Older blog entries for yakk (starting at number 116)

music: Triple J streaming...

I installed Windows 2000 today on my desktop PC. The reason I did it is pretty lame. I want to mess around with music stuff and my Macintosh G4 doesn't have line out so its a pain in the arse to plug into my mixer. I mean, how could anyone think that you might use a Mac for doing music stuff.

As usual I find Windows frustrating. All the things I expect to work out of the box on Linux (like - err - keyboards and mice) don't work right (my USB keyboard's internal hub wasn't recognised and as a result my mouse which was plugged into my keyboard didn't work). Perhaps I'm a freak but stuff just works much smoother and easier under linux than under Windows or MacOS for me. On my laptop power management is much more reliable under Linux than under Windows. My Mac often struggles to notice my SCSI devices whereas my Linux boxes have no problems...

My friend Dan suggested I try playing with KaZaA - a peer to peer filesharing client. It uses the same client as MusicCity's Morpheus. Its really really cool - it seems to scale pretty well - right now there are over 500,000 users online sharing about 425,000GB of files. I downloaded the Buffy musical episode and the Simpsons I missed the other day. The niftiest feature is the ability to download the same file from multiple people at once. Theres a Linux client so once I get my machine running linux again (I need to get my hands on a reiser-compatible rescue disk).

I found a video of the infamouse Mankind vs Undertaker cage match and now I'm downloading the Harry Potter movie so I'm pretty satisfied with whats available there :-)

With Codeweavers getting Quicktime working under Wine, mplayer and ASFRecorder solving the windows media playing problem and now a client for a fairly decent p2p network it looks like Linux is coming of age as a media piracy platform :-)

Oh, the most annoying thing about windows is the lack of Emacs keybindings in IE.

music: Dressy Bessy : Pink Hearts Yellow Moons

I just got back from seeing The Slackers in Berkeley. I sweated like a pig on a hot summers day which was bad because just before the show I dyed my hair blue. Now I've got blue streaks all over me. Luckilly (well, it wasn't luck it was forethought) I work a dark blue shirt to the show. On the way I stopped into the Kilowatt to hang out with Maciej, George and some of the guys from ALS. I didn't make it over to ALS today because I was passed out all day after Steph's spy P.A.R.T.Y. last night. I dressed up in my long black coat and Eskil's bowler hat and glasses. Adam didn't recognise me so I guess my costume was pretty good.

us vs ms: So its over and Microsoft have been "punished". They essentially have to not break the law anymore. This is like punishing a murderer by saying that he isn't allowed to kill any more people. But the government doesn't have any place interfering with the rights of businesses and people to make money. The free market is a magic system that can regulate itself. People can argue that government intervention is needed to protect consumers, but look at why this whole case started - it was lobbying from other technology companies that had been out-manouvered by Microsoft.

Compare IE 4 and Netscape 4 - IE is definately a better product for users. Its faster, smoother and has better standards compliance. Netscape were distracted by their own success and the fact that they believed they had a monopoly.

Look at the Java situation - Microsoft made improvements to Java - their JVM is still one of the best around even though they haven't been working on it. Many of the Java developers I know use Microsoft Visual J++ because it performs so much better than any of the alternatives. This was never a fight for better technology or the rights of consumers. This has been an attempt by some less successful technology companies to use the American political system to their benefit. And of course Microsoft beat them at that game too.

Luckilly for me I can ignore the whole debate. I don't really care if the proprietary software companies argue and fight and sue each other. The software I use comes in source code form and I have the right to modify it as I please.

war: This article scared me a bit. It looks like the US is falling into the same trap they did in Vietnam. All the new technologies havn't helped deal with guerilla warfare. It sucks but what can we do?

You walk up to her
ask her to dance
she says hey baby
I just might take the chance

I believe that Weezer's Only In Dreams may be the best rock song of all time. My current experiment is to put it on one-track repeat on my discman and see if I get sick of it. So far its going pretty well.

Oh, I forgot that last Saturday I saw Cannibal Holocaust with Eskil. Its the most disgusting, gory film I've ever seen. I'm glad I've seen it - once. It was much like Blair Witch, only made better - and made by an Italian exploitation film director :-)

I bought headphones on Sunday. They are Sony MDR V-600s. They're very nice. I also got some CDs on the weekend and a bunch of import stuff from Amazon today. Paul Kelly is a genius. Thats all I can say...

Oh, and I'm working on translucent panel applets.

This weekend was another great weekend. Friday night I went to star (Robin) and Taska's place for drinks. We were celebrating the fact that Robin is joining the staff of an Evil Empire. His new job sounds like a lot of fun and best of all is located in the Mission area. mjs and stephane brought the gang along. We mixed crazy martinis. When I got home eskil, Andrew, Gautam and Dave turned up so we went up to their place. I woke up on Saturday on their couch at noon :-)

Dan's neighbours in Oakland held a party Saturday night. Once again it was a night of extreme fun. A band called Breast kicked off the party. They were really cool. The the DJs started spinning all kinds of stuff - lots of fun. We ended up going to bed^H^H^Hcouch when the sun came up. It was the end of daylight saving so we got an extra hour of partying.

