Several years ago I tried to read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I really wanted to like it, since I loved Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age. His essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line, was the tipping point that got me into Linux and open-souce, and poking around the etymology ...
Articles by gjost
The blog looks funny...
In which your host apologizes for the state of this site.
the music business establishment
Money quote from this Financial Times article:
Thom Yorke warned apocalyptically of its being “simply a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds”. His advice to young bands: “Don’t tie yourself to the sinking ship, because believe me, it’s sinking.”
Radiohead ...
The real story of the week...
...is not that TV news in the U.S. sucks eggs. We knew that, and my little post didn't add anything to that story. There's this freakin' revolution happening right now in Egypt (and a mostly peaceful one at that), and all I could find to write about ...
The Right to Read
Whatever you think about Richard Stallman, you have to admit he is prescient. I came across Vivek Haldar's post about how Stallman's 1997 article "The Right to Read, about a dystopian future, predicted current rules around ebooks on the Kindle and iPad, basically that sharing equals stealing. Here ...
Thinking Differently About Free Network Services
Sometime in 2007 Tim O'Reilly started talking about applying free/open-source ideas to things besides software, like hardware, government data, personal data in web applications, etc. He had a great post about this around that time which I can't find at the moment, but if my memory serves ...
Transistorize the World
Back in the summer of 2007 I came out of the Open Source Hardware session at OSCON pretty jazzed about the x0xb0x -- somebody had actually made an open-source clone of the Roland TB-303! I signed up to buy a kit as soon as I could fire up a browser. Late ...
Ubuntu 8.04 released yesterday
FYI, the Ubuntu just released version 8.04 of their Linux distribution. I run Ubuntu on the servers and my desktop at work, and on my personal laptop, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. If you've heard that Linux is just for geeks, it's totally not true any more ...
Unthinkable Thoughts: How to think them and why you might want to
Read an awesome post this morning by Paul Graham this morning called What You Can't Say, which is about taboos and heresy. Graham is writing as a hacker and venture capitalist looking for to uncover potentially interesting and profitable ideas that are being overlooked because they go against the ...
Wardriving (Foothill Transit)
Had an interesting experience while slogging through rush-hour traffic on the 10-East last night. I'd heard all the podcasts on my phone so I had my laptop on the passenger seat running the excellent MOC (console audio file player). I found myself driving next to one of those long ...