God as a programmer, and the DCMA

From James Baughn and the humorix mailing list, the incredibly funny Solution To The DMCA!. Post is in two parts: retelling of the creation myth in terms of the Great Programmer, which provides the underpinning for the religious beliefs of The First Church Of Digital Grepping, and then an explanation of how the church’s tenets ensure the DMCA does not apply to members. Sign me up!

Tonight’s movie: Down to Earth

Hit me with a big stick, this was one funny movie. I didn’t expect to like it but someone decided to get it without asking me (and what’s up with that?) so I went along with the thought. Damn if Down To Earth isn’t funny, especially Chris Rock and Chazz Palminteri. This is a superior update of the mid-70s Warren Beatty flick Heaven Can Wait, which is fitting since Beatty co-wrote his version and Rock is credited for the same here. Brothers Chris and Paul Weitz show their usual strong touch with comedy–they directed American Pie (and AP2) and wrote Antz and Nutty Professor II.

Artists’s Rights

Everyone assumes that when you hear a song on the radio over and over that the song’s selling large quantities of CDs. Probably is. And that the musicians are making large quantities of the green. Umm, not so fast, chachi. Courtney Love has been campaigning to make the realities known and soon she’ll get a chance to tell the California Senate. A good example is the fact that record companies had the CA legislature exempt them and their contracts from a law that limits personal service contracts for entertainers (the kind that most record deals use) to only seven years.

This is just funny

Of course, to “get it,” you need to be a Slashdot reader: History of the World, part N 1. Thanks to gammatron for preserving this important historical document. A ESR would say, gammatron otherwise known as Paul Victor Novarese “gets it.”

Roundup of web search and research sites

Anyone knows to go to Google or Yahoo but what if you need something more specialized? JD Lasica writes a weblog entry on the Lowdown on the search engine conference and gives some excellent pointers on how and where to search for better results and sites where you can get research materials. For example, ever hear of new search sites AllTheWeb or Wisenut? And how about The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk, a weblog with “Resources & News for Information Professionals & Researchers”?

And Bayern Munich makes it FIVE!!!

This is a little out of the understanding for most Americans, since teams play in one league and then the leagues have their playoffs/championships. College, in most sports, have national championships that roll up the league winners. In soccer, though, there are all kinds of competitions. For top English clubs, there is the regular season (Premiership), the FA Cup, the Worthington Cup, Charity Shield (Premiership winner faces FA Cup winner), the UEFA Cup, Champions League, and Super Cup (one match pitting the Champions League and UEFA Cup winners against each other). There’s also a world club championship but it was cancelled this year and apparently won’t be played until 2003. Reds win 3-2 against Bayern Munich to take the Super Cup to cap an amazing run of five of these: FA Cup, Worthington Cup, Charity Shield (their third win over Man United in a row), UEFA Cup and Super Cup. Liverpool must be regarded as one of the top five clubs worldwide.

And it should only get better. Liverpool FC chairman says the team is aiming for a Super era, and they did get a good draw to help with that. Early voting on Soccernet shows Liverpool as reader favorites to take this year’s Champions League. Go Reds!!

Condit: Roadkill

Shedding his veil of silence 150 days after the disappearance of Chandra Levy before 23 million viewers and Connie Chung, Modesto congressman Gary Condit did himself little or no good. Reaction from his constituents was largely dismissive and personally I thought he showed us a politician who doesn’t deserve re-election. Typical of the press he’s getting today is Levy lawyer says Condit lying about cooperation. The Palo Alto Daily News, which doesn’t put it’s content on the web (boo hiss), headlined it’s front page article Condit Crumbles. Top Five, a daily email humor list, of course made the interview the subject of today’s list; sample line: “His baloney has a first name, and his baloney has a second name, but he’s not telling either.” See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya, Gary.

Space science catching up to science fiction

When I was a little kid, the big excitement was the American race to be first to put a man on the moon. The rush, the pure adrenalin thrill, when we did it was amazing. Somehow, though, that was the pinnacle and ever since we’ve gone downhill to a low key, business-like program. Maybe the Challenger accident in 1986 was the final straw, although there are still some folks pushing us to go on. When I see images and read stories such as Jupiter’s Moons Are Weird Places, the old goosebumps still rise.

Idiots Suck

Another example of how you can find entertainment on the Internet simply by following a few links: CS – Stories About Idiots. This site has other forums but this seem the most amusing. It features stories such as the woman who waited 20 minutes in line to return a video to Blockbuster and the clerk who asked a customer to sign the back of a credit card “so she could verify the signatures matched.” Classics.

CSS Frustration!

