The Null Device
2001/3/6
800-pound gorilla of the recording industry Vivendi Universal warms to Napster. But before you book your skiing holiday in Hades, note that any cessation of hostilities will depend on Napster implementing secure copy control mechanisms. Which means no more MP3s, and you can forget about downloading the latest PJ Harvey track onto your Linux-based MP3 server. Now, if the recording racket stop assuming that their customers are thieves unless proven otherwise and burdening them with totalitarian access-control schemes, we can be sure that the grand opening of the Mt. Erebus ski resort can't be far away.
In case Eve Andersson's Pi obsession wasn't odd enough for your tastes, there's a guy in Bulgaria who's obsessed with the number 26. He runs "Club 26", a site for "admirers and crazy fans of the number 26". (ta, Mitch)
Good news for Wintendo exiles: Some intrepid soul is developing something called LINE. LINE is the inverse of WINE; i.e., it allows you to run unmodified Linux applications on Windows NT/98, by intercepting the system calls. So far it is in alpha, but you can apparently run shell utilities and even some X applications under it (provided you have an X server, of course).
A lot has been happening in Your Humble Weblogger's corner of the world over the past few days, as the paucity of recent entries will undoubtedly attest. Last Thursday, Graham the Happy Scum came to Melbourne, and stayed at my place for a few days. During that time, we worked on a musical collaboration (which started out as "industrial dub" and promptly mutated), and went to one of the What Is Music? events, as described earlier. As it happened, Peter was in town as well, and I ended up getting together with him on a few occasions as well. Mr. Scum left last afternoon to get his football fix, and is apparently back in Albury now. Peter and his girlfriend are going back to Sydney tomorrow; they dropped in a few hours ago, and we talked and listened to music. It's good to catch up with friends.
What didn't I do? Well, I didn't go to the Grand Prix. I also didn't buy a bass guitar (though I almost did on Saturday). And yesterday I didn't do much at all, being rather tired and actually going to bed before midnight.
Another thing: my CD-R writer is playing up, annoyingly enough. It's probably something to do with the external SCSI case, though also annoyingly, I can't put it in any of the spare bays on my computer proper because the motherboard is in the way. Time to buy a larger case perhaps. (Anyone want a new, compact ATX computer case? Make me an offer.)
Tomorrow night there is a census in New Zealand, and some bozotic penguinhead types are planning to list their religion as Jedi. Via Slashdot, of course. Then again, I put mine down as Discordian on the last few censi (at one stage causing my parents to suspect I was involved in a cult of some sort).