like camram, refundable micropayments, or any of a number of other ideas. Until then, things like SpamAssassin, TDMA, etc may help stem the flow, but simply aren’t viable in the long-term.