Music Rights for TV DVDs

I just read this article on securing music rights for DVD releases of TV shows. The difficulties particularly annoy me since I imagine they are holding up the DVD release of The State and make releasing the Beavis and Butt-Head music videos almost impossible. There has to be a better way.

Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody that shows full album names in the album lists. The truncated album names were really getting on my nerves. Hooray for Greasemonkey!

Anti-aliased Emacs on Fedora Core 4 (and 5)

I managed to build Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on my FC4 machine. I mostly followed these instructions (ignoring the Debian-specific stuff), with the following extra steps:

• I had to install the libpng-devel RPM (I used yum). The lack of this library was not detected by the emacs configure script.
• I had to install setarch to use during the build process. The exec-shield functionality and randomization of virtual address spaces in Fedora Core 4 messes up the emacs bootstrapping process. I ran ./configure ; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to build emacs.

The build seems to run fine, and the anti-aliased fonts make a big difference.

UPDATE (10/27/06): I just did a re-build on Fedora Core 5 using these instructions, and everything went fine. Now, when compiling, you need to run ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to make things work. Hopefully soon this code will be stable enough that someone releases an RPM.

Wall Street Journal through ProQuest

I found a fairly decent way to read the Wall Street Journal (which charges for online access) through ProQuest, which I can access through the UC Berkeley library proxy. Go to this page to see issues by date. Then, after choosing an issue, sort the articles by page number rather than alphabetically. Finally, skip all the articles listed as being on "p. 1", as they are just short blurbs; the long articles start on "p. A.1".