Sneakernet would have been faster

I'm in the process of decommissioning my old desktop machine, which has a noisily-expiring CPU fan. It's had a good run; I'm not complaining. But I just spend the last 2 hours, almost exactly, transferring 55GB of data off it and onto my new desktop.

That's about 25GB/hour. It would have been faster if I'd been able to use gigabit etnernet (which both machines have, but my ageing hub doesn't), but not ten times faster because I would have been limited by the speed of the disks. Maybe five times -- call it 24 minutes or so. So I could have saved time by driving down to Fry's and buying a GigE hub, but not much.

It would have been faster still to power down both machines, pull out the drive, and move it over. Ten minutes, maybe. Except that the new machine doesn't have room in its case for another drive, and I wanted to keep reading blogs working while I was slinging bits.

MAKE's open source gift guide

MAKE: Blog: The Open source gift guide - Open source hardware, software and more for the holidays

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don't own it, you can't improve upon it, you can't share it or make it better, you certainly can't post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you'll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source. Included in this guide are things you can get from the MAKE store too (we try and have as many open source goods as possible).

(From EFFector, the EFF's email newsletter.)

Zombies a threat to national security?

'Zombies' file lawsuit against city of Mpls.

A group of zombies have risen up to claim the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County violated their free rights and discriminated against them.

The six adults and one juvenile who were arrested while impersonating the undead in July filed their lawsuit Thursday.

The ragged group were arrested for "simulating weapons of mass destruction" during a dance party near the Minneapolis entertainment district.

Police alleged that wires protruding from the zombie's backpacks could have been bombs or were meant to imitate bombs. It was later learned the wires were actually radios.

(from BoingBoing -- where else?)

(no subject)

I can't do any better than to quote Musopen.com's "About" page:

Musopen is a community driven, online music repository started by a music and economics college student named Aaron Dunn.

This site takes music that is in the public domain, meaning a work that belongs to the community, and has it recorded by individuals and college/community orchestras throughout the United States and stored online so it can be accessed for free through this website. This would do the following:

1. Provide free unlimited access to music in the public domain to anyone with internet access.

2. Allow obscure works, for example some Baroque music, to be recorded for the first time that would otherwise not be recorded because of its small profit potential.

3. Community – being a community driven project, this can create an online music community, perhaps leading to future cooperative projects.

4. Add usefulness to all the untapped talent in our nation’s orchestras. Think of about how many college orchestras perform to diminishing numbers of audiences. Now, every performance adds to the online repertoire, adding another reason to perform and perform well.
5. Create the first organization devoted to giving the public access to musical works which belong to them.

This project exists so that educational institutions and the general public can have free, unlimited access to all kinds of music that have expired copyrights. If there is music that by law now belongs to the general public, let's make sure that it is available to the public.

(From BoingBoing.)

Why we need an Open-source Second Life

Good article on Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (from this article on LWN that unfortunately won't be available to non-subscribers until next week; some of the comments are worth reading).

The thing that made the web take off was that anyone could run a web server, and in fact anyone could write one. The underlying protocol, HTTP, was almost trivial. Writing a web browser, though more complicated than a server, was still pretty simple. Things have gotten more complicated since then, but it's still all about open formats, open protocols, and open source software.

Second Life is closed -- you can't run your own server and splice it into the SL universe. It's a monopoly, and it's not scalable. You might eventually be able to write your own client, but you can still only play in Linden Labs' private universe. It didn't work for AOL, either.

The thing that's different about the web and blogging communities like LJ and Blogger is that they're not all running on the same set of servers, and yet they're all seamlessly connected. I can post in my LJ, link to an article posted on LinuxJournal, and you can go from one to the other without having to worry about whether you have the right client and whether you've paid for access. In fact, you're going to be -- quite rightly -- annoyed if you click the link to the LWN article and find that it's only available to subscribers.

I'm hoping something like that develops in the VR world.

Getting it

This morning I picked up my guitar, thinking I should do a little practicing, and finally figured out that little four-beat pattern that Janis Ian uses in "The Last Train". It helps finally working out exactly what goes into a Gsus4 chord. I'm a little embarassed that it took me as long as it did to work out. Getting old and stupid, I guess.

( just for reference )

And did I mention that ThinkGeek is evil? They're evil. I put in an order yesterday, and we got a catalog in the mail this afternoon.