Arellanes.com

New uses for Brita filters

Apparently you can use a Brita filter to make nasty cheap vodka taste as good as some premium vodkas. These guys have the details. Via Amy Langfield, who got it from Paul Frankenstein.

More on SMiLE

I've spent a good deal of time listening to Brian Wilson's SMiLE in the last couple of days, and have to say that it's really growing on me.

Just out of curiousity, I started looking around the Interfernet for information on the record, and have stumbled into what seems like an alternate universe, an entire subculture of Beach Boys compleatists.

Which is cool, mind you. The record took 37 years to make, and the backstory of its completion - as well as the obsession of bootleg fans - is worthy of almost as much attention as the record itself.

Anyway, for those interested in more info on SMiLE a, check out this article in the Crutchfield Advisor. But for those really interested in going deep, check out The Smile Shop, a site mostly devoted to the musical archeology of Smile, and includes an essay by SMiLE lyricist Van Dyke Parks.

Podcasting

I've been following the development of podcasting with great interest for many different reasons. Podcasting is the new tech buzzword of the day, and it just means audio programs intended to be played on personal audio players like the iPod.

(And no, the player doesn't have to be an iPod. It could be any MP3 player. Heck, a lot of mobile phones have MP3 players these days.)

I like podcasting because it brings together the mechanisms of content management and weblogs with those of radio: you don't have to worry about missing your favorite DJ's show.

I think podcasting will work because it's easy. All you have to do is use a free program like iPodder, which checks to see if a show has been updated, and then downloads it in the background. When it's downloaded, it automatically passes it over to iTunes, which then uploads it onto your iPod.

Our contribution to the whole podcasting phenomenon will come early next year, when our LiveSupport software is released.

LiveSupport is a system that lets you run an entire radio station on a computer (or multiple computers). While we originally set out to make LiveSupport thinking that we'd either be sending the sound to either an FM transmitter or an internet stream, now I'm starting to think about output to a sound files too.

But if you're just one blogger in his pajamas, that's OK, because LiveSupport doesn't set a minimum broadcast length. So you make a short broadcast (say, four songs interrupted with various commentary) and then output that for podcasting.

LiveSupport is free and open source software, and we're always looking for others to get involved. If you're interested, check out our pages to see how.

Gmail accounts

In case you're one of the few who doesn't have a Google Mail account yet, I have six - count 'em - six invitations to give away. Write me either in the comments or to my mail, douglas at arellanes.com to get yours...

The iPod and my walking commute

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I got a new 40GB iPod for my birthday, and it's excellent. Great sound quality, and 40GB in your pocket is kind of intimidating at first.

But considering that my music collection is bigger than that, I had to cut down what actually makes it on to the iPod, which means I've been spending a lot of time making playlists. I understand there are tools that let me publish the playlists I make, and as soon as the iTunes music store works for Europe - which should be any day now, I'll post some there.

The walk to work, which is about 3km, takes me 30 minutes, through some lovely parts of Prague 6. And with the iPod, it's pleasant indeed. Now I just have to get over feeling self-conscious about wearing the telltale white earbuds or my big-ass DJ headphones.

Server troubles

I had some server troubles today, so I'd like to apologize about the multiple postings. Everything should be OK now.

I did have some excellent pork for dinner tonight. Our guests from New York did some wonderful things with krkovička and vepřová panenka involving ginger, lime, garlic, chili pepper and salt on a barbecue grill.

Also, I filled up my car today. 38 liters (10.04 gallons) of gasoline cost me around CZK 1200 (USD $45.56). I can only imagine what it must cost to fill up a Hummer here.

Firefox, Thunderbird and NVU

One thing a lot of people miss about open source software is that a lot of great programs have Windows versions too.

I just installed the excellent Mozilla Firefox 0.9 web browser today, and liked it enough to make it my default browser. I like Internet Explorer fine, but Firefox has some stuff I use quite a bit, especially tabbed browsing, which opens up multiple tabs - each holding a web page - inside a single browser window. This has the advantage of not clogging up your task bar.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a fantastic email program, one I've been using for about a month. It has a pretty good junk mail filter, one that gets smarter the longer you use it, but the feature I appreciate most is a really simple one that deserves explaining.

When you get an HTML message, the web browser inside your mail program calls back to the server to load up the pictures. This is one way spammers know that your mailbox is a real one.

Thunderbird gets around this by blocking images inside an HTML message, so that the spammers can't see that you've opened it. Which is always nice.

The last program to check out is called NVU (pronounced N-view), which aims to be an open-source alternative to Dreamweaver, and is built around Mozilla's Gecko web-page rendering engine. Pretty slick stuff.

