Jonas Beckman

many legal experts… see the DVD case pitting Hollywood’s right to retain copyright control in the digital age against the right of individuals to exercise First Amendment free-speech rights.

… in light of the professor’s testimony, Judge Kaplan said, he would reconsider his constitutional analysis. It would be hard to make a case “that computer code of any kind has no expressive content,” the judge said. “Which then gets you to the question of how then do you deal with it under the First Amendment?”

From today’s NY Times article about the deCSS case. Link via Dave Winer – thanks!

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Does sex with dolphins sound interesting? In that case, here is the FAQ.
Link via Texting

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There is now an official download link for Win2K Service pack 1.

Not everyone will want to install at once, of course. For instance, users of Black Ice Defender or Zone Alarm should wait. W2K SP1 breaks personal firewalls and there are no fixes yet.

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KDE 2.0 for Linux has reached beta3. Looks like they are really trying to make the desktop comfortable for someone coming over from Windows.

I am trying to download and install it right now. My main reason is to get a better Linux browser – but since I don’t already have it, I have some problems getting the software.
We all know that bootstrapping in the fairy tale sense is impossible. But we’re adults now, right?

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No, I am not going to read another W3C draft of the XML Info set!
Link via HackThePlanet. Thanks Wes, but I didn’t actually read it – did you? Maybe next month.

Well, I’m downloading Radio Userland right now.
But the sun is shining, Aila wants to go for a sauna and a swim. Later…

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I had a fantastic swim today: real water, sun, small waves and cold currents from the bottom. A hot sauna with wooden benches outside. Happy people and beautiful nature.

I wonder why there are so many things we only remember by doing again? And then forget until the next time?
If you are in Stockholm, this is the place: Hellasgården. A true oasis.

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Radio Userland… hmmm. I don’t get it. I already have a fairly good idea of Dave’s taste in music from his writing – what more can I do with the entire playlist? And how interesting is anyone’s playlist without an easy way to listen to the music?

Interesting people sometimes make interesting lists of music – yes, that’s true. Napster didn’t add that piece of the puzzle.

When I surf I love to find music I haven’t heard before (or used to listen to but don’t have around). But then I want to HEAR that music, not read about it.
Of course, Dave has an excellent reason for his design: he doesn’t want to break the law. Let the users do that if they want to.

So my first impression is pretty much the same as Martin Spernau’s: this is a nice toy built using good tools, which will definitely be interesting to follow. But so are many other things.

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Maybe Napster has nothing to do with freedom if you are rich enough. It’s about inconvenience: you could easily buy all the music you will ever listen to (and lots more) – if it wasn’t such a hassle.

From that perspective a buycott is logical: “Wouldn’t it teach those stupid record companies a lesson if all us rich Dead-heads living in California threw money at them?”

Well, maybe it would. It seems both silly and slightly obscene to me – but I am neither rich nor living in California.

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My brother mailed me the Life simulator. How can something so boring be so funny?
And Hal has found Crank Dot Net.
“Web sites by and about cranks, crankism, crankishness, and crankosity. All cranks, all the time.”

Oh… I just looked closer and saw that Blivet has a new tag line: “When Bodidharma came to the desert, coyote was waiting…”
Hal, I like that one!

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More links via Null Device:

The Guardian on why the movie industry is scared of DeCSS. Nothing new, but nice to see good coverage from mainstream press.

Why I want to blow up Silicon Valley. No, really – it’s a review of a new movie.

Yesterday we had the first sunny day for a week (or two, or three… it’s hard to remember). I didn’t really care, the hot days of July never did much for me, anyway.

Me and Martin had a great day together: talking, walking, eating, checking out clothes (Martin found himself an amazing shirt!), taking pictures… lots of very relaxed fun.

In the evening we went out to my brother for a family barbecue. Today we are all very hungover (this is Sweden, remember?) and the sky is grey again. Aila has had stomach problems and high fever all week, so a hangover seemed OK by comparison – she is sleeping right now. I was very grouchy before breakfast, but feel fine now.

