I use Grip to rip and encode CD's on my Linux box. I recently got a CD of Japan Rail East train station melodies. I was hoping that I wouldn't have to enter all the info manually--since there are 74 tracks! Freedb had the disc listed, but all the characters were just borked on display in grip. I'm using grip 3.3.0. So I ended upwith this:

1. Go to the Config/DiscDB/Primary Server tab
2. Change "Database Character Set Encoding" to something like ISO=2022-JP
3. Initiate the disc lookup again via the shortcut button that looks like two computers connected to each other

A suggestion for Grip developers

I really really really wish that Grip had support for multiple arbitrary profiles. That way, I could set up one profile for Rock, a different one for Classical, yet another for Japanese, and another for audiobooks.
It would make things so much easier than changing and then remembering all the different settings.

I've suggested this on sourceforge already, but since I can't program, I'm not sure how far it'll go.
Anybody have a solution?

White Sox Panorama (from infield seats)

I've always liked panoramic photos. Don't know anyone who doesn't. The problem is that it's a bitch to take them. You either have to have a special camera, special film, special lens, whatever--and it always adds up to a ton of money.
There's Autostich for Windows. I've used it. It's really fast. But it's really hard to change anything if the result isn't exactly what you want.
I've found that Autopano-SIFT, Hugin, and Enblend--though kind of cryptic at the beginning--offer a lot more control over how the final product will look. Lastly, I just loaded the image into The GIMP and resized it to about 4:3.
I think it feels a bit more real than a regular panorama, especially for far away shots with lots going on, like a baseball game.

Standard panorama linked below. I'm not gonna put up the high-res versions, though.

Background

With the cost of plain old telephone service continuing to rise, and the fact that such a large number of people also have cellular phone bills to pay, it's no wonder that for the first time since its invention, people have been going land-line free.  With the emergence of high-speed Internet connections comes the possibility of using Voice-over-IP for the home to provide a cheap "land-line". Vonage was the first major operator of this type of phone service in the US and has hundreds-of-thousands of subscribers. I'm a Vonage subscriber.

What you get

The VTech IP8100-2 for Vonage comes with a base unit and two "handset units."  A "handset unit" is just a handset and a charging cradle.  The base unit gets hooked up to you Internet connection and the handsets roam the house.  The manual spends a lot of time telling you how to operate the phone--not enough time telling you how to set it up correctly so that you don't chuck it out the window.

The Manual is wrong

If you only have one computer in your house, then great!  This manual is for you. do this:

But even those with only one computer may have a laptop going to a wireless router.  Forget what the manual says.  Do this:

This will put your phone at the head of the line.  Your phone calls will absolutely get top priority on your network.  And why not? I would presume you want to have an actual conversation, not a fun time with echoes.

Sail (III)

I don't usually like the photos I take. I think this one's interesting, though.

I think Drupal is just great. Before deciding on a CMS I tried out Tikiwiki, Mambo, and Typo3, and a couple others. Drupal definitely wasn't the easiest to get going out of the box, but there are so many other advantages, that once you start to get your head around how things work, it's definitely a better system.

That being said, I'm hosted by a service that doesn't give me complete control over my databases. I run on MySQL, and the drupal code requires the use of LOCK TABLES. My host won't allow this, even after lots of emails. I'm not moving to another host because the cost is so low. So...what to do?

I'm not a database person. I know how to use PHPMyAdmin and that's about it. This is part of the Drupal code that kept me from being able to add users, images, etc. without LOCK TABLES permission. It's in includes/database.mysql.inc.

I just commented out the top and bottom lines so that it looks like:

I can now add users, images, content, etc. into the database. WIth a small site, no problems yet. But this is definitely not recommended at all by the developers or me. YMMV.

UPDATE: I've since move the database somewhere where I can get them to do GRANT LOCK TABLE permissions. Drupal 4.7 is comin