This is quite possibly one of the best ideas Google has come up with yet.

It's called the "Summer of Code" and it's an effort to get some of the brightest minds on campuses around the world working towards some much needed Open Source projects.

Here are the basics: apply to complete a project for a list of approved open source mentors, get approved by Google, successfully complete the approved project, get money from $4500 from Google, and get some real world code under your belt.

The projects range from the challenging "Search Party" a server/client protocol to form ad-hoc chat rooms based on what search words, to something as simple as shaving as much time as possible from the GNOME login.

Google is one of the approved mentors, and their projects in general range from challenging to insanely challenging, so good luck to whoever wants to try their hands at those. If you're a coder with a month or two of downtime this summer, and you'd like to help the open source community and make some dollars while you're at it, check out the info at code.google.com

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I'm not sure why I'm admitting this, but I caught the midnight showing of "Revenge of the Sith" in New Tampa just nine hours ago. I must say, I don't think the internal/external conflict with Obi Wan/Anakin comes even close to the father/son conflict from "Return of the Jedi." Of course, that could be the Star Wars elitist in me coming out. Mark Hamill, if you're reading: you whine way better than Hayden Christensen and your agonized "Noooo!" from "The Empire Strikes Back" far outdoes the identical line that Hayden Christensen seems to have copied from Charlton Heston.

Highlights:

• A six or seven year old dressed as Anakin Skywalker crosses toy lightsabres with a twenty-something dressed as Darth Vader while waiting in line.
• Gangland style Jedi/Sith turf disputes.
• Announcement from theater management: "Masks and lightsabres must be left outside the theater." Aforementioned twenty-something dressed as Darth Vader looks dejected.

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1. Compile Gentoo on a 533 MHz VIA C3

Just FYI.

More updates to come.

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In anticipation of Free-For-All Friday, I'm opening up guest posting four days ahead of time, to make sure that I don't forget and to make sure there aren't any unforseen bugs prior to the big day.

The system is similar to my comment code, HTML for formatting and let my CSS take care of the rest. Please don't leave any open <div> tags in your post or you'll mess up the entire page, and you wouldn't want that, would you?

In any case, the URI to visit is here.

Basic rules:

1. I don't censor because so far I haven't had to, please keep things relatively clean and I won't start a policy of censorship
2. Link where you like, and sign your entries if you prefer.
3. Have fun and be creative!

Look forward to doing this on the real FFAF!

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Feeling abused or neglected by your browser?
Is the story of your relationship one hidden flaw after the other, with nothing but broken promises to mend the problems?
Do you find yourself patching your browsers inadequacies, or find yourself limited by who your browser lets you talk to?

If so, you may be living with an abusive browser, and you don't have to take it anymore. Robert Vamosi of ZDnet writes a letter to Internet Explorer explaining why this relationship cannot continue with its current pattern.

It's hillarious and it sums up the many frustrations that IE has caused the community of users. My question is this: why stop with IE? I could write a point by point letter describing why three years ago, I called it quits after a relationship with Microsoft that dated back to MS-DOS 6 and a brief encounter with Xenix (if anyone remembers that *cough* jewel.) I realize this dates me a bit, I'm about as old as the GNU project itself.

Maybe I'll write Windows a letter after all these years explaining why I left when I did.

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I've recently been nudged into the world of XML syndication through RSS, and have subscribed to several blogs using Liferea.

Liferea is still under active development, and so I make a point of checking the development blog as often as I can for new bugfixes and upcoming features. Today, the Sourceforge feed for Liferea was reporting on a new feature of Gmail.

Gmail provides Atom feeds of your inbox with messages, that you can download over an encrypted connection to an RSS newsreader, like Liferea this means you can check your email, the daily news, and your buddy's blog through one unified interface, without having to worry about prying eyes on unswitched networks reading your email.

To use this feature, your newsreader must support SSL encryption, or you need to have some external fetching command that does support secure http.

If you use Gmail, you can get to your Atom feed with this URL: https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom.

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I have succeeded in breaking both of my computers. Not irreprably mind you, but enough to put me out of blogging commission for a few days. I've been using Phlak on my laptop which borked after an upgrade to x.org from xfree. In addidion I ran emerge -u world for the first time in a long time and thus it's been compiling now all night and it's still going. Dennis Nedry, wherever you are, I feel your pain.

When this is all over, I should have a shiny new 2.6.9 kernel, Gnome 2.8, and a CVS snapshot of DR17.

I cannot say enough good things about the development taking place on Enlightentment and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. The code framework in place for the new Enlightenment is well thought-out and has much time to be reworked and rewritten without the pressures of conforming to lots of legacy users. The abstraction and power of libraries built around a GL-accelerated canvas open up many different possibilites for interface design.

