Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Perspectives
Normally I work out of my home in Santa Barbara, or on the road running from one industry event to another. But this week I'm "home" at the Linux Journal offices in Seattle's historic Ballard Building <http://www.pstos.org/instruments/wa/seattle/bagdad.htm>, having a good time hanging out with coworkers I hardly ever see except when we're at the same shows.
Richard Vernon, our Editor in Chief, just came back from a food run and set several plastic grocery bags full of geek food on the floor. Conversation ensued:
"You ever notice that organic foods have the worst packaging?"
"Yeah, you can't open the boxes without tearing them apart."
"And you can't open the inner bags without using a scissors or destroying the contents."
"Organic food packagers can't do a good UI."
"Too bad they don't have a command line interface."
"What's with those shoes?"
"Those are my airport bomb shoes."
"You mean security shoes? The kind you can kick off when you get searched at airport security portals?"
"Yeah."
"For IM, Gale <http://www.gale.org> kicks Jabber's <http://www.jabber.org> ass."
"Jabber is more of an XML router anyway."
"Hey, somebody should get Jabber to do a SOAP firewall. Right now too many places see SOAP as a security risk and deal with it at the firewall by just turning it off."
"A router is 90% of a firewall. A firewall is a router with a bunch of IFs."
I couldn't have picked a nicer time to visit one of my favorite cities in the world. The weather is what pilots call "severe clear." The horizon is rimmed with snowcapped peaks, all spectacularly upstaged by the emblematic Mt Rainier. A flying saucer of the same size would hardly be more ominous and looming. Some links:
Last night the comet Ikeya-Zhang glowed near the galaxy Andromeda, forming a pair of milky wisps near the Milky way, low in the Northwest sky. All I missed was the aurora borealis -- a fairly common sight at this latitude in North America. I just checked the NOES site, which shows auroral activity as far south as Nashville, TN. Here are some helpful links:
Speaking of Large Issues, security seems to be the topic of the day in the Linux community. Here are just a few current stories:
Linux by the Rack is also a hot topic. Dell is announcing its new blade server strategy. Linux is part of it, just as it is with HP, Sun and IBM:
I got an email today from HP claiming that the company's "carrier-grade servers recently outperformed competing servers from Sun by 32 to 44 percent in SPECInt2000 performance benchmark tests." What matters from our angle here isn't that HP is bragging, but that they're bragging about Linux.
Back on the subject of security, here's one piece of spam that got past the sentry this morning. It clearly emits from a source not native to the planet Earth:
BRAND NEW from the ethnobotanical herbalists who brought the herba supplementals Kathmandu Temple Kiff 1 & 2 Personal Choice, pipe-smoking products/substances to the common market!
We are finally able to offer for your Sensitive/Responsive, Personal Choice Smoking Enjoyment, the Temple 3 Ragga Dagga (tm) Pipe-Smoking Substance Supplemental Product. Introduced after three years of research and development, Temple 3 is Personal Choice, legal Smoking/Indulgence Redefined!!!
Thanks to recent, dramatic, technological advances in the laboratorial processes for the extraction of alkaloid and glycocide supplements from botanicals/herbas/plant matter, we are now able to offer, in more cultivated/enhanced/viripotent/substantiated format, what had actually already been the most significant, lawful, Personal Choice smoking substance available on the planet. Temple 3 Ragga Dagga (tm) is the sweet, sweet evolution of all of that.
Whatever, dude.
Back in Reality, the entertainment industry and its congressional sock puppets continue to advocate replacing the Net's commons with a digital rights management system for downloaded "content." The puppets' latest effort is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which EFF's Cory Doctorow calls the "Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act".
To bring some sanity to the matter, Limited Pie offers "A Modest Post-Napster Proposal <http://www.limitedpie.com/2002_03_31_archiveindex#75056270>, which the author describes as "...a way that an open source distributed computing project could quite easily own all future copyrights to all possible future songs. This of course would turn the tables on the RIAA and all these horrible copy protection proposals that keep floating in front of Congress (like the CBDTPA)."
Without that in mind, head outside tonight and look for that comet. It's still free.
And if you're below the Equator, go to sleep knowing that Adelaide convenience stores are starting to feature Copy Cat CD Duplication machines, which will dub your CD for $5 plus $2 for a blank disk. <http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,4062427%255E2682,00.html>