You can get Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows, Mac and Linux at http://www.mozilla.org, and NVU for Linux and Windows at http://www.nvu.com.

Hosed

My hard drive died on me today. It died in the most peculiar way. It didn't even let me know it was dying until it was well past saving. But now it's hosed and there isn't much I can do about it.

I used to have the hard disk divided between Windows 2000 and Mandrake Linux 10. But for whatever reason, the partitions (think of a big parcel of land subdivided into littler chunks) were overlapping (think of two moving sets of fences, with all the conflicts that would result from that.

At some point, the fence gave out, and all heck broke loose. I think what broke the fence was that I tried to upgrade my Windows to XP. All I know is that the disk is in bad shape.

We're trying to retrieve the data using a tool called EasyRecover, but a lot of things - like the various posters, fliers and artwork promoting my DJ gigs - might be lost.

Once again, let my sad tale be a warning to you. Back up your important stuff. Hard disks don't last forever.

Linux counterculture

The ever-mysterious Nicmoc asks for background on a recent headline in the NYTimes that reads: R.I.P.: The Counterculture Aura of Linux.

Pardon me for a second while I put on my white lab coat and start talking in my Dr. Science voice...

The NYTimes article is about changes to the way the Linux operating system is made, and the article isn't about the Linux "counterculture," at all, but rather about changes that will be made in its governance. But before talking about those changes, maybe it would be good to explain how Linux differs from Microsoft Windows.

Both systems involve hundreds, maybe thousands of programmers, each working on sections of the program code. For Windows, as for Linux, there is a hierarchy of project leaders who decide which code is good to use, and which isn't so good to use.

Linux is essentially a volunteer effort, not in the sense that programmers don't get paid for their work - many do - but in the sense that programmers decide to share their work with others under a legal/copyright mechanism known as the GNU General Public License. In Windows, the license is printed in the box, and breaking the seal means you agree to the terms of the license.

The Windows license says, among other things, that you don't have the right to copy the software, or to reverse-engineer it to figure out how it works. In Linux, the exact opposite is true. Not only are you free to copy the software, but you're invited to "peek under the hood" to see how it works - the programmers leave their remarks about the software right there in the code for you to see.

(Old school folks may remember early computer classes taught using the BASIC computer language, which used a statement called REM, for REMark. Then you could write anything you wanted in the program without messing it up. My own REM messages were usually things like "Doug sure wants this class to be over so he can go to lunch." But I digress.)

The Linux programming code (or "source code") is made by people who volunteer their work for inclusion, and so far it's been taken on good faith that it is written by the person who submitted it, and that it doesn't infringe on somebody else's copyright, that it isn't stolen from someone, etc.

So far, it's been a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But a recent lawsuit made Linux creator Linus Torvalds and his team start to look twice at that approach. The lawsuit, brought by a company called SCO against IBM and Linux creator Linus Torvalds - as well as potentially anyone who uses Linux - alleges that there are massive sections of Linux's source code that are stolen.

Nevermind that the charges are probably going to be thrown out. Nevermind that SCO got a lot of money from Microsoft for unspecified "business development" purposes. The bullshit lawsuit - and the fact that many more businesses are starting to use Linux - means that the process of submitting source code has to be made more accountable. In layman's terms, by using a signature, you swear that the code is yours, and that it isn't stolen, etc.

Is that the equivalent of "a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac?" Hell, no! For one thing, the Linux kernel is just one of literally tens of thousands of open source software projects.

While many will adopt a signature process as a way of protecting themselves from lawsuits, this in no way means that the software itself - or the vast majority of the volunteer process that feeds it - will change. Most people I know would be thrilled to be more clearly identified with open source projects. And I'll take up the discussion among my own team of open source developers.

I see it as the equivalent of adding my signature to the Declaration of Independence. Who wouldn't want to be involved in something as cool as that?

Linux Boot CDs

One of the things I hear when talking to people about Linux is that they would like to try it out, but aren't sure if they want to completely wipe out Windows and everything that goes with it.

The new crop of Linux startup CDs provide people with a good chance to check out Linux, to kick the tires, and to see that it's for real. (In Linux speak, startup is called boot. Learning the Linux words for everything is one of the things that's taken me the longest. Go figure.)

Like most everything related to Free Software, you can download these free from the Internet and burn them using your own CD burner. Then you pop the CD in the bay, restart, and pow! You're using Linux. And all your Windows stuff remains intact.

These CDs include the entire operating system, as well as applications to use once you're in Linux. This includes things like Mozilla Firefox for web browsing, OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, and a choice of several different e-mail programs.

I've had good results with all of the Boot CDs I've tried: Knoppix, Slax, and Dynebolic. Each of them is pointed at a different group of users. They work great with old hardware, too - including a couple of older laptops I have sitting around the office.

