You'd think all of these things would be unrelated. Well.....you're right. They're not, other than the fact that they all happened to me today.



First off, the whole Nutella thing. Winston and I were talking about sandwiches or something on the way to practice the other day. (On a related note, Winston has decided to blog here on KernelTrap, and while he doesn't code, he earns my props for being an avid convert and user of OpenOffice.) Anyway, at some point Winston mentioned that he thought that Nutella kicks ass. Apparently, he's not alone:



I can already hear the tag-line...."Nutella, the choice of accused rapists everywhere!" I guess it's no wonder they dropped Kobe faster than Bush & Co. could hand over Iraq to Halliburton! Still though, in spite of Kobe's fate, this still comes off pretty humorous. Even if he hadn't been accused, what business does a basketball icon have endorsing Nutella? I guess he spent some time in Italy at some point in his life. Does that mean that if I become a rock star I can endorse Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinners? I'll remember to only have consensual sex, however. What's next, having Linus endorse Nike? I don't get it.



I think I'm going to give NetBSD a go on the Indigo2 I've got sitting in the garage. The sgi/mips ports haven't really had a whole lot of work since the RedHat 5.2 ports, and even then, they only support Indy's with the 8 bit Newport graphics anyway. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but perhaps add it to the ghetto compile farm I'm sort of assembing, which includes Linux/PPC, Linux/SPARC, and whatever else I dream up. What I am interested in is how *BSD handles things like startup of services and such (there's no init, right?), as well as package management (the "ports" system), etc. Does someone know a good FAQ? What I need is BSD for people who do Linux.



I came up with a solution to a mobile MP3 player problem that I had been thinking of doing for a while. The problem was how to safely shut down a machine which uses a caching filesystem (like Linux) when you turn off the ignition of the car. There are plenty of ways to do this; probably the easiest would simply be to mount your volumes read-only so a hard power off wouldn't matter. Still, I had planned on maybe using a computer in my car for other stuff; maybe navigation, 802.11 tracking, etc. Stuff that I'd want to use read/write filesystem stuff for. The easiest way to power such a machine would be through an inverter. But I still need a bit of power after the car gets shut off. The solution? Use a UPS on the output of the inverter. Then use a power management daemon like ssd or whatever to monitor the UPS, and switch runlevels, flush the buffers, and power down the machine on battery power. Once power comes back up (i.e., the car starts up), the machine can be set to wake up on return of power and do whatever. Now, I'll probably never implement this, but still, it's somewhat comforting to know that my subconscious had sort of been grinding on the details over the three years that have passed since homebrew car MP3 players have been cool.




"Velvet Goldmine" is on Bravo right now. It means many things to many people, so it's all relative on who you ask, but in my opinion it's a pseudo-biographical drama on David Bowie's life. Les, you'll love it. A very cool soundtrack, and plenty of homosexual love scenes for your viewing pleasure. Actually, what's more interesting is the "Curt Wild" character in the movie. Equally parts Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain; but what I don't understand is why Kurt Cobain is really even referenced in the movie at all? The Iggy Pop side of the house makes sense, but not Cobain. My only explanation was that since Michael Stipe produced the movie, maybe it was his own nod to his fallen friend. Anybody else have any ideas? Oh, and the soundtrack alone makes this movie worth watching. Plenty of 70's era glam-rock.