All-Blog

Looks like there's been a small revival in the availability of DRM-free music. No major revolution, but you have the advent of Amazon's DRM-free MP3 collection, which contains quite a number of bands, and even the icon of DRM, iTunes, now has "iTunes Plus" with double the bit rate encoding and DRM-free with the option of upgrading previously-bought songs to this format.

As regular readers (all two of you) know, I've been schlepping a large chunk of my music collection backwards and forwards from work on an external laptop drive. It works just fine, but I'd much prefer to play music from it directly without having to connect up to a desktop system.

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Link: http://porkfry.com/?p=8

I took the summer off from playing Warcraft; in theory I intended to do things like work the garden, be social, hike and kayak. Well, I managed some of that -- still need to be social -- but y'know, winter's coming and I need an indoors hobby again.

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So you want to see a little bit of the tree of life for yourself. Maybe use some of the bioinformatics tools on the Internet to see some of the relatedness of life on earth. Can you do that as a layman? Sure you can, and here's a little introduction as to how.

One protein that's a good one to try is the human hemoglobin alpha chain, a component of hemoglobin, the oxygen carrier in your blood.

Let's do this thing!

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I really thought we'd progressed past this.

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Link: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070825/food.asp

Here's a handy table showing quite how much caffeine is present in soft drinks. Keep in mind that these are for the American varieties as Canadian law does not permit adding caffeine to non-cola beverages so Mountain Dew (for example) up here is merely sickly sweet rather than loaded.

(Via BoingBoing)

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/29/wvatican129.xml

What happens when the aircraft is overrun by vampires? Huh? You reckon 100 millilitres will suffice?

(Via BoingBoing)

Link: http://tihomir.org/crazy-questions-at-google-job-interview/

...although you probably knew that already. However, what I can say -- without ever having met anyone who has worked there -- is that the Googlites must be insufferable know-it-alls.

(Via Kotke)

Some pillock (IP 62.33.12.24) is spamming the Nimbleblog comment area with adverts. All posts are moderated and thus require the approval of Ritchie, Dena or myself before they appear. This means that the spam doesn't serve its purpose and, other than wasting my time as I have to delete them, just doesn't do much.

Anyway, if you've posted a comment and you're wondering why it's taking so long to be approved, well, I probably just haven't deleted enough spam to find it yet...

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/28/nsatnav128.xml

Link is to a Daily Telegraph (UK) story about problems with large vehicles being directed down inappropriate roads. I know Welsh roads and I'm stunned that even locals can drive anything larger than than a small sedan down them. It's too bad that people seem to believe anything a vehicle navigation system shows them over what they can see, including those nice helpful road signs...

(Via BoingBoing)

Link: http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB118953936892024096.html

This is a little worrying. The Wall Street Journal has an article on how it's becoming common to master CDs optimized to sound good when compressed to MP3 and played on a specific DA converter and headphones.

This is just so wrong on so many levels. Aaaaaaaaaah!

(Via BoingBoing)

Link: http://www.loadingreadyrun.com/videos/view/228

Brilliant future mocumentary on the ridiculous hype surrounding Bungie's Halo 3 release.

Oh, it's actually Microsoft these days? Never mind.

(Via Gizmodo)

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers#.22Engineer.22_as_a_title

We're currently going through some job reclassifications at work and my new prospective title is "Senior Project Engineer". I like the sound of it but I'm not a professional engineer and APEGGA gets a bit antsy about the use of the word.

I have to say I'd thought that the engineering societies had pretty much locked the term down to be available to their members only, but it looks as if that's not the case in Alberta or several US states. I may yet have an opportunity to make the old joke:

Yesterday I culdn't spel enginer; today I are one!

Link: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/alttext/2007/09/alttext_0912

This Wired humour piece gave me a laugh.

We got a small swack of spam comments today which point at pages on http://meta.missouri.edu/ serialize/tmp/@top/ (I've broken up the link here so the spammers don't get more traffic). I've sent the webmasters off a warning.

UPDATE: Yay, the pages are taken down! :) Take that, spam monkeys!