Slax is cool because it's designed to be small. In fact, it's made to fit on one of the small CDs that are frequently used for CD singles. This adds immeasurably to its cuteness factor. But it's also practical. With one of these, plus a cheap USB memory card, a person could take their entire "computer" - including all their documents and applications, anywhere they go.

For me, Dynebolic is the most interesting and radical of the boot CDs, because it is intended for use by media activists. There are many geek-cool things about Dynebolic, including the fact that you can boot it on an Xbox, which essentially turns an Xbox into a very cheap, but very powerful PC. Plus it supports clustering out of the box, so if you have several Xboxes (hey! they're cheap!) you can link them together to do things like rip and convert DVDs into DivX. Dynebolic is definitely the real deal for the Digital Underground.

As you'd expect from a CD intended for media activists, Dynebolic includes a number of cool programs for working with multimedia, including Audacity, which is a sound editing program similar to SoundForge or Vegas. There are programs for editing video, burning CDs and DVDs, and in one of the coolest features, you can stream to a public streaming server, essentially creating your own Net radio station.

The biggest complaint I have about Dynebolic is its old-school Unix windowing system, which took some getting used to. You have to right-click a lot. I can understand why they used a system like this, though: it's a lot less demanding on the machine, and that's important if you want to run on older equipment. Plus it frees up more system resources for the things that really count: the applications.

For me personally, I'm currently using a dual boot computer, one that runs Windows 2000 or Mandrake Linux 10. But thanks to Dynebolic, I've downloaded and installed many of the applications they include, so that I get the same effect.

With Linux, I can do aaaalmost about all the same things I do in Windows, with one big difference: my beloved DJ software - PCDJ FX and MixMeister Pro - are written for Windows. Dynebolic includes some DJ software, including the excellently-named TerminatorX, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. I'll check in about that in a future post.

Click Farms

Back in the day, like most folks in the Dot Com era, my colleagues and I were sitting around trying to think up ways to make millions without actually doing anything.

Finally, someone came up with the idea of a "Click Farm," a sweatshop-type place situated maybe somewhere in Albania or something, equipped with a bunch of computers. All the horrendously-underpaid employees would do all day was click on ads. "It'd be great! We'll make millions!" we said.

Of course, like most stupid Dot Com ideas, this one died a quick and merciful death.

I'd like to point your attention, however, to this blog's newest addition: the Google ad strip on the left. Short of opening up a click farm somewhere outside Elbasan, click on those babies like monkeys hitting the bar in a cocaine experiment.

This is not to say that I've lost faith in BlogAds; quite the opposite, and I'll explain that in a second. I liken them both to ad agencies; it'd be a cold day in heck when a publisher decides to accept ads from only one agency.

Side by side you can see different interpretations of "targeting." One is based on an algorithm, so you get somewhat generic ads for Prague travel and lodging businesses or EU accession. One is based on human intelligence, so you get ads for fellow blogger Scott MacMillan's excellent Tulip Cafe.

My Lord of the Rings Review

This weekend I finally got around to seeing "Return of the King," and I'm kinda sorry to say that it didn't exactly rocketh my hindquarters.

I found myself reverting to my 13-year-old me, asking questions like, "man, how many hit points do you think Gandalf has? He must be like +99/+99/+99 or something."

But then I had to cringe, because even as a 13-year-old, while I tried hard to get into the whole D and D thing, I just couldn't, because I had the knowledge that that was the Path Wot Leadeth to Stevie Nicks.

Plus, while I'm pretty good at deciphering accents, I couldn't make heads or tails of the accents in the movie, and was glad that at least there were Czech subtitles. And what was with the hobbits' hairstyles? They all looked like members of The Sweet or Paul Williams. Wait, wasn't Paul Williams in the movie?

I kept waiting for Sam Goldwyn, the elf, to show up from Wil-Shire, the kingdom of Stu Nahan, and smite the mollusks and the Arps. But lo, there was no smiting to be had from Sam Goldwyn, even though a great deal of arse was thump-ed by others.

iTrip and Media Activism

My friend and colleague Micz Flor points me to this very interesting add-on for the iPod which basically turns it into a tiny, easily concealed FM transmitter.

Micz, who understands digital media deeper than just about anyone on the planet, was pretty interested in uses for this that may not have been in the original design spec; broadcasting in refugee camps, for example, or anywhere where the population density is high enough for an admittedly limited range. Then again, he's probably looking into ways to hack the hardware and boost the range.

Yet one more reason to lust after my own iPod. Maybe I should put up my own wishlist, like the camgirls do :-)

Oh Mandy, You Came and You Gave Without Takin'

I've spent the last few hours trying to perfect my installation of the already-excellent Mandrake 10, and have that tinny taste in my mouth that comes with being up way too long.

