Cafe Bucky

Anyone following the SCO debacle will chuckle at the latest salvo: that IBM is coercing everyone to “Beat up on SCO”. Hah! As if any of us in the Linux community needed to get our marching orders from IBM, or Red Hat, or any other corporate entity.

Eric Raymond has a great Open Letter to Darl McBride of SCO. He makes the point loud and clear.

p.s. Darl, you do NOT have my permission to use this blog entry in your press clipping binder.

Recently? Besides words and films?

Dave Brubeck. Dizzy Gillespie (”Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”
drives my daughter crazy). Lots of Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method,
and Fat Boy Slim. Oh, and always some Beatles here and there (and
everywhere).

I just used the Apple Music Store to get Massive Attack’s “100th
Window” and href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000006045/qid=1056955376/sr=8-
2/ref=sr_8_2/104-5950210-3209560?v=glance&s=music&n=507846">“Mezzanine”.
Both get me in the programming groove. Volume up. Coffee strong.
Floating vocals over samples, ambient, sometimes hard-driving beat.
So much of what I’ve heard from MA would be right at home in a Bond
soundtrack. “Man Next Door” is yet another song using the classic John
Bonham drum riff from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” (I hear
this beat all over the place – it’s almost become a game of “find
Bonham’s influence, again”). I can’t hear “Exchange” without thinking
of the movie “Dogtown & Z-Boys”, which always brings a tinge of
Santa Monica mid-70s flashback (very good).

There’s the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival this weekend, and I hope to catch a good part of the show on Sunday (when I get into town). Looks like I will be too late to see Taj Mahal. Taj used to give my dad harmonica lessons in the 60s. Blues Harp, dontcha know?! Hohner. Dad had at least a dozen of ‘em. One night when I was a wee lad, my dad and I were at a Hootnanny (a form of music making party), where Taj complemented my sense of drum rhythm (years of school band with lots of rudiments followed; beats with names such as “double paradiddle”). Great to see that Taj is still out there performing!

I have a media wish list, which is only here
as a “stuff that interests me” link. (so don’t go buying me anything,
unless it’ll make you incredibly happy – I’m just showing a less
tech-centric side here, a different onion layer :-)

More recent input, following films…

I am slogging my way through Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s the master of the serpentine
sentence. It’s become a personal challenge to get through, at which
point I think I’ll start again. Maybe it’s a lot better the second
time?

Just finished Henry
Rollins: The First Five. Man! Mr. 2-13-61 lays down a lot of
thoughts on shallow society, relationships, suicidal thoughts, being
burned, and so on. The book is great in parts, can be pretty intense,
but can get repetitive. It’s not “read it straight through” material. Hank’s a couple of months younger than me
(42), and I wonder if he’s come to terms with some of the stuff that
pissed him off so thoroughly in the 80s. Reading this and seeing L’Auberge
Espanol in the same week might make for a nice double whammy – 2 sides
of 20-whateverish.

I’ve read all of William Gibson’s books, so I had high hopes for Pattern
Recognition. I can’t say that I was let down, but this is no
Neuromancer, or any of the Bridge Trilogy. One thing I missed: multiple
threads, ping-pong chapters. PR is a straight follow of Cayce all the
way through. I never found myself caring about the Footage, and what
it meant. I did enjoy a lot of the atmosphere though – mention London
and I’m drawn in! I wanted to see Cayce wander into a small shop, and
meet The Finn just starting out. A good book if you are reading everything Gibson, or if you are into the “looking over the shoulders of the
main character, and where they travel” aspect. Perhaps I have too
much of a cyberpunk expectation when I think of Gibson: I want my
Ono-Sendai. I want Molly. I want reflected neon in oil puddles.
Braun coffee grinders. Mercenaries. Cheap origami trick.

Whatcha readin? Whatcha listen’n to? You see that!?

There’s a lot more than just tech stuff in my day. I haven’t really
mentioned much about books, films, and music, have I?
Until I work in some sidebar here with little nods to media (readin’,
hearin’, watchin’) here be a roundup. It’s a mini-trilogy, one
part per day. Warning: Spoilers.

I just saw a censored (TV) version of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which
reminded me of how great a film it is. Guess who makes her first
appearance in this one? None other than a sassy head-shakin’
Brooklynite Rosie Perez, showing lots of Attitude in her first role.
I want the DVD, just to get the full-on, over-the-top dialog. It’s Hot!
And that’s the truth, Ruth.

L’Auberge Espagnole was
a lot of fun, being a look at 20-something students from all over
Europe, sharing a large apartment in Barcelona. Maybe the plot is idealized:
living with a bunch of people from different European countries, cramming all
of your food into the refrigerator shelf with your name tag, but it’s
an enjoyable popcorn travelogue. No explosions or superheros, just
real, and very funny. Clever editing too. Go to Europe for a couple of hours.

Speaking of editing; if you want to see a technically interesting 90
minute show (yeah, one take, one continuous shot!), and if you like
Russian history, go see Russian Ark. Not for
everyone.

Spotted on an O’Grady’s PowerPage story, a new service from the fine Wall Street Journal folks …

Got AOL Instant Messenger? If so, send WSJOnline a message. You can get news and stock quotes within AIM. It looks to still be in beta (I don’t know, I haven’t been a WSJ website subscriber for a while). Nonetheless, it is cool to be able to do this via instant messaging, and you can see where this is going.

Another AIM-bot (this one Jabber-based) is detailed at MudLondon, which is up sporadically. That one allows you navigate The Capital by Tube. Real World URLs (shops, pubs, etc.) crop up by proximity. MudLondon is done by jo walsh (jo doesn’t do Capitalization :-)

Since AIM is so prevalent [1], I expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Lots of AIMlets are going to start cropping up. It’s not a stretch at all for me to put it into FlexiPhoto (give a keyword, I will kick back a thumbnail you can click on for a larger version in a browser). I love the idea of instant messaging taking off in new directions (such as iChat AV, and these new services).

[1] did you know you can just run a Java version, which doesn’t require an explicit download and installation?

I TiVO’ed the MTV Movie Awards, because I love looking for irreverency
(and I love skipping commercials). Thanks TiVO; I love getting through
a two-hour show in 30 minutes!

Gollum won an award for “Best Virtual Performance”. His acceptance
speech (or should I say, Andy Serkis’ speech) was a hoot! It
was brilliantly true-to-form. Bring on the uncensored version.

Go check it out.

Precioussssss!

Microsoft is going to pay AOL $750 Million to settle a long-running spat, and AOL is going to use MSIE for the next 7 years.

Damn.

(more…)

According to this article on CNN.Com, Disney
is going to start renting DVDs that become unplayable after 48 hours.
You don’t have to take them back. A chemical reaction makes the DVD unreadable.

This strikes me as wasteful. Those who are inclined to copy the DVD can still do so in the first 48 hours, so it’s not as if they are addressing any sort of DRM. It’s too much in the “disposable mentality, everything ends up in landfills” direction for my taste.

A quick skim of the slashdot thread gave me this idea: Every DVD you rent has a $15 deposit. If you don’t bring it back, you own it. Simple.

Apple gets it (iTunes, Apple Music Store). Disney doesn’t. In a few years we’ll be downloading movies from Apple.