Month: July 2003

Cringely on online music

Robert X. Cringely: Son of Napster.

Cringely thinks laterally about online music. He says it would need $2million up front. I would happily donate $100 to help seed it.

Don’t get me wrong. It costs money to make music and somebody’s gotta pay. I know this from personal experience, having lived with a few struggling musicians while in grad school. But something is broken. There are too many lawsuits. Too much innovative technology under fire. Too much stop energy. There has to be a better way to ensure that musicians and songwriters can make a good living making the music we love. Maybe Cringely is on to something.

MT Rebuild Script

My main blog page has a some sections that change with time whether or not I post. One of these is the Inbound section, which tracks inbound links by periodically querying technorati. The other is the new Listening To… section, which updates whenever I listen to music on my personal mp3 server.

Since these can update more frequently than I post, and since Movable type serves static, compiled, pages, I was looking for a way to automatically rebuild my main page. Seek and ye shall find. Thank you Erik for the sample code. I’ve tweaked the last few lines of your script so that it only rebuilds the index pages:

Before:


$mt->rebuild(
BlogID => $blogid,
EntryCallback => sub {
$i++;
printf “%d/%d – %sn”, $i,
$total, $_[0]->title if $report;
}
) or die “ERROR: “, $mt->errstr;

After:


$mt->rebuild_indexes(
BlogID => $blogid
) or die “ERROR: “, $mt->errstr;

What's up Doc?

If you hang out in the blogosphere much you have probably heard of Doc Searls. Yesterday Christopher Lydon posted an interview with him. It’s a worthwhile listen.

Hint: rather than clicking on the word “Listen in”, which may cause your browser to download the entire file before playing it, try copy/pasting the hyperlink (http://media.skybuilders.com/lydon/searls.mp3) into the Open URL or Open Location option in your mp3 player. This will give the player a chance to play the file as it downloads.

Update Doc’s comments about the interview.

More from the Linux front

News.Com: “Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of the company’s SCOsource intellectual property division, said in a statement. ‘We intend to provide them with choices to help them run Linux in a legal and fully-paid for way.'”.

It’s very strange to hear Linux and for-pay licensing in the same breath. I guess RedHat and others are trying to sell for-pay licenses, but mostly they’re charging for early access and technical support: “If you stop paying, we’ll cut off your ftp account and stop responding to your emails.” Here we’re talking about simple permission to use executables. Breathtaking.

Update Wired quotes SCO chief executive Darl McBride: “‘Take away the code in question and you’re left with Linux 2.2,’ McBride said.”

New look

Inspired by Mena’s beautiful new site, I’ve reworked this one. I’m using nearly identical layout and styles, but obviously not the logo or orange color. Hopefully she won’t mind :->

I really like what she’s done with the Currently Reading and Listening to… sections. Especially the cover art. Hmm, maybe I’ll get an Amazon ID after all.

I have yet to update my archive pages. Please bear with me until then.