I have had several people ask me if I accept donations for the work I am doing on Acidfree. I guess I could say no, but that wouldn't be very gratious, now would it. Besides, my wife, Lauren, would probably appreciate the nice dinner date that your donations would finance. I figure that is only fair — Acidfree takes me away from her — so you can ensure that she allows me to continue to work on Acidfree by giving a small amount to me to encourage her with flowers and fine dining. So click on the logo below and make a contribution.

As I was reading my daily quota of SlashDot a few days ago, I stumbled across a very intriguing sci-fi story called Engineers's Dreams by George Dyson. The fact that he could not get it published in any science journals because it is fiction and that he could not get it published in any fiction venues because it was too technical just makes me laugh. In fact that is half the reason I was intrigued enough to read it. That and it is a story about Google.

I spent too much time today playing with IPv6 stuff that I didn't have any time to work on my latest time sink, Pyrobox. I will have to write about that some other time.

For now, I wanted to get this out there. I was curious about how easy it was to confirm that a string is a valid IPv6 address. It turns out that it is not so simple, thanks to the "space saving" techniques of zero folding that is used. Here are some examples of IPv6 addresses that are valid:

::                           unspecified address
::1                          localhost
fe80::219:7eff:fe46:6c42     link local address
::00:192.168.10.184          embedded IPv4 address

Yes, those are just some of the variety that was introduced that makes the protocol easier to use from a high level, but harder to implement and use from a low level.

About a week ago, vernon.mauery.com and www.mauery.com both had a major overhaul, though it probably (hopefully) went unnoticed by all the users. I had been running Drupal 4.6 for about a year, ever since I started using Drupal. Drupal 4.7 was released a couple of months ago and I finally got around to upgrading my website. I figured it would give me a chance to work on a few Acidfree bugs over the holiday weekend as well. I managed to fix/close 25+ bugs over the the holiday. Granted, some of them I closed as "won't fix," but I did actually fix some bugs and implement a couple interesting features. And now that I am running Acidfree 4.7, it will give me more motivation to make sure it works correctly.

I have long been slightly jealous of Darren's MythTV setup. I kept telling myself that I have enough other projects (a.k.a. kids) to keep myself busy for the next 18 years. Plus, the VCR and TV have always been fine for our needs and up until about a month ago were working fine. The TV has never really been what I would call a great piece of electronic equipment. A great piece of something. But it was free and I can't argue with that. It still works if not for its slightly discolored screen. The VCR is in the same boat. But it finally did give up the ghost. First it stopped rewinding tapes and then it stopped recording. So I tossed it. But that left us without a way to record Sesame Street. Dun dun dun...

Acidfree is the 4th generation of a brainchild of Darren Hart, Bret Gundersen, and mine as we sought to create a cool webpage that our families could use as a communication hub. The original photo albums looked about the same, but were so integrated into the website that it was a bit of work to extract them and insert them into my own young website. The code was, frankly, not my best work ever. But I was young, inexperienced in web development, php, and user interfaces so my shortcomings can be overlooked for this first generation. The important point is that I got better.

The sign said 'Under new managment' and I was skeptical. But it did still look like the same web page that I had grown to love over the past few years. So I thought, 'What the heck, I'll give it a try.' And what a booming success it has been ever since.

This is just to say that I have spent hours and hours learning about the drupal architecture, designing a good photo album for drupal and implementing acidfree photo albums for drupal. I think I did it The Right Wayâ„¢ so I am hoping that I can eventually get it into the drupal contribution modules page. Unfortunately for me, there are already several competing albums (all of which are weaksauce IMNSHO), so it may be difficult for me to convince them that my albums really are as cool as I think they are.

After a request from a friend to see the source for my personal OS toy, I have released the first public version of MauOS. I started MauOS as a way to learn more about the i386 architecture. It turned into quite a fun little project. Even though it doesn't do much more than switch between two tasks and respond to timer interrupts, it was a lot of fun to delve into the sick minds of the creators of the i386.

As it happens, when I was being interviewed by IBM, they learned of MauOS and the word got out that I am an overachiever. Just because I like to play with the bits of my emulated machine does not make me an overachiever.

It was brought to my attention that videos have been broken up to this point. I fixed the problems and made the pages XHTML 1.0 compliant. Then, I tested the video page enough to satisfy me. Here are the supported platform / plugin / browser setups I have tested:

• Linux / mplayer-mozilla / Galeon
• Linux / mplayer-mozilla / Firefox
• Linux / mplayer-mozilla / Mozilla
• Linux / mozilla-plugin-vlc / Galeon
• Linux / mozilla-plugin-vlc / Firefox
• Windows XP / Windows Media Player 10 / Internet Explorer 6
• Windows XP / Windows Media Player 10 / Firefox