durbn.net

This last weekend my wife and I took a vacation from reality and traveled down to the snow-less lands of the americas, Fargo City. The rumours are true too, the prices really are amazing down there. Especially with our currently mighty loonie. I picked up some snow tires for super cheap. I guess going the weekend after american thanksgiving helps with the sales too. We also discovered the amazing foods of Outback Steakhouse. It was so incredible we went there two days in a row! mmmm tasty. We had an amazing time down there and definitely look forward to going again.

My wife's grandpa passed away early sunday morning. He was 86 years old. It's been a really hard time for the family and any prayers you have would be much appreciated.

I might be a few months behind the times but I just finished watching these two movies and I thoroughly enjoyed both of them.

World's End was every bit as good as the second one was. A few times I found myself wondering why exactly the characters were doing what they were doing... but it doesn't take long and you're back into the action again. Now I know that some people hated the macabre-ness of the second movie as opposed to the first and those people will be just as disappointed with number three. I think those people are nuts and should maybe go take a nice lie-down in a padded room, but I digress. Overall I loved the movie and was quite entertained.

Transformers was simply awesome, as in the 1980's definition of the term awesome. I can sum the movie up by saying that it took the child-like coolness that was the cartoon and re-made it for those same kids who are now adults. Yeah it's got it's cheesy "more than meets the eye" moments and introduced some basically useless characters but the rest of it was action-packed. There is definitely a vein of comedy running through it as well. All in all another very entertaining movie.

Over the last little while I have been rebuilding this site along with building a new Windmill Computers site based on the drupal cms. Drupal is the best content management systems I have ever worked with. Pretty much any functionality I can dream up can be done with drupal modules. I've also worked on consolidating my various wiki's under a single wiki.windmillcomputers.ca domain. I've also delved into the magical world of mod_rewrite for the Apache web server and have used that to provide simple urls in all my sites.

All of this technology is simply amazing and is a definite testament to the open source development model, which all of these projects are developed under. Now for some name dropping. Everyone has used the famous Wikipedia site which runs on the MediaWiki software, the Apache web server powers almost every site on the web, and Fox's Searchlight page runs Drupal.

Obviously opensource isn't just for geeks anymore. But we knew that already.

It looks like the RCMP have finally come to their senses and realized that hunting down personal filesharers is just a waste of time, money, and resources. It's also Canadian law that states we CAN make personal backups of copyrighted material. Plus we already pay a levy on blank CD and DVD's.

Here's the quote from Slashdot. I'm linking to Slashdot because they have some good commentary in the comments section.

mlauzon writes "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use (Google translation). Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. 'Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,' Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'"