We had a paper due by email on Friday, but the professor also wants a printed copy today. When I emailed it to him on Friday, I CC’ed myself in order to have a receipt proving that I turned it in on time. Anyway, I went to the library to print off my paper attached to the CC’ed email, but I couldn’t find the message. So, I thought maybe it got caught by the spam filter, and I checked both my gmail and kenrick accounts. Well, in my kenrick account’s spam filter (which can only be checked through the web interface and not by my mail client) there were a dozen or so messages from various St. Thomas Alumni Association people regarding my proposal! It explains why I never heard back from them. So, I had to email them and explain what happened.

I’m mistrustful of the filter now.

Oh, and gmail tagged my CC to myself as spam for some reason.

Sorry I don’t have any better screenshots. It was such a thrill to watch the ipod go through the init process for the first time with its wee little console.

Here is what it looks like with the graphical interface browsing directories like usr, var, lib, etc. (ha ha):

My friend Evan has become very passionate about DRM. He has an ipod nano, and last night we started the attempt to put GNU/Linux on it. There’s something wrong with the bootloader, but it shouldn’t be too hard once we have some time to work on it. The project is ipod Linux.

Props to Defective by Design for telling the truth about DRM. I am sick of users lining up to have their freedom trampled. DRM seeks to deny users the possibility of even their legal rights to copy data. It seeks to do this via a hardware mechanism in an attempt to thwart free software.

Is anyone else as disturbed as I am by man’s effort to exploit man for profit?

We had a workshop on the use of media yesterday. We had one speaker who talked about the nature of media and we discussed ways that the Church can use media effectively. We had a second speaker who gave us some basic ideas on website design.

I was, of course, less than pleased with the fact that the importance of free formats and protocols was not mentioned at all. For a short allegory of the situation and brief commentary, read The Grand Library of Obfuscated Works on my Kenrick website. I am sure that there was no ill-will on the presenters’ part. Sadly, very few people who are what I would call “mainstream Internet users” appreciate the fundamental philosophy of the Internet well enough to recognize the absolute necessity of standardization and free (as in freedom) specifications.

I could go into one of my trademarked (here comes the irony) free software tirades, but I’m really just sad that standards don’t enter the consciousness of most Internet users at all. The first, first, first thing when teaching web design should be to teach that valid markup is essential. The saddest thing is when a presentation on the Church’s use of media, e.g., to address social justice includes invalid markup and things like pictures without alt text! It just makes me want to scream: “What about the blind people with text-only browsers! Where’s the justice for them?”

Standardization is a matter of justice. Releasing media in wmv format that requires people to have Windows(tm)(r) just might be an issue for someone in Africa with one of those $100 laptops running free software.

Tomorrow is the day that the network will require domain authentication in order to access the Internet. All they are telling us is that XP Pro is required, but I presume this is due to the fact that XP Home cannot authenticate to a domain. Of course, I will not use non-free software, so I have configured some tools from the wonderful Samba Project to allow my computer to join the domain. Now, all I need is an administrator to enter his password from my computer so that the server will accept it. If all goes well, I will post a guide on how to use GNU/Linux on the network on my Kenrick website. If things do not go well, then I will be incommunicado until I can get them working. The worst thing that could happen is that I would be without the Internet for a long time, but I’d rather have that happen–and it would be tough with how heavily Kenrick relies on the Internet–than use non-free software.

I now have ftp access to kenrickparish.com/dschrader. So, my Kenrick website is up and running! There are a few things posted there already, but there will be more once I start putting class work onlline.

I plan to keep this weblog, and ipsissima-verba.org is staying up since it’s not really a personal site. The debate I’m having now is whether I should move some of the pages from this weblog over to my Kenrick website. For instance, I’ve got stories and poems of my own composition here that could just as easily be located on the Kenrick site. The question is simply which is more appropriate.