Friday Cat Blogging (2004-12-31)
Mmmm, Open Source Beer
(via Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener….)
Danish students launch open source and shareware beer:
A group of IT-students fra the IT-University in Copenhagen has launched a new “open-source” beer, writes the technical journal Ingeniøren.
It is described by the students as “a great tasting energetic beer and it’s the world’s first open source beer! It is based on classic ale brewing traditions but with added guarana for a natural energy-boost.
Version 1.0 is a medium strong beer (6% vol) with a deep golden red colour and an original but familiar taste.”
Here’s more information from the Vores ØL (Our Beer) web site:
How can beer be open source?The recipe and the whole brand of Our Beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use our recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative of our recipe. You are free to earn money from Our Beer, but you have to publish the recipe under the same license (e.g. on your website or on our forum) and credit our work. You can use all our design and branding elements, and are free to change them at will provided you publish your changes under the same license (“Attribution & Share Alike”).
…
Why beer?Why not? We all like beer, and as an added bonus there is a legendary quote used to explain the concept of free software (now usually referred to as open source software):
“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.
We think that our open source beer is a nice twist on this quote, and we think it is interesting to see if our beer grows stronger in out in the free and perhaps one day becomes the Linux of beers. Who knows?
If you want to become a beer hacker, you can find the recipe here.
WordPress
As some of you know, in addition to this web log, I also maintain the Drum and Bugle Corps (which has been around in one form or another since 1995!) and the Maritime Simulation News web pages.
Last year, I was using a majorly hacked up version of Blosxom to manage the content of these web sites (after a brief flirtation with PHP-Nuke). After getting farked* late last year, I converted my main web log to MovableType. Later, I converted Maritime Simulation News to WordPress (largely because WordPress is released under the GPL). Now I’m also using WordPress for my Drum and Bugle Corps page.
For now, my main web log will continue to run MovableType, though I’ll likely convert it to WordPress in the future. MovableType is fine software, but it’s not truly free (as in beer and speech).
* The problem was my hacked up version of Blosxom was dynamically rendering my pages. This was fine for normal traffic, but during the farking, I was getting 10,000-20,000 hits per day! — putting a heavy load on the web server’s CPU. I switched to MovableType because it creates static pages (yes, I know Blosxom can create static pages, by my hack was based on an earlier version of Blosxom).
Newtonian Swag
(from the I just thought up a name for the band dept.)
|
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction – the writers of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart |
|
Pearls Before Swine : BLTs Taste So Darn Good – Stephan Pastis |
|
Images & Words – Dream Theater |
|
Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory – Dream Theater |
|
Fountains of Wayne – Fountains of Wayne |
|
The Yes Album – Yes |
|
Going for the One – Yes |
|
Monty Python and the Holy Grail |
|
Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends – The Complete First Season |
|
Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends – The Complete Second Season |
Friday Cat Blogging (2004-12-24)
Friday Cat Blogging (2004-12-17)
Correction?
(via The Talent Show)
The Star ran the incorrect horoscope in some editions of today’s FYI section. If your paper has a repeat of the Tuesday horoscope today, turn to Page A-6 for the correct one for July 29. The FYI section is printed in advance.
This correction actually appeared in The Kansas City Star. Just what are they correcting? Was the horoscope on page A-6 more correct than the on in the FYI section? Why are newspapers, the supposed purveyors of truth, even running horoscopes?
temptation on the porn elf
(from the there’s some awfully strange people out there dept.)
While browsing my web access logs, I discovered that someone came to this web site because this page is among Google’s top results for the search string, temptation on the porn elf.
Up until now, I thought “nude pictures of Hugh Beaumont” was the strangest search string found in my access logs (for the record, there are no nude pictures of Hugh Beaumont anywhere on this web site).
Merry CHRISTMS
(from the not sure this is what the holidays are supposed to about dept.)
DoD News: Contracts for October 4, 2004:
CUBIC Defense Applications Inc., San Diego, Calif., is being awarded a $7,765,298 firm-fixed-price contract for the procurement of one Combined Hungarian Range Instrumentation and Simulation Training Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (CHRISTMS) for the Government of Hungary under the Foreign Military Sales Program. Work will be performed in San Diego, Calif., and is expected to be completed in October 2005. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Air Systems Command, Training Systems Division, Orlando, Fla., is the contracting activity (N61339-04-C-0104).
CHRISTMS: Combined Hungarian Range Instrumentation and Simulation Training Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System – having been involved in the acronym game, I can only wonder how long it took to come up with that one. It’s almost as bad as Automatic Omninodal-Heuristic Engine.
Linux on a Toshiba Satellite A45-S130: Part II
This post has been moved.