Robots Will Be Our Superiors

As I’m typing this I’m watching Neverender, the DVD of a four-night series of performances by Coheed & Cambria.  They performed each one of their four albums in their entirety, including the hidden tracks.

It’s awesome.  Just so awesome.

Reaching Scarlet will be at Liquor Sweets this Friday with Ian & the Dream and John Frederick Band.  Doors are at 8:30, door is $7.

We’ve also been confirmed at Mikey’s (mi-keys?) for May 2nd.  More details as I get them.

Skappleton is also less then a month away!

The purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle has some pretty deep implications in the world of Open Source.  The first and most obvious is that Sun managed MySQL (which is actually owned by a subsidiary), the open source database software that provided an alternative to… Oracle’s database software.

This acquisition also means that Oracle now owns Java and OpenOffice.org.  OOo is emerging to be the most visible alternative to MS Office.

Aside from the conflict of Oracle now owning the free, open source alternative to their own commercial products, the fate of the other products is up in the air as one doesn’t know how Oracle will view and treat their new properties.  I haven’t read a lot of doom-and-gloom yet, but like most people I am slightly skeptical.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  In the big picture, the Open Source software that has been managed by Sun will live on regardless, because, well… it’s open source.  Someone somewhere will pick up the torch and modify the source into the new standard.  Hooray for the GPL!

// pound.cc
// A program by Michael Hermes
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
   int minutes, i;
   cout << "How many minutes has Mike been in his Intro to Programming Lab?";
   cin >> minutes;
   for (i = 0; i < minutes; i++)
      {
         cout << "*pounds head against desk*" << endl;
      }
   return 0;
}

I made this today:

Not terrible for a first try.  Most of it is cobbled together from the graphics on the gimp.org home page.  Check out those sexy rounded edges.

You can read an entire list of the updates and new features that are coming with OpenOffice.org with version 3.1, but I’m the most excited about one minor tweak in particular.  Finally, finally, finally, you can rename a sheet within Calc by double-clicking it.  That annoyed the hell out of me ever since I started using the program.  It’s  long-standing Excel convention convention that took them forever to integrate into Calc, and I’m not entirely sure why.

It’s the little things that make life worth living.

Also of note is the impending release of Firefox 3.5.  What was originally slated to be a mere upgrade to 3.1 saw SO many significant changes that they bumped up the version number to 3.5.  I’m excited.

All this talk of software made me realize that I don’t have a link to GIMP on my little OSS page.  I haven’t been able to find any GIMP banner ads online.  Perhaps I should make my own… in GIMP.

GIMP (and yes, I do insist on capitalizing it every time) recently took second in Lifehacker’s Hive Five for image editing.  I don’t think anyone was expecting anything but Photoshop to win, but it was nice to see GIMP in second.

Ooh, two posts in one day.  Note that I didn’t say that I drew the robot.  I just traced it in GIMP.  I can’t draw that well, don’t be silly.

Click to enlarge.

Jen’s sudden interest in xkcd made me think of the stick figure comics I’ve been drawing for her since 2000-ish.  Most of them are on paper.  Someday they’ll get scanned, if we ever get a scanner.  The one below I drew with my little graphics tablet.

One of my other favorite stick comics is Order of the Stick.  (Unless you’ve played D&D 3.5 it might not make much sense…)