General

How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever. - David B. Norris

I read an article today about a bittorrent client which casually mentioned this: On regular swarms, it performs about the same as any other client. But it also opens 500 simultaneous connections (compared to the Mainline client’s default 80) so it hoses your router almost instantly. Which speaks to a long-term annoyance of mine. Why are consumer routers from D-Link, NetGear and Linksys so poor? The Internet runs on real protocols that have real requirements, and the average consumer is only stifled by a router that can only hold up under casual web browsing and e-mail checking.

For those keeping up with the news, December 30, 2006 should be a day that lives in infamy. On this day a chain of events was completed which seals the United States, the largest and most powerful nation in the world today as an International outlaw state. Let’s review. In 2003 this outlaw state invaded Iraq under the pretext of exigent circumstances - that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and the means to create them.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Bell Canada has a long history of dominance in telecommunications, and rightly so. It has until now been the sole owner of a communications infrastructure that can deliver voice communications between local people and the remote corners of the world.

Truth, like a modest little flower in the wilderness of life, is surrounded and almost choked by the luxuriant growth of the weeds of error. If you would find it you must be ever on the lookout. If you would see its beauty you must brush aside the weeds of error and the brambles of bigotry. If you would possess it you must stoop to get it. Be not content with one flower of truth.

Parallels has released an amazing update to their virtual machine software ‘Parallels Workstation for Mac’. To me, the single most notable new feature is called ‘Coherency’, which causes Windows applications to run right alongside Macintosh programs in windowed mode. No more dedicated desktop window for the Windows OS. This mirrors the functionality of Classic, a technology Apple employed to enable MacOS X to run legacy applications right alongside their OS X apps.

I hate ringtones. Sing-song sounds coming out of people’s pockets is not my idea of amusement - a phone ringing is jarring enough, but it’s magnified a thousand-fold when one is forced to listen to 45 seconds of sprightly latino music blaring as loud as a little 1" speaker can possibly blast it before the phone’s owner wakes up and takes the call. However! Some custom ringtones actually sound like a phone ringing.

Hopefully people will glom onto this information, as it’s sorely lacking. Here’s the upshot - DiVX and XViD are dead. H.264, more commonly known as MPEG-4/AVC is the new champion of compressed video. And yet, most media files are still released using DiVX and XViD, chiefly because people are not totally familiar with how to create H.264 files. What’s worse, many people simply use graphical frontends to encoding engines, which don’t provide them the newest options for H.

Microsoft’s next-generation Vista promises to deliver radically improved graphics for end-users, promising 3D-accelerated user interfaces and special effects that will dramatically improve the way a user relates to the computing experience, similar to what current owners of Apple Macintosh systems enjoy. Meanwhile on the Linux front, Red Hat and Novell have been spearheading the development of their own next-generation display subsystems, and Red Hat is among the first to include it in a freely released operating system: Fedora Core 6.

I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to easily set up Evolution 2.8 with an Exchange 2003 account with its associated version of Evolution Connector. This marks the first time in seven months that a current version of Evolution has succeeded in working with Microsoft Exchange. If you’re a user of Evolution and you require Exchange compatibility, here’s some advice: Stick with a compatible version at all cost. DO NOT UPGRADE.