This morning I awakened from a horrible nightmare. Perhaps somewhat apropos for Halloween. But the dream didn’t involve vampires, wiches, or ghosts. It was about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).
I dreamt that I went into a bookstore to browse. I pulled a book from a shelf and opened it, only to find [...]

I’m really looking forward to the Vintage Computer Festival 8.0, coming up next weekend (November 5-6, 2005) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. I’m not exhibiting this year, but it should be a lot of fun. I think the Homebrew Computer Club retrospective should be quite interesting, and there are [...]

From an article article in the St. Petersburg Times, about a girl being charged with a third-degree felony for having a butter knife in her backpack at school:
And a butter knife, Black said, according to the criminal definition of a weapon and the wording of the law, ” “is a weapon.”
How is the statute [...]

My sisters and I were attending some sort of conference, being held in a hotel in a skyscraper. We had just gotten out of a session in a conference room on the 98th floor, and wanted to go to our rooms on the 97th floor. We were waiting for an elevator. The [...]

Apparently some Agilent logic analyzers (such as the 1682A) will dump data in CSV (comma-separated value) files, rather than a separate file per signal as the old HP 16500B does. My la2vcd program, which converts the logic analyzer dumped data into VCD format for use with a waveform viewer, does not yet support CSV [...]

I’m really annoyed by electronic devices with digital volume controls that are only adjustible in coarse increments. I frequently find that one setting is too quiet, and the next higher setting is too loud. I long for baby bear’s “just right” setting.

I took a DEC VR14 monitor over to the museum to help with the PDP-1 restoration project. It disappeared and I was rather upset. After quite a bit of searching, I found that a different restoration project had noticed that there was something wrong with it and decided to fix it for me, [...]

To my rant on the CBS evolution survey, Tsar Chasm posted a response that is a snowclone, of the form: X make(s) baby Y cry.
All your snowclone are belong to us!
I, for one, welcome our new snowclone overlords.

Boing Boing: Scary evolution survey quotes a CBS News survey that indicates that 51% of Americans believe that God created humans in their current form.
Although I disagee with them, it doesn’t bother me that they believe that, as long as they recognize that such a belief is faith, and don’t confuse it with science. [...]

I’ve been trying to use the latest Xilinx FPGA development software (Foundation ISE 7.1i) under Linux. It’s been a huge hassle getting it set up, but it’s finally working.
Unfortunately Xilinx only officially supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which is one major release back, uses a 2.4 kernel, and (worst of all) costs around [...]