Most of the delays came because I have a Sony VAIO laptop, and if you know anything about Sony, it's that they love proprietary solutions. The problem for people in the open source community then is that it's harder to find a critical mass of users with the same problems, which is usually how things get solved. So I was up last night trying to install sonypid, which includes support for my jog dial, function keys, bluetooth (who am I kidding? I don't even have bluetooth).

Other hiccups along the way include support for my external firewire hard drive, ACPI for battery monitoring, Java in my Mozilla Firefox browser, and the biggie, a missing Wi-Fi installation.

I'm sure, though, that installation and setup would have been a breeze with a slightly more common laptop.

On the plus side, there's a lot to be happy about. The 2.6 kernel is really fast, and KDE 3.2 is a gorgeous interface - I'd say it's prettier than XP, but still not as pretty as OS X. There are lots of cool things I've come across along the way, like the "Most Popular Applications" menu in KDE, anti-aliasing, and refinement of Konqueror (probably thanks to the fact that Apple uses Konqueror as a base for its Safari browser).

Combined with a program like Crossover Office (which lets you run Windows programs in Linux), I'm getting really close to the point where I'll wipe my Windows installation completely.

The Geek Test

Thanks to a post over at thatnotsofreshfeeling.com, I took the Geek Test and came up a Major Geek with a score of 40.23669%.

Personally, I was kind of disappointed in their emphasis on the Star Wars/Star Trek axis. Personally, I'm a Dune Geek, but there weren't any points for that.

R.U.R. - The Opera

This came today from the EU's ACTeN Content Media Markets newsletter. It will probably be deeply cool, considering everything going into it. (The photo is of the Kismet robot project, and clicking on the picture will take you to a paper titled "Biologically Inspired Robots as Artificial Inspectors.")

On September 29, 2004 the Opera R.U.R Rossums Universal Robots will be staged at the National Theater in Brno (Czech Republic). The opera is after the play by Karel Capek from 1921. It will be one of the first operas dealing with the creation of robots and artificial human beings on stage. R.U.R deals with the take-over of the world supremacy by robots. The play develops its vision on the background of the inhumane working conditions of the industrial period at the beginning of last century. The discovery of the structural design of life shall make life easier for mankind. The Rossums Universal Robots company starts with the mass manufacturing of working robots on an island. The intention to improve the robots’ efficiency by giving them humanlike characteristics is very successful. The robots have bestowed on man a life full of leisure and free time and even have taken care of fighting their wars. In the course of the years, the robots develop an individual life and self consciousness independently of their creators, they form alliances and eventually destroy their creators, the human beings. The opera is a co-production of the Media Archiv Prague and the WRO Center for Media ArtFoundation, in Poland, the Fraunhofer Institut for Media communication and the National Theatre Brno in the Czech Republic. For more info: Petr Vrana [vrana.p@t-online.de]

Casemod of the Week

Overclock this!

Clark, Dean and the GPL

During all the Tuesday-morning quarterbacking that's going on about the Iowa Democratic caucuses, I checked out a comment by Tacitus about the fact that no matter what the outcome of the primaries, the Dems will come out stronger on the Internet:

"Almost without realizing it, the Democrats will emerge from this election cycle with a seriously good and adaptable internet machine." (Link via Henry Copeland)

This question interested me, as someone involved in Free Software. I'm not sure whether either Democratic or Republican candidates really understand what is going on with the General Public License, the contract between the software developer and user that underpins the open source movement, but I'll bet their technical people do.

Both Wesley Clark and Howard Dean's technical organizations have been using existing open source software, altering it to their own purposes. And when the need arises, they are creating their own software and releasing it under open source licenses.

Mostly this comes down to content management, automatic systems for updating the archipelago of websites connected to their campaigns. In Dean's case, the DeanSpace team has been making alterations to the Drupal content management system. The Clark TechCorps has been working on the Kuro5hin Scoop content management system that they've heavily altered. [Disclosure: the foundation I work for creates open source software, including a content management system for publications.]

What's cool about open source software is how it changes the rules. Normally, such copy-and-pasting would be considered intellectual property theft. But in the open source world, these activities are not only allowed, they're usually encouraged.

The only catch is this: when you make changes to an open source software project, you have to make your changes available too.

So my question is this: How will the Clark and Dean campaigns react if Karl Rove's programmers get hold of their code and start using it for the Bush campaign? The GPL doesn't say anything about the user's political orientation - there are no restrictions whatsoever on who can and can't use the software That's why they call it Free, dummy! -ed].

