DGS to OGS

I've decided to move from the Dragon Go Server to the Online Go Server, suggested by the folks at GoDiscussions.com in this thread about players who let time run out instead of resigning. Still not sure if I'll get the same treatment over at OGS but I do need a notifier application for OGS. There is a .NET based OGSNotifier. I try to avoid Microsoft specific technology if possible so I found this program called Your Move written by Adrian Petrescu. His version works with DGS and the Mac specific notification system Growl. I modified his code to add an OGSNotifier and work with the Windows equivalent of Growl called Snarl. (See this thread to get the Snarl Python API) If you're interested, leave me a comment. (I doubt anyone else who want to use it other than myself though since it has 2 dependencies: Python and Snarl, instead of the 1 dependency of OGSNotifier!)

Olympic protest - both sides of the story

This is the hottest topic for San Franciscan as the Olympic torch has arrived and the relay will begin at 1pm today.

Pictures of protesters:




Pictures of supporters:


Clearly I'm biased.

Do you want to have your identity protected

... by a company whose CEO has his identity stolen?

I'm talking about the CEO who advertise his own SSN. I found it funny that whenever I run into an annoying ad, there are always some interesting stories behind it.

Burn a music CD on Ubuntu

The application K3b is very good for this purpose, except for one problem: it doesn't support MP3->CD out of the box. On K3b's startup screen, it says:

"Mp3 Audio Decoder plugin not found.
K3b could not load or find the Mp3 decoder plugin. This means that you will not be able to create Audio CDs from Mp3 files. Many Linux distributions do not include Mp3 support for legal reasons.
Solution: To enable Mp3 support, please install the MAD Mp3 decoding library as well as the K3b MAD Mp3 decoder plugin (the latter may already be installed but not functional due to the missing libmad). Some distributions allow installation of Mp3 support via an online update tool (i.e. SuSE's YOU)."

Fortunately the solution is extremely simple:
1) open your terminal
2) execute this:
sudo apt-get install libk3b2-mp3

Now you could drag-and-drop MP3 tracks into K3b.

You might ask: who still listens to CD? That's another story :D