iTunes scooped the Sci Fi Channel by showing the Stargate Atlantis episode Doppelgänger four episodes ahead of schedule. I just downloaded Adrift and got this instead…

The real “Adrift” has not been posted yet, but according to the Wikipedia article, it aired on the Sci Fi channel yesterday. Oops!

Now where do I go to find out what happened to the city drifting in space?

[Update] Apple took down the wrong “Adrift” at some point and made the real one available by Monday evening. They even issued a credit for a future download. That’s what I call customer service. Thanks!

The only bad news for Stargate addicts is that it’s a two part episode. Now if only they had posted the second one ahead of time… I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the future for iTunes TV, premium content for paying viewers that’ll be on iTunes first and on the spam infested networks a year later.

Steve Jobs has challenged the music industry to license their libraries DRM-free and asks:

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

The problem is that music industry executives have forgotten that their revenue comes from paying customers, not pirates. In other words, why punish paying customers with inferior products and give pirates access to the real thing?

Buying music online would be a no-brainer, if it wasn’t for the DRM nonsense.

[Update] Cult of Mac asks: Why doesn’t Jobs sell DRM-free music available elsewhere on iTunes?

KasLog is slowly coming back to life. The custom theme is back, but the old content is still missing and that means the links are still broken.

Patience, please.

Bill Thompson looks at Windows Vista DRM and sees a bleak future for net freedoms we enjoy today:

Yet now governments and corporations around the world are making a concerted effort to dismantle the open internet and replace it with a regulated and regulable one that will allow them to impose an “architecture of control”.

That’s a pretty good summary of what’s happening, but will they succeed? Today DRM is all the rage and all the rich kids on the block use it. Windows Vista is just a little ahead of the curve in that area. But what if consumers find out there’s a better alternative, that actually lets them use the stuff they pay for as they see fit?

Overly restrictive DRM is creating new opportunities. Once a handful of today’s little guys who don’t use DRM make it big, the whole game will be changed forever and the dinosaurs will be forced to drop DRM and find business models that work in a DRM free world, or face extinction.

Too optimistic?

If you’re compiling Ruby from the source, you might find that the interpreter is unable to load extension modules, after the usual ./configure; make; make install dance. For example, ri may be unable to load the stringio.so extension:

$ ri
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:9:in `require': no such file to load -- stringio (LoadError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:9
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_descriptions.rb:1:in `require'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_descriptions.rb:1
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_reader.rb:1:in `require'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_reader.rb:1
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_driver.rb:5:in `require'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/ri/ri_driver.rb:5
from /usr/local/bin/ri:43:in `require'
from /usr/local/bin/ri:43

If that’s the case, check your file permissions. I found that the extension modules installed under /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux were not world executable. To fix, try the following:

chmod -R o+rX /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux

You’ll probably have to run this command with root permissions and replace the path depending on where Ruby was installed. That fixed the problem for me.

McDonald’s is trying to patent sandwhich–making. I would have thought the repulsive taste of their “food” should suffice to deter would be competitors. Apparently not.

Oh no, Thanksgiving without a caffeine fix? That’s illegal in Seattle, home to Starbucks and about a million other coffee shops within walking distance. Unfortunately Thanksgiving isn’t the best day to replace a broken coffee mill. The only place nearby I could find one was the local drug junk store. I didn’t expect much and I wasn’t disappointed.

The lid on top doesn’t fit the clear container and the wheel that’s supposed to determine coarseness doesn’t work. It turns with a range from one to eighteen, but the ground coffee comes out coarse no matter what. It’s OK for drip coffee, but way too coarse for espresso.

What is the point of manufacturing garbage, even if it’s packaged in a nice box? At least they could include some ground coffee.

And no, it’s not broken except by design. Another box at the same store contained an identical piece of plastic dirty with coffee grounds. It seems somebody else returned theirs. I should have taken that as a hint.

—
P.S. I still had a great day and I’m very thankful for that. The pie was excellent!

So what’s Thanksgiving anyway? Just a day to hang out with the folks and to eat until the stuffing threatens to make a reappearance? A last minute meeting with your shopaholic compatriots on the eve of the busiest shopping day of the year to gripe about Christmas?

Speaking of Christmas, judging by local store displays it seems like a lot of people are confusing Thanksgiving with Christmas. Even worse, some stores were selling Christmas loot before Halloween. Losers. Can’t they wait another day and celebrate holidays one at a time? No wonder people are stressed out over the holiday season. I like Nordstrom’s policy, of not unveiling Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. Thank you.

What about me?

I’m just enjoying a nice quiet day with my girlfriend and cats, after a very busy year, giving thanks for all the good stuff that’s happened thus far. It’s a chance to sit back and reflect on life for a few days; something I haven’t had much time for lately.

One specific thing I am most grateful for is the toy I’m typing this on, a MacBook Pro. After quite a hiatus from using a Mac regularly I’m turning into a Mac fan boy. More on that in another post.

And I’m finally scratching my blogging itch again — wouldn’t you know it, right after I posted the last message that KasLog is back, I started working insane hours again on several different projects. Yes, I’m quite thankful for those opportunities as well, even if it gets a bit tiring at times.

I hope you have lots to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving.

KasLog is back online after being down for 9 months or so. How’s that for a downtime record? Several server crashes in a row and working on one too many projects at the same time were nearly fatal for my little soapbox. But things are better now. The server has been running for a while and seems to be stable, and most importantly my itch to write has overpowered a mega bout of procrastination.

I’m still not sure what happened to the old server, since it’s in a data fortress half way around the world and the hardware crew is less than forthcoming with informatioin. It seemed to be an ailing hard disk based on the errors I started seeing in my logs, but within hours of restoring the OS, the server started crashing again. I can only assume that after several years online, the server needed retirement more than most.

The good news is that KasLog is now running on a brand new server with gobs of memory and hard disk space. Hopefully this will be a more stable home.

Yes, you noticed. The KasLog theme and all the old articles are gone. Well, not quite gone, but not restored either. I need to dig the database backup out of some old tar archives and hopefully get the old content back online. In the meantime I started the article numbers at 1,001, which will let me bring the old data back when I get a chance.

Welcome to KasLog 2.0.