Like politics, open source can make strange bedfellows. Witness the member list of the Apache Software Foundation, makers of Apache, the most popular web server in the world. Many of the members work for companies who are deeply competitive. Paradoxically, they have managed to not only define a common need, but to solve it.

Could such collaboration ever happen between Democratic and Republican candidates? If it did, I'd venture to say that the software that emerged would be stronger. Which would mean that the voter would get better information, and would be better served by the candidate and his or her organization. If that was the case, voters of all persuasions would benefit.

Nintaus 9888

My Christmas present to myself this year is a DVD player, and it's a pretty cool one that other expats should appreciate. It's the Nintaus N9888 DVD player, made by the completely and utterly legitimate Nintaus Corporation of Guangdong, China.

It's region-free, Macrovision-free, plays both NTSC and PAL DVDs, and takes voltage from 100-230V. Translated into non-geek this means: All DVDs from anywhere in the world will work just fine on this, and when and if you ever go back to the states, you'll be able to take this unit with you.

I've known a couple of expats who bought DVD players here (cough, Sony, cough), only to be disappointed to find out that their US DVDs wouldn't work. Then they went through a pretty seedy process of getting the unit "serviced" by a third party so that it would play US DVDs, which is a pretty big pain in the zadeček.

You can get the Nintaus 9888 online from a number of sources in the Czech Republic. I used the services of Alzasoft, and had it delivered to my door less than 24 hours after ordering, thanks to eBanka's speedy electronic payment system. I ordered it at 3pm yesterday, and it was at my door at 10am today. Not even Amazon is that fast.

I was testing it out today with my own "gold standard" for both sound and picture quality, Moulin Rouge, and it was both looking and sounding real nice.

Geek Tattoos

As an amateur typographer and recovering graphic designer, I have a really hard time thinking of something I'd want on my body for the rest of my life. Maybe "This Space For Rent," set in Zuzana Licko's Matrix? Or would it have to be set in Oldřich Menhart's "Manuscript, which I used for the Prognosis logo back in the day?" Or maybe something like the Beowulf font, which utilizes some heavy PostScript programming to look different each time it is printed, which could be interesting as the body changes?

Which is why this site, devoted to geek tattoos, is so amusing. (Link via Attu Sees All)

Personally, I'm much more into the idea of ephemeral body art. For me, one of the hottest movies ever has to be Peter Greenaway's "The Pillow Book." Not for seeing Ewan's MacGregor, but for all the crazy calligraphy/poetry/sex connections.

Global Attention Profile

A crafty geek (which is high praise in my book) at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has come up with this application, which parses the AP Newswire for the number of times a country is mentioned. Then it is turned into a map where blue is "cold" and red is "hot." (Via Scripting News.)

I can't really tell for sure because the map is so small, but I think we're the tiny pink dot under the larger red blob in the middle of Yurp.

Ronja

WiFi is great for lots of places. Heck, I just installed an access point at home that works fantastically. But there are places and times when radio connections aren't possible or feasible.

That's when you need over-the-air lightwave connections. Ronja is a Czech project to create affordable and reliable over-the-air lightwave connections that can reach up to 2km away at 10mbps.

You can't buy Ronja products yet. It's an open source hardware project, so if you know your way around a soldering iron and a circuit board, you can download the plans and build it yourself. Each unit should cost around 2,000 CZK (around $72 USD), or 4,000 CZK for the pair.

What's even cooler is that it doesn't use a laser. It uses the brake LED from a Škoda.

Comment Spam

I don't know if you've come across comment spam in my comments, or in others' comments, but I've just installed Jay Allen's excellent MT-Blacklist tool. Hopefully this will help me fight evil spammers.

Ooooooh, they really burn me up! If I ever caught a spammer, I'd lock them in a room and force them to listen to the music they play on the Czech TV show "Panorama" at full volume, over and over again. Forever.

In case you were wondering which URLs are on my blacklist, check 'em out at http://www.arellanes.com/blacklist.txt

Led Zep midis

In case you're looking for a good time-waster this Friday afternoon, here's an excruciating collection of Led Zeppelin MIDI files for your listening pleasure.

Geekdown!

A few brief, unrelated items on the geek front I figured I'd bring to your attention.

iTunes for Windows really is all that and a ham sandwich. Worth downloading and installing. Personally, I currently have 22 gigs of music, or 9.9 days worth, and with iTunes set to "shuffle," it's like listening to a radio station run by me. Now I just have to get hold of an iPod and I'll be set.

RSSWeather has Prague weather available as an RSS feed. Click here to get it, if you know what an RSS feed is. Click here if you don't.

