February 2008 archive

When will the copyright holders want control over our mind’s eye?

I read with interest Crosbie Fitch’s rant: “In respect to the artist - NO PHOTOS”.

With this statement: “anything that is available to the senses of the public visitor is available to be recorded by that visitor,” I got to thinking about how copyright owners will try to control their “property” in the future.

It seems the time isn’t very far away when our senses will be augmented by our machines. What we see and hear will be much better preserved, and available for perfect recall. Will the RIAA claim the privilege and the right to dilute or maybe erase entirely our enhanced memory of a song we hear on the radio? Or control how we communicate so that we don’t share our experiences with others?

Doesn’t that seem awfully …

Converting PDFs into Image Files (Citimortgage PDF Reprise)

I didn’t receive a response from Citimortgage about their ghastly PDF files, but on my next visit I was again able to view my statements in Evince, the GNOME PDF viewer. (Although they were still obnoxiously large files for the amount of data represented.)

But then on my next visit after that, the following month’s statement was again not viewable. Come on, Citimortgage, this shouldn’t be that difficult.

However, I had already invested some time in learning a couple of things about free software programs for working with PDF files in GNU/Linux, hoping to either shrink the files down or convert them into another format with less storage overhead. I’m a small man with small ambitions, and it had become a mission to not waste so much space on these records.

(You’d think …

WordPress XHTML Validator Plugin

WordPress is very good about supporting standards and producing valid markup, and at least when I started using it, it had a link in the standard theme to proclaim the validity of its pages and prove it to you by taking you to the W3C Markup Validation Service. A lot of people never pay this any attention and promptly produce a bunch of non-complying pages, all the while shamefully leaving the boastful link in the sidebar or footer of their site.

Being a retentive sort about many things, I’ve always worked to ensure my pages validate correctly, looking for the below highly satisfying message on each and every one of these posts that I strive mightily to create for you:

(Versus the alternative which is highlighted with red instead …

Down in the Caucus, Out in the Street

Went to the Minnesota Democratic caucuses tonight. What a madhouse. What a zoo. There must have been five hundred or more people at the middle school. (Updated, 10 February 2008: Just learned that there were 2,600 attendees in my Senate District, where there had only been 233 in 2004, and 95 in 2006. Wow!)

Across the street, the Republican caucuses were being held at a high school. The parking lot of the middle school was jam-packed when we arrived just before 7pm. There were lines out the door. We made a slow loop through the lot, waiting in line behind many other cars, before parking across the street at the high school. Where the lot was also full but not as many cars trolling for spots. Walked …