Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.Merry Christmas to you and your families. This morning brought me some surprise goodies, including a long-coveted DVD of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, a gorgeous slipcased copy of Absolute Watchmen, and a beautiful album of Renaissance lute songs by Sting.
Evie and Ethan also made off with plenty of loot (har!), including a “Lightning McQueen” car (Ethan) and a couple big boxes of real “big-kid” Legos (Evie). Other goodies abounded:
|
Sagan lives!Ten years ago one of my favorite popular scientists passed away. Carl Sagan made science fact more romantic and poetic than the best science fiction, took us on journeys of discovery and wonder at the dichotomy of the unlikelihood of our existence and the certainty of our insignificance, and filled millions of viewers, readers, and fans with the thrill of a universe full of possibilities. It’s been quoted often, but you can find one of his very moving summations of the precious commodity of life on Earth here. |
But she’s got the FUDCon thing covered.Me: Cool, there’s a page up for our Bar Camp at FUDCon. She: Er, I don’t think that sounds like something you need to be leaving home for. Me: Not that kind of bar. She: Oh. Well, my first reaction was, “Wait a minute, I want to go to that.” |
Except for the ones they force to walk the plank.Take no prisoners! It’s always great fun when someone at Red Hat comes out swinging. I think I may have to send Alex Pinchev some home-cooked goodies for the holidays. Also, did anyone need some more reasons why Microsoft is evil? (Read the whole article, there’s some doozies in there.) |
A welcome diversion.I had intended to write a post this week about the pathetic fumblings of Congress this year — only in session for 103 days, even fewer than the 110 of Truman’s “Do-Nothing” 80th Congress — or the exceptional performance of Red Hat on the CIO Insight 2006 Vendor Value study, where they tied Cisco for 3rd, above stalwarts like Dell (7th), IBM (16th), Microsoft (24th), and Oracle (32nd). However, I lost momentum in the middle of a very busy work week so I’ll have to leave that to the rest of the blogosphere. It’s far easier to read at night in bed than tap away on the laptop, so I did manage to punch my way through Thomas Harris’ new novel Hannibal Rising. By far the slightest of Thomas Harris’ works, there’s not much of a surprise factor in reading about Hannibal Lecter’s downward adolescent trajectory from war orphan to monster. The evocative asides from Harris’ earlier novel Hannibal were more than adequate to paint the broad strokes of this story. The most intriguing fraction of this book depicts the relationship between Hannibal and his stepmother, Lady Murasaki Shikibu (named for the Tale of Genji author of course). But the story’s mostly simple revenge plot is not a detriment, and in fact, I think there’s a fair argument to be made that this is a conscious choice on Harris’ part, tying in to a rich vein of Japanese literature. It’s hard also to find fault with the elegant execution of Harris’ prose, sensuous and heady throughout, but often also cuttingly direct: Night in the gross-anatomy laboratory. The large room with its high windows and big vent fan was cool enough so that the draped cadavers, preserved with formalin, remained on the twenty tables overnight. In summer they would be returned to the cadaver tank at the end of the workday. Pitiful little bodies underneath the sheets, the unclaimed, the starvelings found huddled in alleys, still hugging themselves in death until rigor passed and then, in the formalin bath of the cadaver tank with their fellows, they let themselves go at last. Frail and birdlike, they were shriveled like the birds frozen and fallen to the snow, that starving men skin with their teeth. I truly enjoyed Harris’ last book Hannibal, and was one of the few, I suppose — judging from the critical reactions — who was disappointed by the film’s departure from its Cocteau-worthy denouement. This book wasn’t as thoroughly satisfying, but it was a pleasurable read and a welcome diversion from a grueling work week. |
Wheee!Frankly, I’m outraged that my favorite didn’t make it to the list of Firefox Flicks that will be advertised on TV. Before you cringe, note the similarities between this ad and other highly successful (if annoying) ad campaigns:
|
Not getting it, Part 36.My friend Christopher (possibly the de facto king of thoughtful geeky Christian libertarian blogging) asked me to blog this response to some email he sent me: Wow, that article is one of the most prima facie ignorant pieces I’ve read on free software and open source in quite some time. It seems to ignore completely how much free software Microsoft has benefited from over the years (including the TCP/IP stack, for example, which is BSD-licensed). The author also speaks like there’s nothing wrong with the fact that Microsoft has consistently abused its market leading position to push technical inferiority on its customers, not to mention treat them like criminals with crappy DRM schemes. The FSF frankly is not the only game in town, but the article makes the FOSS community sound a lot more fragmented than it is. I would say there are roughly two camps — the FSF tends to be the more zealous (and less attractive to non-hippies), while the open-source camp is happy to live with big business as a partner, *as long as they respect the licensing of the software produced by the FOSS community*. (Interestingly the article is so poorly-researched that the author is apparently ignorant of the schism between the “free software” camp and the “open source” camp.) I would say the community is roughly split, with the more pragmatic “open source” guys possibly holding a slight edge, but a declining one as we are slowly winning the large-scale war. The GPL license, probably the most widely used free software license, was written by FSF principal Richard Stallman, and was designed to allow people to build service-based businesses on free software while respecting the rights of users to do what they want with the code itself. No one has yet been able to assault that license, and many people believe that the MS-Novell deal is only possible because it violates the terms of that license. FSF attorneys are looking into that possibility right now. It’s unfair and misleading to say that FOSS people want to tear down all IP — what we don’t want is an intellectually vacuous system of software patents that is ignorant of the difference between ideas and implementation. Truly unique, patentable ideas in software are almost unheard of — or at least quite rare by volume. Rather, the software patent system that we currently have (and that the EU has been trying valiantly to shed) is one where a software vendor claims their unique (!) system of adding two and two and getting four should be protected from encroachment. As any programmer will tell you, there are only so many ways to code a system that adds two and two. The idea itself is not in any way novel, and given the limited ways to write an implementation of that idea, it’s very unreasonable to keep programmers from independently writing those implementations. Anyway, the article is probably a gross oversimplification of some ongoing issues like the GPL v3 (now being drafted by the FSF), tossed in with some FUD about how free software people want to kill capitalism. I call The FSF’s changes to the GPL don’t automatically sweep the FOSS world — people have to elect to use the new license, and there are a *LOT* of people who don’t want anything to do with v3, including Linus Torvalds, who says that the Linux kernel won’t be using it as far as he can tell for the foreseeable future. That’s a pretty big “no” vote and carries a lot of weight in the FOSS community. |
Clown Prince of Pizza.Here he is in all his manic, third-birthday glory — our little man Ethan:
Tonight we’re taking him out for pizza (and maybe a balloon or two). Grandma and Grandpa will be joining us too… Then back to the homestead for presents, cake, and tranquilizer darts! (Gotta kill that sugar high, y’know.) |
