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Monday, September 16, 2002
Two fools on the hill 
| | I'm sitting outside on the roof in the soft warm night air, lit by moonlight. I just put the boy to bed. He fell asleep on my lap a few minutes ago. When we came out earlier, he carried a globe of Earth and a smaller one of the moon, set them on the bench, brought out a flashlight, handed it to me, pointed at the waxing Moon in the Southeast sky and said, "Show me how this works, Papa." So I did. He took over the flashlight and moved the Earth around, demonstrating his understanding, which was right on. In the middle of the lesson, we stopped at exactly 8:22:25pm to witness an Iridium Flare — the brightest I've ever seen, and a first for the kid. We knew exactly when and where to look, thanks to Chris Peat's brilliant Heavens-Above site. |
| | Then we settled down in the rocker and explored the sky with the help of Carinasoft's Voyager III, a planetarium of a program that also produces amazingly illustrative animated demonstrations of celestial mechanics, including the image above. By the way, the Voyager III free download is remarkably large and complete. You won't be disappointed. |
Advantage: readers
It's more bureaucratic than it appears
| | Broadcasters Oppose Net Radio Fees is my latest in Linux Journal. It's about how the biggest over-the-air broadcasters don't want to get taxed off the bitwaves, either, and have filed a motion to stay royalties that are now, technically, due. |
| | Of course, they're not really, because the whole thing is a huge fucking administrative nightmare for everybody. Bad laws and bad regs have a bad way of making even worse shit happen. |
| | In any event, it's not like the RIAA or SoundExchange was going to start sending out bills in October, anyway. They are far, far, away from being in a position to accurately determine who owes what, due to the incredibly complex reporting procedure that they themselves insisted upon. What will be happening in October, barring some sort of intervention, is that SoundExchange will then be faced with the task of extracting huge volumes of log data from all of the stations, which will have to be thoroughly processed before any billing can take place. |
| | There's a nice long quoted section from Dean Landsman, too. Unfortunately, it's not Dean's final draft of what he wanted to say (the piece went up before his last draft came in), but that's cool, because it leaves more to say for the next round. Looking forward, because Dean is a broadcast veteran who knows his shit, big time. |
| | Bottom line: there's interesting stuff being said by these guys that I haven't been hearing anywhere else. |
| | [Later...] In response to a comment by a reader, I added a post with links to all my earlier articles on the subject at Linux Journal. |
Chart another shore
Another one bites the fruit
| | OS X rocks! As someone who used a Unix workstation until three years ago and only begrudingly started using Windows when the widespread use of Word documents ruined the Internet forever, I love having a Unix core. All the developer tools you need to port real software are already there: gcc, make, emacs, etc. Really nice. |
| | Phil is CIO for the State of Utah. |
The Market speaks
| | Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. For the Wall Street firms, a lack of IM interoperability has been a source of increasing frustration and a possible pinch on profits. |
| | The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch's New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank. |
Fact frisking
| | Tony has apparently been getting similar feedback. He writes: |
| | in my opinoin there are two sorts of ways to attack bad writing: you can carpet bomb or you can surgically remove the virus. |
| | me, i like to carpet bomb. i don't care who gets hurt, i don't care what happens to me, i don't care how out of control it looks, i don't care. i have a real job to get back to and be slightly better than mediocre at. here is one of the few places where i feel like i have the freedom to be completely mediocre. |
| | apparently the Times feels the same about their Living section. |
Eagleities
| | All these legal eagles, and I'm like, I dunno. A crow, I guess. |
| | More after I get some sleep. |
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