I just installed a drupal twitter module out of curiosity. The whole twitter concept is still a bit strange to me, so this may end up going nowhere. Supposedly the posting of this entry will also update my twitter ... we'll see if it really does.

On a side note, if you're a gentoo user and try to use the twitter module, you'll need to make sure that php has been built with simplexml support. There is a USE flag "simplexml", which I just added to the dev-lang/php entry in /etc/portage/package.use.

UPDATE:
Apparently it doesn't work with blogapi posts yet. :(

Yep, it's true, LISA'08 is right around the corner. I'm not loading up with as much stuff this year (I learned my lesson at LISA'07). A coworker is going this time, which is nice. Meeting new people is great and all, but having somebody else around that you know makes things more enjoyable, I think.

Finally, all my stuff that was on gutenpress is now here. I've also ditched linpha (again), in favor of drupal's own image handling. I still need to run through the photos, giving them real names and rotating the ones that are misaligned, but at least they're all in here. This was by far the easiest import I've ever done, so perhaps I'll be sticking with the drupal image gallery for a while.

I am almost done reencoding all my music CDs into flac format. I was previously using the AAC format, using iTunes via a VMWare guest to perform the encoding. I had tried some of the open source AAC encoders, but found their quality to be not nearly as good as the iTunes encoder. The huge downside to that was that I needed to keep iTunes around. I have never used iTunes as the music library manager for my music (either on or off of the iPod), preferring amarok, but it was a bit of a pain in the rear to have to fire up a Windows VMWare guest everytime I wanted to encode another CD. The problem was I didn't want to use mp3. I find the mp3 format to be too lossy for my taste (yeah, hints of audiophileness there), and if crank up the bitrate enough to eliminate the muddiness, then it quickly becomes pointless to use mp3 at all. The filesizes aren't significantly smaller, and bits are still being thrown away. To my mind, that's a lose-lose situation. I think AAC is a good compromise. I found that I could kick up the bitrate a little bit with iTunes encoded AAC and achive decent compression with a relatively small degredation of quality. But that required me to use iTunes. *ugh*

Enter Rockbox. My iPod version seems to be well supported, and I had no trouble at all installing the software. Basically it only involves patching the boot loader, and then extracting the software into a .rockbox directory on the partition of the iPod where the music resides. And now I can listen to my flac encoded audio!