October 2007 archive

Sedona, Arizona: Cathedral Rock

Red Rock State Park, Sedona, Arizona.

1600 x 1200

Self service wallpaper: 1280×1024 1280×960 1152×864 1024×768 800×600 640×480

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Shot with: 2 mega-pixel Olympus D-520 camera

Related: Sedona, Arizona: Doe Mountain

Mah Na Mah Na » Scrubs » Martin Sexton, ‘Diner’

It all started when I had my daughter sitting on my lap and I decided to play for her:

Mah Na Mah Na

Which she seems to enjoy. (Me too!) In the related clips, I saw one for The Muppets meet [Scrubs], and watched that one also. I love Scrubs. That further led to a click on a related video for Scrubs outtakes. Outtakes are usually fun to watch. For shows that I enjoy watching, I like seeing the actors enjoy themselves making them. At 6:26 of the outtakes reel, there was this catchy song that I immediately liked. A quick search of some lyrics snippets turned up that it was “Diner,” by Martin Sexton.

It was also used …

Don’t forget…

Bill Gates says that patents stifle innovation and competition:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. […] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

–Bill Gates, 1991

(Sure, you’ve probably seen this one, but it’s good to keep in mind.)

But it’s ok! As long as Microsoft holds the patents, I’m sure they’ll keep our best interests at heart. Especially if they don’t have to worry about all those pesky competitors.

I mean, really, the brazen impudence of these …

New Dirs in Gutsy: Documents, Music, Pictures, Blah, Blah

photo by mrmanc

I had mentioned my encounter with some new directories in Ubuntu 7.10, the Gutsy Gibbon:

Documents
Music
Pictures
Public
Templates
Videos

These showed up on an upgrade from 7.04 Feisty Fawn and on a fresh install of 7.10. On installs of previous versions, there has been the Desktop folder, and I’ve kept that around as a special dir that is actually linked to the desktop somehow. (Saved items in ~/Desktop will show up on the GNOME desktop.)

I was put off at first by these, concerned that we might be moving in to the Microsoft territory of “My Documents” and “My Favorites” types of folders, and rigid expectations of where we should put things, but after some investigation they don’t seem like …

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Swings In

photo by guppiecat

I’ve been running a dual boot on my laptop with Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). I recently upgraded to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) so that I’d be ready to try out 7.10 when it came out. I don’t use the laptop much, so it’s good for experimentation. I don’t expect to upgrade my main desktop from Feisty right away.

I first tried the upgrade route through the update manager. It was a little bit slow on Friday with everyone hitting the Ubuntu servers, but I made it through the process and had the brand shiny new Gutsy Gibbon running with no trouble.

I did the upgrade, wanting to verify that it worked ok, but my real plan was to wipe out everything and start fresh with 7.10. …

Jeremy Allison on Innovation and Patents

Jeremy Allison is fast becoming one of my heroes. Not only for the great technical work he has done with Samba, but also for his principled support of free software. He quit Novell in protest after they signed their patent pact with the devil, and he and the Samba team gave an early vote of support to GPL v3 by moving Samba to the new license soon after its release.

He also regularly contributes thoughtful essays to Tux Deluxe. I just found The Innovation Game in my feed reader, which has some positive points about innovation in free software, but also deals with a depressing subject, Microsoft and software patents:

So who could possibly be against this wealth of the commons? People wishing to own innovative ideas, that’s

…