Whoa! The FDIC just shut down NetBank, and it looks like all insured accounts are being transferred to ING Direct. I only discovered this through a random mention on Advogato. Talk about random knowledge…Anyways, I do have a checking account at NetBank, so I’ll have to figure out what happens now. The cause of NetBank’s collapse appears to be bad home loans.
ING Direct has a press release about it.
Just for the record, my leg was shaved at the hospital before they cut holes in my knee. That would be, let me see, yes, the first time my leg has ever been shaved in the history of the world. It still feels rather odd, over two weeks later. And now that I’m able to take showers again, the water feels weird, sluicing down my leg. For the record…
The three X’s on my knee where the incisions were made are going away already, though I may have small scars, I suppose. The good news is that my ACL is only 20%-30% torn, which means full reconstruction is not necessary. I should be able to get back to all activities once I get through my physical therapy.
I just registered Tellicoon CIA.vc, with statistics available at http://cia.vc/stats/project/tellico. I think I got the SVN info submitted correctly, so we’ll see if the repository information starts showing up.
Tellico 1.2.14 is available. I’ve accumulated several miscellaneous patches over the last two months, so there’s quite a bit in the change log.
I wrote a quick python script to export a Griffith database to Tellico format. It builds off of Mathias Monnerville’s basic framework and grabs most of the Griffith fields that have comparable items in Tellico’s movie collection template.
Download the script. Make sure it is executable. If you have python installed in a weird place, or if Griffith is storing its database file in a weird place, you may need to edit the first few lines in the script. Then run:
% ./griffith2tellico.py > griffith.tc
Load or import the griffith.tc file.
The export of the actors and actresses may not work depending on how you have them formatted. Griffith doesn’t enforce any sort of format - it’s a free-form field as far as I can tell.
My python expertise is still at a novice level, so don’t pick at it too much. The script is rather fragile, I’m sure. It requires pysqlite3, but I don’t know if that’s part of a standard python installation or not.
All I have to say about Google sponsoring the Lunar X-Prize mission is, Awesome! Those X-prize guys really know how to get sponsors and people involved in reaching technological challenges. And having a private company land on the moon will be pretty impressive, if someone can do it by 2012.
Sebastian Held emailed the tellico-users group about some code he wrote to use his webcam to scan barcodes and feed them into Tellico. It looks very impressive.
Basically, he has a script that captures frame from the webcam using mplayer, sends them to BaToo, a barcode recognition package, then passes the resulting ISBN value to Tellico using DCOP. He uses DCOP in ways I didn’t even know was possible, showing a dialog, editing a specific widget, clicking a button.
Webcam integration is one of the most-heralded features of Delicious Library, and several other collection management software package provide it as well. BaToo is written in Java, and Sebastian has some helper classes around that. Getting it integrated into Tellico would be a big job, but wow, what a cool thing to have! I may start playing with it some, though I don’t have a webcam.
I created a test partition on my home machine and installed Fedora 7, which, by the way, is pretty slick, though for some it won’t boot directly into X, it goes to runlevel 3. I don’t know what I did to make that the default, but I must have done something since I can’t imagine Fedora not behaving sanely. Anyways, the problem that Tellico is having with the setting being overwritten turns out to be an issue with the way I’m (ab)using some config settings that come out of the Kiosk framework. It appears that if you set them in the local config file, then it gets ignored and overwritten with the software defaults. I don’t know why it does that, I couldn’t find the KDE code that did it, and I don’t know why it only showed up on Fedora.
The easy work-around is just to not use those settings. I’m probably being too paranoid about them anyway. But, the better fix is to install a global config file for Tellico with them, and don’t set them in the application constructor. I checked in that fix and it’ll be in the next release.
Fedora Tellico users all over the world rejoice! :P
I went to the Cal-TN game on Saturday, a game in which Cal played excellent football and won, 45-31. They’re going to be a real force in the PAC-10 this year. Tennessee’s offense did pretty well, though they did stall on a couple of crucial drives in the 4th quarter. Tennessee’s defense gave up the most points in a non-overtime game in 12 years or something like that.
So taking nothing away from Cal. DeSean Jackson has mad skillz. Nate Longshore hit the passes he needed to. They completely out-played the Volunteers.
But Cal stadium is a mess. My biggest peeve is that they were playing loud, very loud, music over the stadium loudspeakers while UT was lined up to run an offensive play! Tennessee used a no-huddle offense for most of the game, and so the noise when Ainge came up to the line played a critical role in check-offs. And if the fans were actually that loud, more power to them. But the loudspeaker was playing “We Will Rock You” when Ainge was calling off to his receivers. That’s cheating, morally, if not legally. There were several folks around me who were yelling about the same thing.
The crucial 3rd down play at the opening of the 4th quarter, when the Volunteers had to settle for a field goal, was especially bad. The music was playing AND they had microphones on the crowd so their yelling got amplified. That’s really pathetic, Cal.
They played AC/DC during the kickoffs, including after the ball was kicked. That’s just wrong.
And the number of advertisements, well, I feel sorry for the announcer, to make him read all those. We’re hearing ads for dental service while the referee is trying to call a penalty. That’s really bad. In short, Cal Memorial Stadium is pathetic. It’s sad. You don’t have the professionalism to host a good game.
The amusing anecdote of the day was due to the toilet situation. Evidently, Cal doesn’t know how to build a stadium with adequate facilities for 72,000 people. So there were port-a-potties back behind the fences. A lady close to me was overheard to say, “Those bathrooms are horrible. Even Alabama has outdoor plumbing.” Just so you know, there is no greater put-down than to be compared negatively with Alabama.