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This is kind of a hard review to write. Short take on the music: it's brilliant. If you like Irish folk or punk, you'll like "The Meanest of Times". However, I just can't get past the awful recording quality, and by awful, I mean truly, utterly terrible.

As though the music industry didn't have enough problems to deal with, such as the string of lawsuits against its customers, the major labels have been busy with something called the "loudness war". The thinking is that the louder music is played, the better most people will think it sounds. In an effort to make their CDs sounds better than their competitors', the companies are recording music as loudly as possible. There's nothing inherently bad about turning up the volume, but they try to squeeze out a few extra decibels by smoothing out the sound so that even the quitest sounds can blow out your speakers.

First public release.

This is the successor to the XBaseToPg project for converting XBase/FoxPro files to PostgreSQL. While XBaseToPg works well, it's comparatively slow and big and complicated. The smallest changes touched lots of files, and the scope of the project is far larger than I actually needed on a daily basis.

Thus, PgDBF. It's a small C project comprising two files with no dependencies other than standard Unix libraries. While the project is relatively tiny and simple, it's also heavily optimized via profiling. I routinely got benchmark results that were many times faster than with XBaseToPg. In fact, even on slower systems, conversions were typically limited by hard drive speed.

Features

PgDBF was designed with a few core principles:

• Simplicity. This code should be understandable by anyone who wants to hack it.
• Robustness. Every syscall is checked for success.
• Speed. I wanted the fastest conversion available anywhere.
• Completeness. It has full support for FoxPro memo files.

In Nebraska, petitioners are gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would remove all gender and race consideration from government hiring. This is a fairly polarizing issue and emotions run pretty high on both sides.

This morning I heard a radio ad attacking the petition, not because it was a bad idea or unjust or for any other debatable reason, but because the petition circulators might be convicted murderers. The ad said that if you sign, then you might be subject to identity theft, robbery, or worse.

Really. They said that. Never mind that all of the information you'd put on a petition is available in the phone book, or to anyone you've ever written a check to or used a credit card with.

Hi! You're the guy who sat behind me at my 8-year-old daughter's teeball practice. I thought you'd want to know that you were talking loudly enough for everyone to hear you, including the coaches. I mean, we could all tell that's why you were bitching so loudly the whole time, and I figured you'd be happy that you were heard.

Now, I'm sure you're an expert in the game. You definitely sounded like it from 30 feet away! Still, I thought perhaps you might appreciate a few clarifications:

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it's not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.

A man calls into a radio show because his son received an obviously-spam email telling him that he's been kicked off of Facebook. The host gets worked up and sympathetic and wants to handle it like a legitimate eviction notice, even though no one's verified whether the kid can still log into his account.

Another man calls a radio show because his business stores a lot of personal information about its customers, and he wants to know what he should do to keep that data safe. The host tells him to install Norton Internet Security.

What do they have in common? They made the mistake of asking Kim Komando for help.

In Nebraska's May 13 election, two Green Party candidates ran for Douglas County Commissioner, District 3. Between them, they received one vote. How stoned do you have to be before you forget to vote for yourself?

At least neither can accuse the other of splitting the election.

I'm voting for Sue Fuchtman for mayor of Norfolk. I know her personally, and she's the sort of intelligent, decent, detail-oriented person we should have making city decisions. The other candidates might be alright, but I'd rather see someone elected that I'm genuinely excited to have in office.

Vote for Sue. I will.

In another article, I described a replacement for Python's built-in map() function that could take advantage of multi-processing systems. That one was based on the standard Unix fork(). Since then, I've written another based on Parallel Python that is much simpler and lets other, better-tested code do all the hard work. It could also be easily extended to run on a cluster instead of just the local system, but I haven't been inclined to tinker with that too much yet.

Kudos to Connelly for nudging me to finally publish this.

I just saw a commercial for "Kinoki" foot pads that supposedly suck poisons out of your body through the soles of your feet. This is the dumbest, most scientifically impossible thing I've heard in a long time - and that's saying a lot. I mean, honestly. Asbestos from your feet?

In short, these are an outright hoax. I normally try to phrase things like that pretty carefully, but there's no need here. To repeat: Kinoki foot pads are a hoax. If you really want to remove the toxins from your body, use the bathroom.

Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert", recently ran a series of cartoons comparing office politics with the Easter story. While many people thought they were funny, others found it offensive. In fact, given how close those strips ran to the actual Easter, I suppose a lot of people were very offended indeed. Adams's own blog claimed that he'd received several letters of complaint.

I'd like to point out something to our Muslim extremist neighbors, though. A cartoonist offended many Christians with drawings of a satirical Jesus just before arguably the most import holiday in Christianity, and yet there have been no reported threats against him. None. Some of us laughed, some of us got angry, but no one condemned him to death. This is how civilization works, and you'd do well to observe and learn from it.

Did you know that you're probably not allowed to make backups of your computer? It's true, if you believe in the legal fiction known as "End User License Agreements" (or EULAs), which are those annoyingly long contracts where you have to click "I Agree" before you're allowed to install some program or another.

For example, here's a snippet of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) End User License Agreement:

2.3 Backup Copy. You may make one backup copy of the Software, provided your backup copy is not installed or used on any computer.

Nice, huh? If you install this software, its EULA forbids you from making more than one backup copy. This is a deal-breaker for business which keep multiple backup archives from days, weeks, and months past.

Global warming is real. Forget the arguments about what's causing it. Forget trying to figure out whether it's going to be good or bad. Forget wondering what should be done to stop it. The fact of the matter is that the Earth's atmosphere has been getting measurably warmer for quite a few years and shows every sign of continuing.

I don't remember when I first heard of global warming, but I do know that it became a political football soon afterward. Sadly, it seems like the issues around it have turned into a screaming match about whether it even exists. This is silly and needs to stop so that we can figure out what to do next.

I am not an atmospheric scientist. I'm pretty sure I don't even know any. I do follow science news rather closely, though, and it's become obvious to me that almost all scientists agree that the Earth is warmer now than it was a decade ago, that the decade before was even cooler, and that the average temperature has been trending upward.

I haven't figured out exactly why human cloning is a bad thing that should be opposed. It intuitively feels wrong, but that's a pretty poor standard to go by. In nature, human clones are all over the place - we just call them twins. But even if someone wants to clone themselves as a way to have children, why not? It doesn't seem inherently different from in vitro fertilization and most people accept that.

Someone please help me out on this one. Why should I be opposed to human cloning?