Brian Behlendorf's Blog: April 2003 Archives[Protected by-ps.anonymizer.com]

April 24, 2003

Hello Jesus!

Damn, but jwz finds good stuff. Almost as funny as Buddy Christ.

Posted by brianb at 05:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 23, 2003

Alabama and Bush

Looks like Alabamans may have to consider some alternatives in November 2004.

Posted by brianb at 11:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 22, 2003

Holy Carbon Reprocessing, Batman!

Is this real? Sounds way to close to cold fusion or perpetual motion to me, but it doesn't sound contrary to the laws of physics or chemistry as I understand them. The part about distilled water is hard to believe, though. If this wasn't in Discover... anyone in Philly want to drop in on the "Naval Business Center" and see if this company actually exists? And ask if they are seeking investors?

Posted by brianb at 05:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Slashdot: State "Communication Services" Laws Analyzed

OK, I'm going to try REAL HARD not to just echo Slashdot stories in this blog, but this one caught my attention. Ever since I heard that some state in the southern part of the U.S. once legislated pi to be equal to 3, I always assumed that legislation that defied scientific reality (and to a lesser extent, cultural reality) would just be ignored, rendered moot, never enforced, or eventually repealed. True, it's not yet worked for the WOD, but it did eventually work for crypto.

Still, Mike Godwin is not someone who exaggerates the seriousness of a situation. Slashdot does, though! So is "all technology that is not expressly permitted by a communications provider will be prohibited" really a possibility? If that does happen, will last-mile broadband over 802.16 (or whatever that 30Mbps 30-mile range omnidirectional wireless technology is called) save our freedom of choice?

By the way, if you want to receive Slashdot stories via email, send a note to slashdotnews-subscribe@hyperreal.org. Each message arrives as a separate email, with clickable links. It's a screen-scraper I wrote awhile back, my only interaction with RSS (and yes, I use a hand-built parser in Perl like Tim Bray, so sue me!)

Chennai's hot and crowded, but the people are smart and very friendly.

Posted by brianb at 04:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2003

Today's links

Is there a preferred way to post links so they're usable/syndicatable as objects? So that, e.g., link aggregation can take place, and people only have to see a popular link exactly once? It looks like blogrolling is more about maintaining a hotlist next to your main blog, not really publishing newsworthy URL's, etc. Still learning...

The news that DARPA has cancelled its funding for OpenBSD has been making waves in open source circles. Plenty of fodder here for Theo's theses about How The World Works, but frankly I think it's far more plausible that the original article's way of explaining UPenn as some sort of money laundering system for the DARPA grant (since DARPA grants can't be awarded to non-US entities) was the real reason why the project was cancelled; or something more subtle but still along those lines. Still, it's a small tragedy - a project like OpenBSD in particular would have more difficulty getting corporate backing than others, and not just due to the personalities involved. The OpenSSL work is actually the more widely relevant part of what Theo was doing, and it's through efforts like OpenSSL that we still have a chance at keeping the concept of security and privacy as ubiquitous as they are. Hopefully the developers will find other sources of grants; maybe it's time for the Canadian public sector to recognize and reward native talent and a technology that'll keep Big Brother Next Door somewhat in check.

In other news... I do most of my music shopping online, but not through Amazon and I'm not a big fileswapping fan, despite having always been a DJ and loving the idea of sharing music with people. I guess it's because music has always (for me) only had meaning when provided in some sort of context - a band I caught while wandering around Paris one night, or a song played during a particularly intense moment of time for me, or even just an interesting story about the musicianship and process of creation.

I buy most of my online music from a great guy named Dave Stein who runs a mail-order redistribution house called Ear-Rational. One big reason is that his taste in music overlaps with about 70% of my own, ranging from electronic and avant-garde to Human League album reissues and almost anything on FAX and Axiom. The biggest reason, though, is that every Saturday he sends out an update to his catalog to a mailing list of his customers; each release has a the band name, title, and order code in brackets, followed by a healthy chunk of text about the release from either the liner notes, record company PR, or a review in a magazine like the Wire or his own story. To order, I just reply to the email, cutting out the order codes for the releases I want. Thanks to the writeups, I'm able to tie in my interest for context, and discover stuff I would have never even thought of trying. I'm writing about this because I just discovered a great example that I placed in my weekly order:


Golan Levin, Scott Gibbons & Gregory Shokar - Dialtones: a telesymphony CD (Staalplaat) [STCD160] $14.00

