Shamelessly stolen from /.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp

It seems that the County of Los Angeles is now requiring that their vendors refrain from using the term “Master/Slave” when referring to computer hardware. For those who don’t know, these have been industry standards for many years, “Master” refers to the primary hard drive in a pair of drives, and “Slave” refers to the secondary hard drive in a pair of drives. These labels are even printed on hard drives to signify which jumper setting are required to get a hard drive recognized as a “Master” or as a “Slave”. To me this seems like ‘political correctness’ run amok. It is sad, but it truly is another sign of the world we live in.

*edit*
You have to read the comments on this /. article, they are hilarious. Available here

Well, today marks the day that wireless companies have less of a hold on you than they would like. Starting today you now lease the rights to your particular phone number. It used to be that phone companies would purchase blocks of numbers and if you wanted to change to a different carrier you would have to change your phone number. That is, until today. Any customer that wants to change merely has to get service with a new carrier and then notify their old carrier that they will be moving their phone number to a different carrier. This however is taking into account that you don’t have an outstanding contract with your current carrier
This should show itself as a very beneficial event for the end user. Carriers that are afraid to loose current subscribers, and want to try and gain some new ones should be altering their price plans in the favor of the customer.

Recently it has come to my attention that there was some sort of security vulnerability in the current version of my blogging software. This weekend I put forth the effort to do the upgrade, and it has been successful. It could have been easier, but the default install came with an updated index.php and css file. So, I had to dig through the guts of that and get it all fixed. Thankfully with my trusty diff tool at my side, and my favorite windows editor, it was a breeze.

For those who like cars, going fast, and the internet. I have been shown the coolest game that I have played in a long time. It isn’t graphically intensive, and doesn’t require a high-speed internet connection to play it. The game in short is virtual drag racing. You begin your career with a stock Honda Civic SI, and earn money in challenges against the computer or any user that you wish to wager an amount of money in a race against them. I highly recommend checking this game out. It only requires that you download an executable to your machine, and no install is needed. All your account stats are kept on a central server so you can log in from anywhere and check your challenges and current setup. Check it out here.

This link has been shamelessly stolen from slashdot.

The timeless question “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” has been answered (well at least partialy). Check out this link to see the answer.

Finally my case is finished … Just a little buffing to do to remove some fingerprints and it will be ready for the photo shoot, and the steps I took to achieve the look that I did.

on a side note: there is a new strongbad email out here if you are new to Strong Bad, then welcome to the club. You will love him.

For those who think that I spelled a word wrong in the title … I didn’t. I must rave about Dvorak because I have now been using it for the last few months. I know, I know … Some of you are wondering what it is. Dvorak is a alternate keyboard layout that makes actual sense vs. the common Qwerty layout that everyone uses. Have you ever wondered why when typing words like “certification” why some fingers type 3 letters in a row? have you realized how much that can slow you down or make your hand get tired faster? If you haven’t then you either aren’t very observant or you are a 2 fingered typer. Click here to learn more. I type all day long and have noticed a huge difference in hand strain since I made the switch. It takes a little work and you may pull your hair out, but as soon as you start picking it up you will find it was well worth the effort.

The main difference that you will find how different the keys are laid out - aoeu htns - is the home row. You will notice that the vowels are on one side and the consonants are on the right. This ensures that you will be alternating between hands, thus upping your speed capabilities because the apposing hand has time to prepare for the next letter. It makes a lot of sense for someone that types a lot and whose hands hurt after typing for awhile.

That is my take…

Just wanted to inform those of you who care that mandrake 9.2 iso has been released for public download. I am in the process of downloading it right now and will be trying it out in the next few days. I may or may not post a screen shot of my success with it when I have it setup the way I like it. I’m in the midst of a complete case mod overhaul and will have to post a pic of that when it is finished. I got a little tired of messing with the guts of it for awhile and am going to make the outside reflect the total awesomeness of the inside so that people who know nothing about computers can still enjoy the almost pointless eye candy of my case.

This is an article at Linux Journal about putting your homedirectory in CVS. The author discusses how he has done it for the past couple of years. I find this to be an interesting idea. I know that I have toyed with the idea of putting all of my system config files in CVS, but it had never occurred to put my entire home directory in cvs. Now after having read this article, I am not highly motivated to go out and do this, but I am intrigued.

I was just reading this article on Eweek: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1378269,00.asp. Basically the skinny is that contrary to what was originally reported, Virtual PC will still allow you to run virtual linux machines in it.

I know for most of us this won’t make much of a difference as we already have linux boxes, but for those who don’t, and are willing to pony up about $200, it should allow for easy playing around with the OS.

Also, if you are interested in the product then you should also look into VMware: http://www.vmware.com/landing/ws4_home.html.