The reason there’s not much posted yesterday is I spent most of the day, at least six hours, experimenting with Cascading Style Sheets. The biggest issue, and I know this seems terribly petty, is that while the margin seems to be taking around the top, right, and left it isn’t working on the bottom. I still haven’t found an answer for that one! Also, I decided to check how the page looks in other browsers. Opera is mostly okay, except for the bottom margin and also I needed to put in a hack to get it to show the right margin. Netscape 4.x is just a mess but I found from looking in the newsgroups that this is to be expected and I think most people will be using the newer 6.1 version anyway. Netscape 6.1 respects the left and right margins only and it uses only a small portion of the browser window, giving the page a ‘smooshed’ look. I think I will only worry about getting the look good in IE and Opera and Netscape can go suck an egg.

Definite weirdness 3

The techies are piling it up lately. Here is a specification submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force proposing a Digital TV Channel Changing Protocol from Richard Hodges. Checking out the website for his email address, Matriplex.com, I have to believe this is for real. The proposal is full of technical details and is justified:

Advances in video compression techniques and new technology for delivering broadband services are making digital television (DTV) services practical and marketable. One of the missing elements is a flexible and open protocol for DTV clients to request desired video/audio streams, or “channel changing”.

I suppose he’s right, but what is more needed is a good online program guide.

eBay: a stock worth its price?

Smartass Christopher Byron in this week’s installation of Back of the Envelope on The New York Observer explains why eBay, even though trading at a (high for these days) 83 times year-ahead earnings, is the one dotcom to survive the carnage; the short answer is they get money from real people and not other dotcom/tech companies. This column has an excellent, brief, precise explanation of the tech stock crash, one of the best I’ve read.

Note: there’s no permalink yet for this article, but an index of all his columns is online.

Evan Williams, Cultural Innovator

Wired Magazine is holding its 2001 Rave Awards voting now and Evan Williams, Mr. Blogger, is nominated as a Cultural Innovator against writer David Chase and James Gandolfini (Sopranos), director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), game/film developer Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy), and Thomas Krens, Director of Guggenheim Museums Worldwide. VOTE for EVAN!!

Dave Winer is nominated as a tech renegade; I voted for him over a couple of your kidding nominees (Dean Kamen, Ginger/”IT” and Dmitry Sklyarov, programmer/DMCA victim) and two real challenger, Princeton professor Ed Felten, author of a controversial SDMI paper, and Miguel de Icaza, open source guru and leader of the .NET for Linux Mono project.

Definite weirdness 2

Humorous prank piece or serious effort? People do some strange things and it can be difficult to tell when someone is joking, at least for me. So when I saw Working on a Unified Code for ‘LOL’ or 🙂, I wasn’t sure at first. Do we really need an XML standard for emoticons? But this story appears in press release form on the OASIS website so I’m guessing Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga, chair of the technical committee, is serious and for real.

Definite weirdness

In an article about Sinatra’s Beverly Hills house being up for sale, I saw the following and had a mindquake:

“At a party celebrating Sinatra’s 80th birthday, ‘he had Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen there, and the three of them were around the piano playing and singing,” he said. ‘And Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme were there.”’

Yowza!

The Wackiness continues

As previously reported, the marketing humanoids at Red Hat (the big Linux vendor) are continuing their comic series of beta update announcements with Roswell: the second sighting – available now. As ‘one scientist said: “I mean, this stuff just fell out of the sky! Any computer you install this on could start being used by THEM to construct sophisticated mind-control devices. Or, more likely, it would just catch fire and melt down. However, if that does happen, we’d want to know about it.”

An open source Clipper

You stumble around the web, looking for random things, and you find stuff you never expected. Just now I was looking up some old friends in Google and found the Harbour Project. Harbour is “a free software compiler for the xBase superset language often referred to as Clipper (the language that is implemented by the compiler CA-Clipper).” I made my living, and a good one at that, for the first half of the ’90s developing Clipper applications for telecoms, pharmaceuticals, and insurance companies back East until the Windows surge became overwhelming and I moved, at management encouragement, to Visual Basic. But there are still people doing Clipper for a living in 2001, otherwise why this project, which appears to have a large number of participants? Really surprising to me, but Computer Associates is still maintaining and selling Clipper! The web remains cool.

Good news, bad news day

The good news is that Jesse Helms, 79 years old and longtime ridiculous caricature of his younger anti-civil rights self, has announced he will retire in 2003. This follows fellow caricature Strom Thurmond’s recent decision to retire from the Senate after next year at age 99. These are two seats the Republicans will have difficulty holding even though Elizabeth Dole looks like a strong early contender to replace Helms as a Republican.

The bad news is AOL Time Warner’s announced plans to layoff 500 people from iPlanet. This represents all, or substantially all, AOL employees working at iPlanet. Lots of friends of mine. People will point to the soft economy as the cause but from my perspective there were lots of executive execution errors early on in iPlanet’s history that are more to blame. For example, the application server team lost at least 12 months trying to figure out what to do with two application servers (Netscape and NetDynamics) and then how to manage the people side of the decision. Lots of pain and now it ends up like this.