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I bought Tarkovsky’s The mirror on DVD yesterday, but haven’t watched it yet. Instead I’m reading up on DVD.

I have no real interest in “ripping” (that is, copying movies from DVD to something else). But DVD is currently another shining example of industry greedheads trying to screw consumers – so my gut feeling is to learn more about the techology while it’s still possible.

Totally useless had some links to get me started. I soon found a very good guide for getting my DVD-drive region free. And here is a little guide to sites focused on ripping… just in case.

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Garret pointed me at this reviev of webbrowsers for Linux. I’ll check out Galeon. Plenty of interesting links where these came from: Array is a great weblog that’s getting better!

Microsoft Passport is dangerous! Joel would know – he used to work there.

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Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall.

Martin called yesterday: he was bored and wanted to come over and play. We’ll do that today. I just got out of bed… he will be here with his mother any minute.

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Guido Van Rossum presents the Current state of Python. Summary: Python 1.6 is really cool and WILL be out anyday now – but there are still some license problems between CNRI and BeOpen. Link via the excellent Qube corner weblog

What is going on with XML schema? Summary: developers need stuff they can use now, standards designers haven’t delivered yet. Read more on XML-Deviant

Interbase 6 is released as Open source. Another link from Qube. Like me, he is also looking forward to Kylix.

Yesterday Napster was ordered by an american court to stop allowing the sharing of copyrighted materials. Everyone had opinions about it. But most people agree this is just the beginning of greater battles.

Almost twenty years ago I was extremely fascinated by Jimi Hendrix – but Jimi was dead. He was a genius who wanted to play music more than anything else, so the only thing he left behind was music. Lots of music – some say he is the most over-released musician in history. I bought everything I could find and lots of it was trash – but I also knew that good music was locked up in vaults by record company lawyers.

So I started buying bootlegs and concert recordings. Eventually I had a small business trading and selling my own recordings: using two very good tape recorders and an equalizer I learned how to make decent analog copies. This was illegal – but the things I traded and sold couldn’t be had any other way.

Today, Hendrix family is finally in control and are releasing official versions of some of the best stuff I had. Would I download it if I could? Yes. Sell it? Hell no – that would be both illegal and immoral. I always wanted to buy this music from people who cared about it and now I can.

Some people won’t buy, of course. That’s too bad – but once we have smelled freedom we can’t go back to locking up music again.

BTW – here is a page about Hendrix and funk. I got seriously into black music via Hendrix – while guitar heroes and oldtime psychedelica can be nice, a little bit goes a long way. Hendrix was always more than that.

Some people didn’t like Band of Gypsies, but I always thought Billy Cox was a great bass player. And I just found out he is still playing: a bit down on this page are some recordings from last year.

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The null device is a nice, unpretentious blog by someone from Australia. I was about to say good clean fun – but I am not that jaded.

Why do we read about the death of a dot-com wonderboy, a webcam legend betraying her best friend in public or brazilian teenagers killing without missing a beat ? Cheap thrills, food for thought, raw material for commentary… all of the above? Neither?

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Gary links to me from his Favorites list. Thanks, and keep up the good work! ISeeISay is getting better and more ambitious all the time.

Hal explains what he means by letting someone else drive the bus. And I suddenly remember this line from Electric Kool Aid acid test: “I’ll always be on the bus”.

Greg Franklin of Flyingchihuahuas comments on recent horror stories about ExtremeProgramming, likes wild analogies and has a slight japanese touch to his FAQ. Thanks for the link!

Cult of the week (via Totally useless). Of course, you and I don’t belong to any cults – this is a joke, right?

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Classical indian music, indian food, peace & quiet… I relax after a long afternoon of weblogging. And realize that my notebook and my weblog are the same right now. When I come home I’ll use this paragraph exactly the way it is.

