Dave Kellam

Visit musicplasma (via bb), a music search engine that displays the artist results in a network graph fashion. The interface is a little bit clunky, but it’s a pretty cool visualization. It’s also helpful for finding bands similar to ones that you like listening to; I know a couple that I want to check out now.

Grampa’s first album, Pop it up Son, is now available for download in its entirety. All tracks are available in high quality variable bit rate mp3 encoding as well, as 56kb mp3 streams. If you want the tracks in some other format, contact us and we’ll see what we can do for you.

The CD is also available for purchase if you’re a fan of liner notes and such. If you want one drop us a line. If you download the tracks and think that it’s hot shit, throw a few bucks our way — we’re poor and Grampa is starving artist. There’s a PayPal button and a Dreamhost button (if you want to be sure that you’re helping pay the hosting costs) on the page.

Queen’s has approved the appointment of Dr. Karen Hitchcock as the 18th Principal of the university. They have also approved an increase of 500% in the annual budget for hair product. She appears to be the school’s first female principal at the school. Regardless, she is going to have very very large shoes to fill being the successor to the infamous Billy Legg$$$. I wish her the best of luck.

The internet has returned to my humble abode. I had to fight with the connection a bit, but it all works now. I’ve also spent a good chunk of the last few days fighting with the internet and various computers here at work. I cobbled together a couple of working computers from the old ones that were laying around too. They’re having a whole bunch of routing trouble here, some of it is ITS banning the mac addresses of computers that appear to be infected with viruses. It’s kind of pain, because I need an internet connection to clean them up. The router refuses to assign ips, so you can’t see the machines on the network at all. I guess it’s back to old-fashioned cdr burning and sneakernet.

From a Wired article on Google’s IPO offering:

Geek humor: If you take a close look at the form Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the exact value of its planned offering is $2,718,281,828 dollars, which some would immediately recognize as the mathematical constant e.

E, for those not blessed with a PhD and a job at Google, is Euler’s number, which is used as the base for natural logarithms.

I can appreciate that. It’s good to know that they’re still in firm control of their company and having fun doing it. Gives me hope for having enlightened employers in the future. The article also has a link to the company’s SEC filing (2.8mb)

My internet presence will be sporadic until sometime next week. We have to return our modem today, I’ll be coming tomorrow and won’t have it hooked up until Tuesday. It also means that I somehow have to get everything packed by tomorrow. I don’t think it will be that hard.

Microsoft has a pretty intense typography section of their website that I never noticed before. The links and news section has lots of information about what’s going on in the type world today. I did such a half-assed job putting fonts together back in the day. They weren’t intended for use as more than title fonts though.

Guided by Voices is breaking up after the release of their next album:

After almost 20 years, assorted lineups, and countless albums, EPs,  singles, triples, stolen bases, misdemeanor convictions, and broken hearts, Dayton, OH’s fortunate sons are taking leave of your senses. ‘Half Smiles Of The Decomposed,’ to be released August 24 on Matador Records, will be the final album from Guided By Voices, one of the most acclaimed independent rock bands of all time.

It’s sad to hear, but it’s not like Pollard’s dropping off the radar. The band has seen so many configurations, it seems more like the he’s retiring the name than anything. He’ll keep pumping out albums every year. Hopefully they come to Toronto again before the split, I’d like to see them again.

Mark Cuban isn’t really angry that Donald Trump didn’t remember him, I guess they were running in different circles. He has offered to make it up to Donald by taking him out to Whitecastle:

I respect you and think we would have a great time hanging out talking business. How about this as a truce offering: I will come by your apartment in NY, we can either walk or take a cab to the White Castle of your choice and dinner is on me. Bring your girlfriend if you like. If we can’t be friends after sharing a couple dozen sliders and onion chips, it just wasn’t meant to be.

Someday, when I have my billions, I will ask a fellow billionaire out for a burger. As far as reality television shows go, I can’t really see one based around Mark Cuban being anything like the Apprentice. My guess is Cuban and Trump have slightly different management styles.

Want to avoid typing your password every time you ssh into your remote client? I bet it’s on the top of your priority list. If you’re one of the few, take a look here for a general linux tutorial. And here for a more mac centric one that shows you how to generate a 2048 bit pair.

Basically you generate the key-pair using ssh-keygen (don’t enter a passphrase if you want to connect with no password) . The key generator will put the files in ~/.ssh. Upload identity(.pub) to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and id_dsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 on your remote host. Then you should be able to open a secure shell without a password. If you’re connecting from multiple locations, you probably want to concatenate the files onto authorized_keys rather than overwriting them. What works for me, may not work for you, especially if you’re using ssh2.

There are some security issues, because anyone can use ssh from the terminal to connect to the server. But it’s not really a huge issue because they need to be able to get onto the computer in the first place. Then again, I’m not one of the uber-paranoids and save website passwords and such.