Tyler Vann-Campbell's Weblog

In 1938, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally ingested a chemical while studying fungus on wheat grains. The chemical was lysergic acid diethylamide-25 and the rest, as they say, is history. He turns 100 today in good health, and continues to advocate the legalization of his invention for its “medicinal purposes.”

If you’re ever up for a SCOTUS confirmation hearing and you really want a Senator on your side of the field, quote him or her as part of a joke. Trust me, it works:

Do you agree that Casey is a super-precedent or a super stare decisis, as Judge Luttig said?

ALITO: Well, I personally would not get into categorizing precedents as super-precedents or super-duper precedents or any…

SPECTER: Did you say super-duper?

ALITO: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

SPECTER: Good. I like that.

(LAUGHTER)

ALITO: Any sort of categorization like that sort of reminds me of the size of the laundry detergent in the supermarket.

(LAUGHTER)

After one of the longest held oppositions in the GNOME community, Fedora Core 5 will ship with Mono included.

Could this be the end to the longstanding debate between the opposing views of “Mono is the self-actualization of the Linux desktop” and “Mono is the Beast of Novell, sent to destroy us.”

In the interest of disclosure, I have a bit of a halo effect regarding Novell, not in small part due to their stock’s recent performance. However, I’ve used a few Mono apps, Beagle, F-Spot, and Tomboy, and here’s the thing: they’re useful apps. Moreover, aside from something like Apple’s Spotlight, Beagle doesn’t really have a clear competitor in the proprietary software world. This makes Mono a clear selling point for the unwashed masses of PC users looking for a new way to think about computing.

So where does the truth lie? Well, Mono is based on Microsoft technology, which makes me more than a little uneasy, but if a company like Novell will stay behind it, it certainly makes writing quality apps a little more rapid.

I’m a little late to this party, but SOAP rocks. I’ve dabbled in PHP and database-driven websites before, and running a blog kind of assumes you know more than a rudimentary XML-RPC.

But SOAP means that my PHP code can interface with a database on another machine via an ASP script with no worries about bits flipping or handling connections or sockets or anything technical. Implementing one of these “come-one-come-all” web application servers has the feel of a security nightmare but using them from the outside is really cool. Maybe there’s something to this Web 2.0 thing after all.

Hey! Remember about two months ago when I did that review of Serpentine?

Well, Tiago Cogumbreiro, the developer behind Serpentine came across it and left a comment calling me on a few features. Regardless of my rating of Serpentine. Tiago gets 5 stars in my book. Keep up the good work, man!

To any of you who downloaded that package yesterday, I sincerely apologize for any headaches I may have caused. Apparently it had an exclusive arrangement with me, as far as running properly was concerned.

Anyway, I’ve fixed it, I think. It depends on libmp4v2-0, but I think that’s installed by default in Ubuntu. Whee dependencies. If you like video and m4a music on your iPod with one Linux program, download the Ubuntu package here.

Okay, I’m being a bit facetious here. I was thrilled to get a spiffy new video iPod for Christmas this year which meant I finally get to play with video podcasts.

“This is great,” I thought to myself, “now I can watch Democracy Now while I’m on my way to school, yay!”

However, after examining the state of video podcasts, I discovered that a good percentage of them were NSFW.

That aside, I got the interesting experience of building and packaging a gtkpod that works for Apple format AAC/M4A as well as H.264 videos. Most of this code is out in CVS already, but getting it to work with Ubuntu can be a hassle even for someone with a good deal of Linux experience.

For this reason, I’ve taken my build and packaged it as an unofficial deb for Ubuntu Breezy. It might work with Debian Sid as well, but you’re taking your chances installing it. I offer no guarantees that this package won’t replace all your music with David Bowie, but it’s worked for me. If you’re still interested in living close to the metal and don’t mind hurting yourself on sharp objects, download and install the package here.

More on Blingo, the cool site with the weird name that gives away free stuff for searching. It appears they have their own social networking framework set up. So not only do you win things if you search, you win when your friends search. Wow, a free way to share your free fortunes with your searching buddies.

So, how about being my friend?

It takes a lot to pull me away from my favored search engines, but this is just really neat.

It’s called Blingo and their business model is to give things away for searching. On top of this, their results are powered by Google, so you don’t lose any of the speed and accuracy which you’ve come to love.

They don’t have all the really advanced features that Google does, like searching for “wifi hotspots near tampa fl” but they do give things away, free.

Of course, I thought, what’s the catch? There’s not one. At least that’s what readers of the Tampa Bay Times think. Like Google, Blingo makes its money on sponsored advertising, and uses these randomly awarded prizes to bring in more traffic. Go take a look, who knows, your next search might bring you an unexpected gift!

As primary time rolls closer, you might start to notice that political blogs have something to do again. Candidates are fund-raising like it’s going out of style, and campaigners are busy gathering votes in anticipation of upcoming ballots.

District 11 is no exception. With Representative Jim Davis running for Governor, the district 11 seat is up for grabs with no incumbent for the first time in nearly ten years.

The race for the Democratic nomination has already attracted a number of candidates. County Commissioner Kathy Castor has some name recognition via her mom, and has done great things on the County Commission. State Senator Les Miller is also a well-qualified candidate and a Tampa native. However, if you’re looking for an up-and-comer with some great ideas and nothing but enthusiasm for putting them into action, check out Scott Farrell. He’s a UF grad that is pro-education, pro-business, and actually doing something to get out a message about alternative energy.

When there are this many good candidates, nothing but good things can come of the primary, but I think you’ve all guessed my endorsement.