And I did. This was written after dinner at Ellora, my favorite indian restaurant and a true oasis. Today they where plaing santoor music by Shiv Kumar Sharma. Here is a sample

Alright. I have my dualboot set up the way I wanted to.

And I just saw that Garret has listed me among his faithful. Thank you!

But now I’ll get some sleep…

“… let the sun take a, holiday”
Jimi Hendrix – Still raining/still dreaming

There is massive rain all over the country, houses have been swept away up north – in Stockholm everything is just wet and grey.

But I like it. It’s good to be back in town, it’s good to have unlimited time to tinker with my new machine, it’s good to run in the rain.

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Martin (of Traumwind) is thinking about how we invest time learning (sample quote: “I prefer narratives to sample code”). I think he has the right idea: no time spent learning is wasted.

Sometimes we worry too much about the market value of what we learn. David Carter-Tod linked to this sad and very familiar story about yet another assault on the “improductive” humanities.

Martin also noticed my little rant about weblogging – and linked to him and alien friend Mike having fun. I had fun, too. Thanks!

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As night falls, I am preparing for another round of Linux-installation: I have already prepared my main disk with Partition Magic.
Duncan Crawford (IBM tech support) helped me out of hardware hell. Thank you! Some very silly jumper stuff and erasing the disk again did the trick.
Now I’ll install Suse Linux 6.4 and dual-boot with W2K. Then I’ll install VMware so I can have both environments running at the same time. I have done this before, so in theory it should be easy. But since installing the hardware took days, I’ll keep my fingers crossed. No learning is wasted… I’ll write a little story when I’m done.

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My parents just called: they are going on their annual vacation-trip to Germany tomorrow, and wanted to say goodbye. Have a good time!

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W2K looks slick – but I am still not ready to install things I care about. Right now I worry about a weird startup error: it says the system has no page file and asks me to create one.

Problem solved. For once, Ars Technica had some bad advice: this Windows 2000 security tweak doesn’t work. Microsoft has a fix – it seems insecure to me, but works.

Aila left town yesterday, I’ll catch a train in a few minutes. Updates will probably be sporadic until next week – I’ll sit near a beach and try to think about sand instead of silicon.

Dave Winer didn’t like this story about what’s wrong with weblogs. He preferred Kate Adams’ concise and positive list of reasons for writing a weblogs. Her reasons are very concrete and I agree with every one of them. But she also says:

The only guideline I go by (and one that I do think would improve some of the younger weblogger’s writings) is that my parents and loved ones not be offended, hurt, or overly concerned about what I write. For this reason, there is not a lot of self-introspection on this site.

Staying away from public self-introspection to avoid hurting other people is a valid personal choice, and it obviously works for Kate. And yes, many young (and old!) people are careless with what they write (which not only hurts people’s feelings – it can be very boring).

But while my favorite webloggers usually write well about interesting things, they ocasionally take risks by writing about who they are and how they feel. Revealing that you are hurt (or angry, scared, totally confused etc) doesn’t necessarily hurt other people.

We are all suffering human beings – and the weblog format makes it possible to be very professional and very human at the same time. Not many people can pull that off, but when it happens it’s fantastic.

Writing in public, while scary, is a great way to learn things about yourself. With lots of luck and hard work, other people may find what you write interesting. That’s fine. But if they don’t – well, you can learn from that too.
Meanwhile, Dave is now pointing at Curmudgeon: It’s Your Civic Duty to Run a Weblog!

I am about to wipe my harddisk clean and start over. See you in a few hours… I hope. Wish me luck!

Alwin and Garret started an interesting discussion and provided lots of good links about mental illness – Hal pointed me there, as usual. Damn hardware! I want to read more about this.

OK, I have my new workstation. It’s fast, quiet and connected to the Net. Aila lent me her steady hands, and that’s what it took to fix a few mechanical floppy drive problems. “Why didn’t you ask me to help you with that?” Well, I know better now.