Since my phone is on its last legs, I'm starting to get interested in the newest bright and shiny things. Amy Langfield just got herself a Treo 600 all-in-one communicator with digital camera, Palm OS, GSM/GPRS, and a partridge in a pear tree. She seems pretty happy with it. I wonder if Eurotel will be selling these.

OpenOffice.org 1.1 is pretty good. It's a free and open source alternative to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I've tried to come up with something I use from MS Office that would make it choke, and so far it hasn't. And it's free and legal.

We just got Macromedia Studio MX 2004 here at the office, and I've got mixed emotions. While I like Dreamweaver MX a lot, I'm pretty underwhelmed by Freehand MX. Aside from the Flash-like display engine, which does anti-aliasing better than previous versions, I don't really see the difference, aside from yet another change to the Freehand UI. And to think I just got around to learning all the shortcuts to the last Freehand. And someone at 600 Townsend should be strung up and flayed for what they did to the Bezier tool. Ouch.

PCDJ FX VRM 7.0 (whew! that's a mouthful) came out a couple of days ago, and while I've downloaded it and installed it, I haven't practiced my DJing on it. It crashed while inputting my 22 gigs of music, so I'm wondering if it'll hold up this time or will be just as buggy as its previous versions. In its favor, it's supposed to have been completely rewritten, though.

Today's Kids Review Classic Videogames

What an excellent idea for a story. Get a bunch of 10- and 11-year-olds to review classic video games. Here's some of what they had to say about Pong:

Niko: Hey—Pong. My parents played this game.

Tim: What? There's no power-ups in Pong. The concept of a power-up hadn't been invented yet.

(Via Blogdex)

Speedkicker

I've always believed that it's a dangerous thing to have engineers with too much time on their hands. (Link via Fark)

If anything, it's a reminder that the winter season is nearly upon us. I have a group of friends heading to Kaunertal, Austria Thursday for the snowboard opener there. Should be good.

Monkey mind control Flash

News of the monkey-brain-remote-control-robot-arm experiment is all over the Internet today, but I just had to point out this less-than impressive Flash animation over at Duke University. (Link via BoingBoing).

Digital Ephemera: Tears in Rain

I've been reading Jason Scott's guestblog over at BoingBoing. He's got an interesting project, to try to preserve as much as possible of old-school BBS content. I appreciate this, as the operator of an old BBS back in high school. I used to work on a local Fidonet node here before the Internet was widely available. (I think it was 424:10.1 if I can recall properly. It was a long time ago.)

It's interesting work to try to preserve the throwaway relics of digital culture, and this morning I recalled a conversation I once had with Duncan Forbes, the excellent UK musician otherwise known as Spooky (no, not Spooky, That Subliminal Kid. Forbes is the original Spooky). I asked him what equipment he used to make Gargantuan, which has to be one of the best house records ever made, and to my surprise, he said it was mostly done on an old-school Atari ST.

I wonder if Duncan Forbes has the original files he used to make Gargantuan. Hell, I can't even get my hands on a copy of the CD. Which got me to thinking about how much digital ephemera we "throw away" or erase without even thinking about.

Source files from Quark, Illustrator or Freehand in graphics, or Cakewalk, ProTools or Acid files for music. Not to mention all the digital pictures we're all taking these days.

Somewhere in the basement I have a box of floppy disks with my older work. Books I've designed, covers of Prognosis, even the source files to an art installation I had. I don't even know if the floppies are readable, and even if they were readable, how I could get hold of a copy of Freehand 1 or Illustrator 88 to open the files. So they stay in the basement, waiting for the PhD student who will come to study my life to make sense of it all ;-)

In the climactic scene of Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer's character, nearing his end, recalls some of the amazing things he's seen.

"All these things will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Skin Me Elmo

Artist Kelly Heaton, in her new work entitled "Live Pelt," has fashioned a jacket made of 64 Tickle Me Elmo dolls. What's even better is that she's kept the vibrating parts in. Via Bruce Sterling's excellent Viridian mailing list.

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

I'm a huge fan of the science fiction writer/essayist/raconteur/Viridian Pope Emperor Bruce Sterling, and have been from Back in the Day when he interviewed me for Wired. OK, I have to come clean. The article wasn't about me. It was about Prague. I think two paragraphs with me made it into that long, cool article. But still.

Sterling's new article is for the MIT Technology Review, and is titled "Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die." As with all of Sterling's writing, it's funny and insightful, and well worth your time.

Blacked out

Sorry about the blackout. A little green man from Al-Qaeda chopped down a tree near the servers at my hosting service. And the dog ate my homework.

His name is Linux

I just saw the new IBM Linux ad. I have to admit it gave me goosebumps.

I figure there are a few times in every person's life when they have a chance to do the right thing. For me, helping develop and promote Free Software is one of those chances.

