Steve Jobs says Apple would love DRM-free music
Wow. Steve Jobs has posted an open letter on Apple's website essentially calling for the big four music companies to abolish their restriction that music sold through iTunes be done with DRM. This combined with hints from Bill Gates that he'd love to see DRM dropped as well, may actually move the discussion to the right players - the music companies themselves. (After all, not only have they pushed for DRM, they actually blackmailed Microsoft into giving them money for every Zune sold!)
It's nice to see the big technology companies are starting to push for the right thing - even if it is because the hassle of keeping up the DRM and recent court battles have pushed them into this position.
RDT gets Refactoring support
Well the cat is out of the bag: Mirko Stocker and his cohorts have committed their refactoring support to RDT's Subversion repository.
This means we'll be able to roll out 0.9.0 with this support. Right now we're working to get it integrated into the build process, so that it will begin showing up in our new builds. I'm pretty excited myself, because I've had little chance to try out their work.
This refactoring support joins other recent work in RDT which allows us to do some occurence marking of variables, code completion and other exciting features (thanks Jason!). There's certainly a long way yet to go to get the tools polished - for instance we still have a hard time doing code completion (or much else) on a file which is being edited while the syntax is temporarily incorrect (the JRuby parser is great, but not so forgiving) - but we're constantly marching forward.
Look for 0.9.0 to come out sometime this month (we're aiming for the 15th)!
Rosie our cleaner
So, I was lucky enough to get a Roomba Discovery for Christmas from my parents. My wife and I both love her and we've decided she'd be named Rosie.
My father also grabbed a strange TV remote alarm, which is supposed to learn your remote's infrared signals for turning the TV on and off and then send that signal when the alarm goes off (thereby waking you up by turning your TV on). It also should be able to learn the Roomba power/clean command.
But it won't.
Or at least it says it's got it by flashing it's little red lights, and when the alarm goes off those wonderful little lights go off again - but no movement from Rosie. I can't get it to actually learn the TV remote control either, so I guess it's no fault of Rosie.
So, dear lazyweb, are there any other cheap solutions for setting Rosie up on a timed schedule to clean my house while I'm away? Or do I have to buy some accessories from iRobot (which will be more expensive)?
Google Summer of Code Swag
Hmm what is this mysterious package?
It's my Google Summer of Code T-Shirt! That feeling you're having - pure jealousy.