What David's Thinking

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. In case you're wondering, you can see my awesome musical taste by visting my Last.fm profile.

Last night Eric S. Raymond spoke at BALUG the Bay Area Linux User's group.

If you don't know who he is, he's credited with coining the term "open source." He wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" a widely-read essay describing the economics of Linux and other open source development.

Eric is a really hoopy frood. He says he never writes his speeches. The presentation was titled "What Open Source Teaches Us About Economics and Politics," but he mainly spoke about converting his 70-year-old mother to Ubuntu.

We've all been in a meeting where the speaker told us to "please bear with me." This xkcd comic tells the truth about this phrase.

I'm looking forward to gradumakating.

Sometimes, it's the little things that make the difference. Several of my favorite Mac applications, such as Colloquy use Growl to notify me of events, such as a successful connection. I like it because I don't have to keep checking on a program to see if something important's happened. A message just pops up on my screen, no matter where it is. It's open source, which I love. I've never seen anything like it on Linux or Windows. Growl is so simple, yet I wonder why no one thought of anything like it before.

Sorry for the long delay, but I felt I didn't have anything really interesting to say. Now I'm going to get back in the blogging saddle. I hope you had a good holiday season and wish you all a happy new year.

Today, most major webcasters are silent, protesting licensing fees for music that would effectively put them out of business. The fees are retroactive to 2006 and are far more than the stations make in revenue.

I cannot, as a libertarian, abide such governmental interference in business. If the stations stopped broadcasting simply for lack of funds, I would find it sad but understandable. What really irks me is that the U.S. government is effectively quashing a business at the behest of one of its fundraisers, the RIAA.

The recording industry has fought nearly every technical advance of late. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age. As a libertarian, I believe the best way to deal with businessed who treat their customers badly is to avoid dealing with them. The new royalty rates are supposed to kick in on July 16th. I I have always been a music fan, but the death of net radio may well be the final straw. If it happens I am considering never buying or even listening to any music ever again.

This is one of the funniest things ever to grace Youtube. Kermit singing "Once In A Lifetime" by Talking Heads.

One of my favorite bands of all time has broken up. It's such a shame. New Order was such a great band. I got to see them when they played Oakland on their last tour.

In the wake of the flap over the HD-DVD key, I've noticed that production and distribution of knowledge has seemed to supplant production and distribution of material goods. Just as in the real world, people disagree on how knowledge is distributed. On one side are what I call "infosocialists," people (such as the FSF and the EFF) who oppose copyrights and patents. They believe knowledge should be equally available to everyone. On the other hand are "infocapitalists," people who see their knowledge as their property, and they can disallow people from knowing certain things. I've been a political libertarian who favors strong property rights my whole life, but property rights for bits are getting confusing for me. Are IP laws even enforceable when bits are trivially easy to copy? I guess we'll just have to let the courts decide.

I've successfully emerged from a geek rite of passage: the Linux kernel recompile. The major hurdle was figuring out how to get Ubuntu's kernel builder thingy to create a ramdisk. Anyway, my new kernel is noticeably faster, and OpenGL is smoother as well. I did screw it up at first, but Ubuntu is smart enough to mount a scratch monkey, so I had nothing to lose.

While perusing the source code for Crossfire a multiplayer rougelike game, I came across this line:

void new_player (long tag, char *name, long weight, long face)

Note the last variable in the function call. It's things like this that make source code worth wading through! :-)

If you don't know by now, Viacom is suing Youtube for copyright infringement because users post Viacom shows. Other networks such as NBC actively promote their show on YouTube. Why not Viacom? Viacom has their own video-sharing site which is much less popular. It appears that they would rather compete in court than in the marketplace.

Ever since I discovered the Unix side of Mac OS X, I've been using Fink a package manager based on Debian's APT utilities. The folks at Debian have come up with a great package management system but the Fink packages are paleolithic, even in the "unstable" repository. I've switched to MacPorts, which is based on BSD's ports. They have the latest and greatest stable packages, which makes me happy. (I'm surprised at how reliable open source programs are, even when the version number is much less than 1.0!)

I've just discovered the Ruby programming language. It feels like Google-simple, elegant, powerful. It gets out of the way and lets me express myself.

I've found a great site that has pictures of felines with grammatically challenged but screamingly funny captions. It's called I Can Has Cheezburger. These things keep showing up in web-based fora such as FARK.

I know my userpic looks terrible. My cousin took it when she arm-twisted me into joining another social-networking site (hint: it was recently purchased by an Australian media mogul). I much prefer being behind cameras than in front of them. I don't like hiding behind handles (most "experts" tell you not to use your real name online, but I don't listen to experts anyway) and I don't want to hde behind a cartoon character either.

The library at my university is the only one where you'll find Solaris! They have a "Learning Commons" which has Sun thin clients, Windows PCs, and Macs. End-users use Solaris to do end-user things. They don't seem to mind that's it's GNOME instead of their familiar Windows. If it works this well for Solaris, it should work for its free as in freedom cousins.

I must say that I find Solaris itself unimpressive. It lacks any really interesting utilities. However, Unix is Unix. I would like Solaris better if I had no Unix experience.

I cram into the shuttle going from CSU East Bay to the Hayward BART station. When we get there, the police have blocked off the station, and BART trains are going through but not stopping. There are several police helicopeters over head. Three people were shot in the bus loading zone. I managed to catch a bus going to another station.

Full story here.

For the past few days, I've been listening to tracks from the XTC album "The Big Express." It's a good but overlooked (even by many fans) album. All of their trademark hooks are present, but they really cranked up the guitars and the percussion sounds like a machine shop. It's an intriguing contrast. "Express" is sandwiched between two pastoral albums, "Mummer" and "Skylarking."