I'm enjoying my life a lot these days.

... falling asleep to Coltrane's Blue Train ...

I've had a good couple of weeks. The 15th was my birthday. That night I went out to the Outback Steakhouse with eskil, Arlo, uzi, jlbec, Amy, Tracy and yosh. Dinner was fun. Ate too much cow. Drank too much beer. Afterwards we stumbled across the road to the Peppermill. I love that place. People began feeding me drinks. I had a pink squirrel (after hearing about it from robey), two Zombies and another drink - possibly an apple martini, though possibly not. Much of the night was blurry. Eskil and I were both very very drunk. Joel and Amy were very kind to give us a lift home and put up with our drunkennes, though I'm sure it was amusing to them at some level. I was reminded again that I need to make an occasion for Amy to mix lots of cocktails because the has both the enthusiasm and the training for it :-)

That week I ended up feeling pretty depressed about my life. I don't think it was the "I'm getting old" depression or anything. Seeing my friend Bec from Perth cheered me up a lot. She stayed at my place from Thursday to Saturday. It was good to catch up, talk about old times, find out what people are up to. She is teaching English in Tokyo and had stories about living there. It sounds like a facinating place to live for a while but I have the feeling that it would annoy me for a lot fo the reasons that San Francisco does (ie: too crowded and uptight and too obsessed with work). I would like to live in Japan at some point but I should probably move somewhere else between now and then.

On Saturday night Dan had a party. It was sort of a birthday party for his neighbour Amy, but it was mostly just a party. I had a really great time. Dan's roommate Cyrus his a DJ and so are some of their neighbours. We drank and danced till about 4 in the morning. Then we went next door where one of their neighbours has an awesome little studio set up. I would have liked to go to the Danger party that night, but I was already overbooked. We crashed on Dan's floor and in the morning BARTed back from Oakland to San Francisco and went to the Kilowatt for a beer on the way home.

Last night I went out to dinner with raph, chema, yosh and nullity for Ethiopian in San Jose. Raph and Chema are in town for the OSDN printing conference. It was good to catch up with them both - and I hadn't seen Seth for quite a while either. Then I caught the train up to the city, taxi-ed home, dropped my crap off, changed my shirt and taxi-ed back down to Popscene. Dan was there and so was Molly (a girl I met at Dan's party). It was the regular popscene crowd (fun) and the regular popscene music (fun, too much Morrissey).

Who knows what the weekend will bring...

war: The Whitehouse and the Pentagon don't have concrete goals in this "war on terrorism". Thats perhaps for the best. I guess one of their implied goals is killing Osama bin Laden. By killing Osama bin Laden they can make an example of him - to discourage others from being involved in terrorism. Sure five or ten more terrorist leaders will rise from where he fell, but making an example is important - especially back home. As the bombing raids go on I become less and less convinced that they'll get him. He is well funded and doesn't seem to mind hiding out in the desert. I'm not particularly sure that he is still in Afghanistan. He could have easilly slipped away to some former-soviet islamic republic to the north, or west to Iran, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. If he does get away and does survive this sends a pretty scary message to the American people and future terrorists - that the entire might of the American military can't catch one guy. Perhaps this won't happen. Perhaps US military intelligence knows whats going on on the ground, know where Bin Laden is and are planning to take him out some time soon, but we haven't seen any evidence of that so far.

On CNN this morning they were talking about how there are plans to use helicopters over Afghanistan. I'm glad I'm not going to be there...

gbowland: Congratulations on the directory merge. As someone who worked on this two years ago I'm glad its finally done. The technical hurtles you mention are I'm sure nothing compared to the political ones. :-)

life: Goes on... Caught up with my friend Dave Chinnery from Perth at Popscene. I really like that club - I just have one suggestion: morrisey must die.

I'll be catching up with another friend from Perth this week - my friend Bec who has been living in Japan for the last few years.

Today is my birthday. I got a family phone call at some ungodly hour this morning. I'm not used to having birthdays somewhere where I only know a few dozen people well. I'm used to big birthday parties.

world: The talking heads on CNN are becoming a parody of themselves. Their refusal to consider negotiations with the Taliban who're making very reasonable offers, while cutting deals with the military dictatorship in Pakistan would make me sick it if wasn't so funny. Australia is heading towards and election. Politics in Australia are pretty broken. Before this S11 stuff the biggest issue in Australian politics was the fate of Afghani and Iraqi refugees which the government claims aren't really refugees. People don't seem to see how these issues are connected. To quote Can't Hardly Wait (I've been on a teen coming-of-age movie binge this weekend) "You're all sheep! Baa!".