What is the sound of 200 mobile phones ringing? When it's
choreographed by computer whiz Golan Levin, 'Lilith'
frontman Scott Gibbons, and sound artist Gregory Shakar, the
answer is: suprisingly sublime. 'Dialtones' is a large-scale
concert performance whose sounds were wholly produced through the
carefully triggered dialing and ringing of the audiences own
mobile phones. In 'Dialtones', waves of polyphony cascade across
the crowd, rendering unprecedented sonic phenomena like
spatially-distributed melodies and chords. The magic is
accomplished with a custom software system, developed by the
artists, which allowed them to arrange the audience
members' locations and ringtones before the concert, and then
perform their mobiles in real time with a specially-designed
dialing instrument. The composition is sometimes delicate and
twinkly, sometimes cacophonous, and sometimes purifyingly
haunting. More than just a simple composition, however,
'Dialtones' is a performance artwork which redirects our attention
to the unexplored musical potential of a ubiquitous modern
appliance, and inverts our understandings of private sound, public
space, electromagnetic etiquette, and the fabric of the
communications network which connects us. This disc contains a
complete live recording of the 26-minute concert, as well as a
special CD-ROM component with Quicktime video excerpts, interviews
with the artists, and other information about the concert. - label
description.

Wow.

Finally (and this may be old news in the blogosphere), I remember hearing about the covering up of the "Guernica" painting at the U.N. as the Iraq debate was unfolding, and marvelling at what appeared to be such a callous disregard for the power of irony on the part of the Bush administration. Instead it sounds like there's a much more mundane reason for the covering. It's tough to remember, but usually the least conspiratorial explanation is the correct one. Someone tell Theo.

Mt Fuji was shy today. Tomorrow I'm off to Chennai. Fun fun.

Posted by brianb at 06:12 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 19, 2003

Feedback & Resonance

Wow! I knew being linked from Joi's blog would lead to some traffic, but it was great to see the feedback to yesterday's dip in the water. I figured it was better to respond via a subsequent note in my own blog rather than comments-to-comments on the old post; if I'm wrong, let me know.

* Blogrolling.... Technorati... lots to learn.

* RSS aggregators for Linux. John, thanks for the link to Straw. The FreeBSD port doesn't appear to work correctly, though; it installs fine, but when ran reports "ImportError: No module named ui". Assuming this meant the devel/py22-ui port was a forgotten dependency, I built & installed that, yet the error persists. I'll dig some more into this; pre-1.0 software is always the most fun, anyways.

* Caterina! Nice to hear from you. I'd seen your blog early on. It was the first time I thought it might be a really different kind of medium, because I learned more about you through your blog than in two years(?) of working at Organic.

* The random-access analogy - perhaps, but you gotta know that Track 3 is That One With The Wicked Beat sometimes.

Thanks for the warm welcome, all. Next up, if I don't fall asleep, today's links...

Brian

Posted by brianb at 07:31 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

April 18, 2003

Crashing the party...

OK, time to stop wondering what this is weblogging thing is all about and dive in. I'm a bit nervous about this. I live and breath within my email inbox on a daily basis, horribly event-driven; I also tend to be more comfortable participating as a peer within the low-tech miracle called the email mailing list.

But as I've talked with others about the social dynamics of blogs - from Cory and Meg at PC Forum in March to tonight's dinner with Ito-san - I've started to see it's less about one-way broadcasting of opinions with heavy meme duplication than I thought it was. In fact I can see places where I'm doing things in the context of a mailing list that are just far better suited to a public blog - such as forwarding a story or URL where you have to ask yourself if the 500 people who happened to be on that list really wanted to hear about it, whether it's more appropriate for some other list, and whether cross-posting will annoy anyone.

More importantly, I realized while talking with Joi tonight that Clay's "power law" thesis may be true, but that the arrangement of the X-axis under the curve (the popularity ranking of individuals and memes) is much more dynamic than in most other online forum tools. This is really cool and really distinguishes blogs from mailing lists and web forums, which tend to reinforce established members and ideas rather than make it easy to introduce new ones.

My main worries right now: that without some fancy desktop-client RSS aggregation tools I'll be a blogging Troglodite, and that until this becomes second nature to me to log in and write an entry from time to time I'll simply let it lay fallow and won't build much of an audience. Especially since I'm in the middle of a six-week travel blitz - though even in China and India I expect to have pretty decent net access.

On the desktop client tip - looks like I'm the only modern geek in this circle who prefers FreeBSD/Gnome to MacOSX. Any modern client-side tools for this environment? Looks like I can overload by having various feeds sent to my email inbox, but my inbox these days is pretty much a war zone.

Finally, I have to find my own balance between quality control and openness. I can't talk about everything I do - not only because I'm an executive and board member at CollabNet, but also because, well, it's hard to explain exactly *why* I found myself singing Karaoke with a former Red Army General in Shanghai a few weeks ago. At the same time I don't want to this to be bland, an echo of memes found days or weeks earlier elsewhere. Or rambling, which I'm sure this is by now.

So... bear with me. Show me what you like about blogging, moveable type, etc. Be kind to my mistakes, as Kate said. Or at least, let me know if you've read this at all!

Arigato, Joi, for giving me the space, and for a great dinner tonight.

Brian

Posted by brianb at 07:51 AM | Comments (13)