A demonstration of the power of the EFL is something called Emotion, a smart abstracting video library. Using Emotion, one can write something as complex as a DVD player in just 18 lines of C. Add the other features of the EFL, and you could have a stellar application in no time, with very little manual coding. An example of Emotion in action is here.

Some components of DR17 that I've already incorporated into my desktop are Entrance, an accelerated login manager Engage, an accelerated starterbar with an Aqua feel and soon to join them, eRSS, a desktop integrated RSS reader built on the EFL

Check them out if you're interested in the future of Linux desktop applications.

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The second TBBF is in only one and a half hours. Hope everyone's ready for some fun in Soho. See you there! There's a WiFi spot along the way, so with luck I should be able to blog from the scene of the crime this time, wish me luck!

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"Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" opened in Tampa last night. This film far outdoes the original, melding elements of classical Anime with the very best in digital animation, with the same dark, weighty realism that so characterized the first film.

The added detail with the somewhat more involved storyline takes you deeper into the character of Batou, and fleshes out the memories of his relationship with the Major. In the first film, Batou appeared more like a cardboard foil for Kusanagi. Here, he begins to take on real depth as a character, especially in the interactions with his basset hound, the most authentic character in the film, and one who remains Batou's last connection to his humanity.

The film is visually stunning, and is quite simply the most beautiful Anime I have ever seen. Transcending the genre, this film could easily be compared to a modern science fiction or art film, and would hold its own.

Aside from some humorous exchanges with the yakuza, the deep philosophical headiness of the film is rarely lifted to allow time to breathe. Additionally, like the first, many long spanning scenes are devoted to painting a complete picture of the seemingly endless metropolis. If the city was oppressive in the first film, the skeletons of the even greater generic metropolis are an image straight from a William Gibson novel.

The characters retain their habit of quoting great works, and doing so extensively. They quote everything from Milton to Psalms for their purpose. At times, these frequent references slow the pace of the film, but supposedly, with externalized memory, one can reference the great works with ease. Sadly, this seems to be the only method these cyborgs have of expressing their inner thoughts.

The obsession in this film is with the doll, and the desire of humans to recreate themselves, and to immortalize their soul in an image of perfection. This point hangs over the film from the first scene to the last cut. In truth, the basset hound may in fact have more of a soul than the mechanized humans searching for proof of their own existence in a world of dolls and the skeletons of humans striving to immortalize themselves.

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I must apologize for the excessive downtime over the past few days. First, I tried to implement some Perl code live that only worked in theory. It appears that though I can compile Expat, I am unable to convince the linker to make the XML::Parser Perl modules use the shared objects in a non-standard location (my /home). Jon tells me that I should be able to compile PHP on the University server (with a little hackery) and use it exclusively from my /home. At that point I could just start using SiG.

The other instance of downtime was shared across all of USF's servers and I'm still in the dark as to what caused that.

I have a newsfeed finally, for those who are interested. Perhaps I'll have to generate some real content now :)

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I am the curmudgeon of the blogging world.

Blosxom powers my site with some speedy and very flexible Perl code. For other gems, such as my fortune cookie of randomly selected quotes, a flexible plugin interface lets me sort through what I need and what I don't need.

Dave says I'm living in the stone age. I like things that work, are simple, and can be extended flexibly. I most notably despise any configuration stored in binary-encoded files. Sure, this information is more efficient, but anyone who has dealt with corrupt GConf keys, or registry hives knows human-readable configuration is worth the small performance hit.

Forgive my short tirade, but it is for this reason that I use Blosxom. I've dabbled in Movable Type, but it still didn't have the flexibility that I wanted from blogging software. Those of you who have followed Casimusings for a longer portion of its history know that for a very long time, my own homegrown Perl code, dubbed Sublimeade, was responsible for rendering new entries.

I craft each blog entry in Bluefish, using a limited set of HTML tags, and let CSS handle the overall formatting of the page.

Stone age? Perhaps.

What I must finally break down and do however, is provide some real syndication feeds. So, coming soon, Atom and RSS feeds should be coming soon, for eager aggregators! Thanks for the nudge out of the past, Dave :)

At least I've stopped blogging in Emacs.

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Despite USFBS going down only hours before my party, more than a few people showed up. More than last time, and approaching what I'd actually call a nice sized LAN Party.

Several games were on the menu, including Unreal Tournament 2004, Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Savage, and last but not least the ever entertaining Armagetron. Despite all the new technology and great graphics improvements, the most popular game for the second time in a row was Tron. Also like last time, none of us were a consistent match for the AI found in Tron, which possesses reaction times to rival most hard real time embedded systems. We did succeed in beating it once or twice.

The party lasted all night and ended with much coffee for the coming day.



Some photo documentation for the curious: After a brief recovery the world begins rotating again, look out for LAN Party Part Trois in a month, who wants to volunteer their living room?

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