You may not be aware that for the past day an war has been raging on the Internet. Specifically, the fight over the HD-DVD key. Rudd-o posted this article covering the battle. He sat at ground zero.

In a nutshell, Digg got a story that had a key that allowed people to make a copy of virtually all DVDs published to date. It got to the front page. The HD-DVD consortium sent Digg a cease and desist letter. Digg pulled the story. HD-DVD is also a sponsor of Digg. The Digg users saw the story pulled and assumed that Digg was censoring them. In protest, a storm of submissions developed with people encouraging each other to digg anything that had the HD-DVD key.  I shot a few diggs for all my peeps at digg. Funny stuff. Digging cuz i give a damn.  Kevin Rose, owner of Digg, finally waved the white flag. Free Speech and Piracy wins.

<h2>HD-DVD lost the code and won the format war.</h2>

The real outcome of all of this I believe is that Sony loses the HD war. HD-DVD wins. Blue Ray Loses. With the ability to copy HD-DVD content, users will flock to HD-DVD when they need to make that decision. Just like they did with VHS over BetaMax. Less than 1% of all users will ever copy a HD-DVD I’m betting, but it will take over. Didn’t cost them anything either, just the legal fees for the cease and desist letters so they can put up a “reasonable effort” at protecting the content. It was the smartest move they could have ever made to win the format wars.

I installed Gentoo Linux a while ago and got a mail server working on it. I really love having an IMAP server. It basically let’s me see the same mailbox wherever I am and with whatever mail client I use (Outlook, Thunderbird, SquirrelMail).

However, I had been disappointed by the fact that I still hadn’t gotten an X desktop set up. I’d tried doing that before, but I didn’t want to blow up my LCD this time or spend 3 days getting it to work. I figured it was time to find a linux distribution that would meet my needs:

1) Free - I’m still me after all
2) X desktop configured for me
3) Decent applications pre-installed
4) Contol panel must exist - I modify enough config files at work
5) Package manager - allows for install of new programs

I began my search…
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I installed Gentoo a couple weeks ago on my brother’s old 850 Mhz Athlon. It went pretty well with only minor hiccups. Now that it’s all installed I’m really enjoying the whole emerge thing. Emerge pretty much takes make install to a level that a 5 yr old child could install apache, mysql, and emacs without crying to their mommy.

I’ve set it up reasonably secure and now I get to add more features. I immediately added vim because a world with only nano is no world at all.

I just looked at my ClamAV virus scan results and I found that I had a Trojan horse/Back Orifice dll in my system! Apparently it could have been there for a long time allowing people to control my computer to send spam or other evil things. It was a part of the Filzip program, a freeware utility.I removed the program, but I had been using it for a while. It’s pretty scary since I consider myself to be pretty net savvy. I guess that teaches me to not download every bit of freeware I can find. I guess Winzip will have to handle my compression needs.

Here’s the entry in the ClamAV scan that showed me I had an intruder:
C:/Program Files/FilZip/unrar3.dll: Troj.BO-Server FOUND

Be careful if you have this program, you may want to uninstall it.

Okay, I finally got gnucash up and running. It was a pain because I really didn’t know how Fink worked completely and how all these library dependencies were going to play out. It’s been a while since I’ve done a lot of C++ development and even then I selected an IDE that did my Makefiles for me.

Here’s some good stuff I learned. If you install gnucash, you might as well install gnucash-docs because the manual is pretty well written and helpful in many places. It has lots of screenshots and other goodies to make the setup easier.
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