But Windows 2000 still hides 30 gigabyte of harddisk capacity from me. The diskmanager made irreversible changes to the disk capacity while I added and deleted logical drives – I really dislike the way W2K hides information about low-level things. David Chernicoff worried about this in a recent article for Windows 2000 magazine.

IBM’s excellent webpage has all the utilities to help me work this out – but unfortunately, wiping the disk clean is the only way to go.

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Dave Winer is writing a lot about music on the Internet these days. He’s right, this is a revolution – the old definitions of intellectual property don’t work well. And he’s right again, it’s getting personal: locking music away makes people angry.

Being aware of the issues helps. Yesterday I looked at Sony’s new digital walkman in a shop – and then asked the clerk a few questions: what format is this? (“Sony’s own – but you can play MP3″), Can I record? (“yes, but only to this format”).

Now, the interesting part is that the clerk wasn’t surprised – when he realized I wasn’t buying, he said: “well, they have made a lot of money running their own race before”.

Locking people into proprietary formats is an old and not always successful strategy, even for giants like Sony. Betting on people not catching on fast enough is usually a sure bet – but it won’t last forever.

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Maybe I will have time to fix my machine before Aila’s vacation starts. Fortunately – or unfortunately – that’s tomorrow.

We are leaving for the southern parts of Sweden, to visit Aila’s sister and her family. Me and Aila will live by ourselves, in a trailer on a remote beach. I’ve never lived in a trailer, so that will be interesting.

I worry about not being connected to the Net, though. Of course, our hosts are in the web business, too. So they must have some kind of connection.

Hmmm… maybe a completely disconnected week would be a good idea?

Well, I am in hardware hell again. My new PC has strange problems with Windows 2000 partitioning – the disk manager ate half my disk capacity and won’t tell me where it went!

I was prepared for that kind of stuff. But then I discovered that the floppy drive is defect…

It’s very difficult to fix low-level disk problems if you can’t boot from diskettes. Not impossible, since the CD-drive is still recognized… but scary. So, here we go again.
Update: Hardwarehell.com exists!

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I try very hard to see this as a lesson. It’s easy to become very mad at everyone who doesn’t make things work for you… but that’s just not the way it works.

PC hardware was never very reliable – if anything it’s better now than it used to be. Years ago there was an entire Byte issue about crashing PC’s. One article compared mainframe and PC traditions. The conclusion: we have made every possible trade-off against reliability for years – so what’s the surprise?

Searching for that Byte article I found the next logical conclusion: Programming is unsafe at any speed. Actually it’s a plug for some kind of debugger – but I love this quote: “The mental energy of the programmer is the fuel that runs programming environments.”

Back in 1984 I bought my first PC – and predictably something went wrong. When I went back to the store the clerk looked at me and said something I have never forgotten: “You are not a hardware guy, are you?”

I felt slightly humiliated and pleased to be understood at the same time. He sure had my number: software is my drug. And now I need a fix, so it’s time to get to work. Yesterday I downloaded Partition Magic – all I need now is a new floppy drive.

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from the “Well, if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich?”-department:
I met a non-technical friend today, who reminded me that four years ago I explained bandwith to him and said everyone would know about it in a year or two. This time I was enthusiastic about weblogs… we’ll see.

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All I wanted was a cheap floppy drive for testing purposes, but I almost found hardware heaven – PX is a place that reminds me of William Gibson’s lyrical description of a Gomi no sensei (“Master of junk”). All the old-time corner shops selling PC’s are disappearing, but the real low-end market for old, cheap and/or used stuff will never disappear.

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Hal worried about how many readers he had yesterday. We all do, of course. But why?
Garret thinks it has to do with compatibility and popularity – he started an interesting thread in Hal’s discussion group.

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Aila just came home with 15 litres of handpicked strawberries! Now I must fix all this hardware nonsense so I can upload some pictures. Jesus… that’s a lot of strawberries!