I used to think that Free Software was something for geeks in rich countries. Not any more. When I was in South Africa two weeks ago, I got a chance to meet with people who have very little money - journalists from Zambia, net activists from Namibia, NGO representatives from Rwanda. The amount of money they have to spend on technology is very limited, and they'll be damned if they have to spend that money on software licenses whose pricing policies can be summed up in one word: usury.

In December, all the world's leaders will attend the World Summit on Information Society, a UN-sponsored event which is trying to create global consensus on the issues raised by the rise of an Information Society. The leaders will come, shake hands, take a big group picture and everyone will most likely go home.

But the African representatives to WSIS will bring a different message: the promotion of Free and Open Source software has the opportunity to help speed the development of an Information Society in their countries. It does this in two ways: first, it means that money that would be sent abroad for software licenses doesn't get paid. Second, by training local IT professionals in Free and Open Source methods, they're building capacity for future generations.

Watching the Linux ad today, I'm reminded that this isn't just about getting IBM to sell more mainframes to banks. It's for all of us; even the least fortunate of us.

Buzznet from Schiphol

I'm in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, sitting on a couch near the "meditation centre" with a wi-fi connection. I've managed to get my digital camera to work with my Buzznet account, so for the next few days, provided I can get a network connection, I'll be posting pictures from my trip to South Africa.

You can see the most recent five pictures over on the left hand margin under the "Buzznet" logo.

Buzznet, by the way, is my friend Marc Brown's excellent new photo/moblog hosting service. All you have to do is take a digital picture, attach it as an e-mail and whammo, it's up on your buzznet site. Mine, by the way, is at http://dougiegyro.buzznet.com.

Now it's off to the not-too-shabby record store here at Schiphol, which for some unexplainable reason has the entire stock of Hed Kandi compilations. Go figure.

Prague Fark Party

So it looks like a Prague Fark party is in the works. That's pretty cool, as Fark is one of my favorite sites. I've got pretty mixed emotions about the timing, though, as a) that's the day I get back from South Africa b) that's my birthday.

Regardless, here's the link.

Casemod of the Week

In keeping with today's casemodding theme, I just came across this excellent casemod, which really puts new meaning into the term "Case."

Casemodding, in case you haven't heard, is the growing subculture where people modify their PC cases. In this one, the owner has built a working PC into a case of beer.

Viral marketing

I don't know about you, but I'm getting soooo many virus-infected spam messages today it's not even funny. Luckily, I have two ways around it.

Firstly, I'm running on a dual-boot computer, which means I have the ability to start up either Linux (Mandrake 9.1 and KDE), or Windows 2000. If I use Linux, the viruses have no effect. But I still have to go through each message and delete it.

I have to use Windows 2000 for various reasons, so I'm using F-Secure antivirus, paired with Cloudmark SpamNet for Outlook. SpamNet is pretty cool. It runs in the Outlook menu bar, and has two buttons: Block and Unblock.

When you get a spam, you can report it and save others the trouble of opening and reading it. The SpamNet central server takes a "fingerprint" of the mail message, and blocks it on all the other computers running SpamNet.

In real life, what it means is that an e-mail comes in, I see the little envelope on the bottom right hand side, then it disappears. The message is then put into the "Spam" folder and I can either keep it or delete it. If a message is wrongly blocked as being spam, I can always unblock it.

On crazy days like today, the little envelope is constantly appearing and disappearing, which is good, because it means I don't have to do anything more to the spam except select all the messages at the end of the day, and delete them. With extreme prejudice. Bastards.

Neverosexual

Gawker, the excellent New York-based gossip site, is rapidly becoming a key source of new words for me. I've previously mentioned "Zeta-Jonesing" here (Gawker explains that to Zeta-Jones means "to eat ravenously, as if downing last bowl of Sally Struthers-provided rice in the midst of a famine.")

Now here's another word for you: "Metrosexual." Here's their definition: "the current crop of fashionable, foppish, dandyish and yet somehow sexually straight men. Guys with frosted hair and $100 tee shirts. Guys who loofah."

Adding to that is a variation from one of their readers: "Neverosexual."

"Metrosexual is a fine word, though I recently heard a better one: neverosexual. Here's the definition: nev·er·o·sex·u·al n. a person who never has sex, generally in spite of his or her best efforts; adj. Of or relating to a person who just can't get laid. Usage: People used to think he was gay. But in reality he's just neverosexual."

Linux: Making the Plunge

Ah, Cucumber Season!

Seeing as we're heading into the depths of Cucumber Season here in Kafkaville, I've finally gotten around to some things I've been meaning to do for quite some time. Namely installing Linux on my Sony VAIO laptop.

