I am going to be shifting my consulting business to PowerVenture.com and reusing Docuverse.com as it was originally intended, a wiki-variation based document universe including my blog as well as other contents.

Beside PowerVenture.com and Docuverse.com, there is another website being planned.  I can't give any details though except that it will be a shocker of sort.

What all this means is that I will be needing more bandwidth and storage space.  I have chosen to use ServInt VPS instead of dragging a T1 line to my house and running my own Linux server farm which requires too much money way too early.  ServInt has pretty good reputation so I can trust them not to disappoint me and 100GB/month transfer with 2 GB storage for $49/month is very attractive.  As traffic and load grows, I can upgrade to ServInt dedicated servers.

If you decide to use ServInt as well, tell them Don sent ya.  But then I just signed up so you might want to wait until I have used their service for a while.  Life is full of surprises you know. ;-p

Dave is, as he would say, full of sh*t today.

[Correction: After reading Dave's Why they hate me post, I have to say Dave is not full of sh*t today.  He is full of sh*t just in the post mentioned below.]

In It's not really piracy, Dave writes:

Calling it piracy views it only from the perspective of an obsolete distribution system. They see their revenue declining because the service they provide isn't worth anything. The Internet provides efficiency in distribution that cuts out the middle man. Since the industry pays little or no money to the artist, the users can have the music, if you cut out the distributors, for $0. To blame that on people who use music is to miss the historic trend. Users are just behaving economically, not unethically; and it's even arguable that they are behaving legally.

I sympathize with musicians who are being enslaved by the music industry labels and believe Internet technologies can and will free them eventually.  But using them to justify ethical failures or advocate new business models amounts to cowardly and selfish acts.  If people really wants to solve this problem, they should first learn to see straight instead of making up false and delusionary images.

Suppose you bought a country house with apple trees in the backyard which you never tended to.  What Dave is saying amounts to saying that if apples fall from the tree and roll downhill to a public road, anybody can take those apples because the owner never tended to the trees.  Nonesense.  If they didn't know where the apple came from, they are excusable and should be excused.  But if they are doing it knowingly, that is theft and it doesn't matter who the owner is nor whether he is a beastly fellow.

Just as atrocities are made easier by demonizing opponents, we are demonizing the music industry and planting seeds of wide-spread self-justified corruption into our young in the name of newage morality.  Piracy is piracy whether the pirate is a sleezy character or a 13 year-old girl.  Whether she should be punished or not is irrelevant to the definition of the word.

I am not faulting people for falling to temptations for I have fallen as well in the past.  When Napster became popular, I downloaded many MP3 files.  It was amazingly convenient and, as a geek, it opened new possibilities.  But I have never denied the fact that what I was doing was stealing because doing so will damage me more than I could ever gain from free music.

I am not a command line jockey nor am I comfortable with emacs or vi.  What I am is a creature of comfort.  Since I am actively dancing around with Perl again, I thought I should find a nice IDE for Perl and found a really nice one that does exactly what I want and no more: Open Perl IDE.

Open Perl IDE is an open source Perl IDE for Windows.  All I had to do was download the Open_Perl_IDE_1.0.11.409.zip file from SourceForge and drag a single executable file (PerlIDE.exe) out of it.  PerlIDE.exe is the excutable, not an installer (sounds familiar?).

If you have perl.exe in your PATH, you can just run the IDE, write some perl statements into a file, and Run it.  Yes, it has a source debugger.  If perl.exe is not in your PATH, you can specify its location via the Preferences dialog under the Edit menu.

Have fun.  I know I am having fun.  Only sour point that my Camel Perl book is 11 years old.  Assuming Perl changed a lot in 11 years, I will have to get a more recent copy although I can see that the latest version covers only Perl 5.6.  Maybe I should just fill a slot in my teeny O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf until the 4th edition comes out.

I find Safari Bookshelf to be too slow for my taste and it's annoying that I have to be online while I am coding so I can access the bookshelf.  Only usable forms of documentation for me are CHM (HTMLHelp) or real books.  PDF?  Books in PDF format may make sense for sloths, but not people.  Maybe I'll get the Perl CD Bookshelf.  I heard that they contain CHM versions of the books.  I maybe wrong of course. 

Post categories I had were too narrow to be of any use to anyone and it was tedious for me to figure out which categories a post belong to.  So I deleted all the categories except the Korean category and added two broader categories: General and Technical.  I also removed category specific HTML pages because they were messing up Google and causing duplicate entries in Technorati.

URLs for the three categories are listed on the right side under My RSS Feeds.

On September 18th, 1931, Japanese army invaded China using a fabricated act of terrorism as an excuse.  Exactly 72 years later, 380 Japanese tourists were having a three-day orgy with 500 Chinese prostitutes in a Chinese hotel.

Intentional?  Is it even possible for all 380 Japanese tourists to not notice the date?  Are such orgies common in China?  I don't think so.