Defender of the Free Refill » OSTG

Have gun, will commute

Nate — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 04:46:00 +0000

Well, I now officially have a contract with OSTG, so I am a paid, card-carrying member of the biased liberal media. This means that I can now start defaming and libelling hard-working patriotic George Bush loving conservatives forty hours a week, instead of just on a hobbyist basis. I’m very excited that I get to do my part. Let the fact distorting and agenda fronting begin!

Actually, that’s not true, since OSTG doesn’t do anything political. I mean, obviously I’ll still make fun of libertarians but come on — everybody does that; it barely even counts as making a joke.

In all seriousness, though, OSTG is the evil clandestine global corporate syndicate that weakens the minds of the young through cereal additives, publishes some Web sites about Linux and free software, and keeps the metric system down.

My role will be to write for them on whatever topic amuses me at the moment, peppered with the occasional vitriolic rant about the obscure shortcomings of various objects around my desk. Periodically I will do something about the milliliter.

Really you probably wouldn’t notice anything different about my material if you started reading it now than if you had read it before, only it will be a little more frequent, drastically shorter, and I will no longer be bothered to politely respond to readers’ comments. Hey, the news doesn’t slant itself. It takes people, people.

Fun with eBay

Nate — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 03:26:00 +0000

Well, it has begun. I’m auctioning off advertising space on my fingerprints via eBay. Here is the auction URL if you want to bid or read more of the justification: eBay item #5595514591

If you don’t feel like reading it, the upshot is that it’s a publicity stunt aimed at biometric security systems. A printed piece may follow at OSTG after all is said and done. But I am really going to do it; the fingerprint-faking is easy, I read about it online.

Till then, feel free to bid or just pass the word along. The more hits it gets, the merrier.

UPDATE: The auction has now ended! History is over; please return to your homes. I will be setting up a separate blog to document the process and the biometric ad campaign — more on that when it’s ready.

New boring material now!

Nate — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 23:59:00 +0000

Linking to a new article is now an opportunity to waste another post.

Bringing back LZW is a guide to restoring some image-editing functionality that was lost temporarily because of a software patent fiasco. Plus it has a moral for programmers who can learn a little from how well the libtiff project administrators handled the situation.

Mono, by contrast, is a patent train wreck waiting to happen, and when it does the project’s users will be up a creek because the developers haven’t planned for it.

Be sure and read the comments from uninformed readers asserting that their favorite Linux distribution is immune to the LZW situation. They’re wrong.

Oh, and Happy birthday Uncle Sam.

Okay then

Nate — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:54:00 +0000

Day one of the bloglife. Since there are no other links to it anywhere else on the Interweb, I’m using this inaugural post to supply some links to my written material at OSTG.