I've tried doing this a couple of times before, but it's always ended badly. The big drawback to Linux is that support for different hardware - especially the kind that laptops use - is spotty to say the least. The last time I tried to install, I couldn't find support for my video card, which meant that I could only work in 256 colors and 640x480 pixels, which was uncomfortable to say the least.

But I've heard that Mandrake has been making great strides with their distribution, and it's true. The installation went smoothly, done in about a half hour, with a couple of minor glitches that I managed to fix - namely support for FireWire and a couple of Sony-specific gadget things like Memory Stick and the Jog Dial. I've still got a lot of loose ends to tie up, but it's up and running now.

I've always been more of a fan of the Gnome desktop, and never even tried KDE, but I'm pretty thoroughly impressed with KDE 3.1's "fit and finish." This isn't just a functional desktop environment, it's actually really pretty. It's a lot closer to Mac OS X in its design than to Windows XP, and it's definitely better than I was expecting. Maybe because of its extensive use of a Lucida-like typeface everywhere? Or is that Stone Sans?

My next step in a couple of days will be to install WINE, which essentially lets you run Windows programs under Linux. I'll be curious to see if my beloved PCDJ runs under it, and how much of a performance hit that'll entail. There are really only a handful of programs I really need to run under Windows - Lotus Notes for work, Photoshop, Freehand, PCDJ, and some sound tools - but if I can get them up and running under WINE I'll be a happy Gaucho.

The cool thing about Mandrake is that it sort of assumes you want to make your machine a "dual boot" system, meaning that you can run either Windows or Linux. It's stuff like that that makes it easier for people to come over to Linux. You know, pusher-man style: yeah, just one little taste, but you'll be back for more...

Matrix Pong

Hilarious video of a lo-lo-budget ping-pong match, done Matrix-style. (3.84 megs, Windows Media). Via BoingBoing.

The Smart Roadster

I think I've found my next car: The Smart Roadster. Wow.

RSS feeds

It sure would be nice if local bloggers were able to make their blogs available as RSS feeds. What's an RSS feed? Here comes the lab coat and Dr. Science voice: I'm glad you asked that question. RSS is a format for syndicating web content. It basically means that in addition to making an HTML version of your web page, you also make one that uses the XML-based RSS format.

So what? You might ask. One of the biggest pains about weblogs is that you don't know when they've been updated. So you keep visiting the site, only to find no new content. What an RSS feed helps with is that a helper program (either called an 'aggregator' or an 'RSS newsreader') does this for you, and puts all the RSS feeds' content together in one place.

I installed an excellent newsreader today, the free and very user-friendly Blago Newsreader. Now when a weblog's RSS feed is updated, Blago pops up an MSN-style message in the lower right hand of my screen that tells me what the weblog name and headline are. Then I can either open the Blago window or click directly on the message, which opens the weblog's page in the browser.

In case you're wondering, the excellent Movable Type weblog software that runs this site automatically makes an RSS feed. It can be found here.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Go to Google, type "weapons of mass destruction" and hit "I'm feeling lucky." (Via boingboing.)

EU to decide on software patents today

Today is the day the European Union will make its decision on software patents, which will have enormous impact for the entire IT business, but especially for Open Source developers. The Register doesn't think the penguin is going to fare very well. I'll be holding my thumbs, but am expecting this to cause an awful lot of problems.

Self-Cooling Keg

I just came to this item via Fark.com: a beer keg that cools itself. Pretty, um, cool...

SummerCAMP

In my job, one of the cool things I get to do is help develop open source software for media organizations. Once a year, we get all our developers together in one place for a big geek-down. This year's SummerCAMP is underway, so I might be posting lightly; not sure how things will come down yet. But it is pretty cool seeing Romanians, Czechs, Serbs, Germans, Britons, Australians and Americans all pulling together for a good cause.

Damn-near-instant ice cream

On hot days like we've been experiencing here in Kafkaville, one's thoughts can turn pretty quickly to things like swimmin' holes, beer gardens, and ice cream. I found this link to an article in Popular Science about how to make ice cream in 30 seconds using liquid nitrogen (via Slashdot).

Hellboy

Guillermo del Toro is filming Hellboy here in Kafkaville, and apparently a whole planeload of Internet film geeks got to come out to the set on a junket. It's kind of interesting to hear what bonafide geek Nick Nunziata has to say about his trip. Be forewarned. He speaks Deep Geek.

It'd also be interesting to hear if any of my readers (from recent stats, there are about 139 of you a day) have been to the set.

Excellent casemod

My cousin Grant just mailed me this article about an excellent casemod. It's a tachometer that displays the CPU load in real time. Kewl. Very kewl. Almost makes me wish I had a desktop machine instead of my badass VAIO.