Not angry enough yet for a Monday? Read the Boston Globe‘s excellent article by Chris Gaither on the Illegal Art exhibit at the Artists Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in SF. The exhibition purposeful uses copyrighted imagery to push against the strictures of copyright. The anger-making part is the pettiness of some of the copyright holders such as Mattel that sued Tom Forsythe for selling his photographs. called “Food Chain Barbie,” of Barbie in kitchen appliances. The article explains that a facet of the law called acquiesence means that a copyright holder has to fight every supposed infraction or else they are presumed to have given up their rights. But Mattel sued, lost and is appealing.

Then, to top off your morning depression, you can read in Scott Kirsner‘s column about the demise of small ISPs. On the one hand, I respond by thinking that these dial-up ISPs are doomed because we’re making the transition to broadband. On the other, I think that it’s too bad the high-speed infrastructure wasn’t opened up for competition by small providers offering features like reasonable service.

[Note: The links to the Globe will break in a few days.]

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Larry Lessig offers one more blog entry before Howard the Dean steps in as a guest blogger for a week. Lessig points to a guitar track Coliln Mutchler posted to Opsound under a Creative Commons license that allows it to be shared so long as attribution is given. Cora Beth, a 17-year-old violinist then added a violin track, resulting in this.

Stuff like this enriches the world the way that that owned and defended music just can’t.

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My nephew the linux guy has posted instructions that have my linux computer looking at Windows files elsewhere on the network. Cool! I can only do it within a terminal window – Gnome doesn’t think it has GUI access – but it’s pretty satisfying. In fact, I’ve copied over a bunch of MP3s and thus have a new project: finding an mp3 player for linux. The media player that comes with RedHat says that because of a licensing dispute, it won’t play the little sweethearts.

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John Naughton in The Guardian seems to have discovered Lessig’s Law. Naughton writes:

,,,software determines the architecture of cyberspace, and thus determines what you can do with and in the space.

Software is political. He has a good column about it that includes Ed Felten’s suggestion that the open source community come up with filters as an alternative to the opaque commerical filters libraries can now be required to use. (Thanks to Alice Marshall for the link.)

Note: I don’t know what Lessig’s Law is. I made it up figuring that if anyone deserves to have a law named after him, it’s Lessig.

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Larry Lessig is going on vacation and Howard Dean will serve as a guest blogger for a week starting on Monday.

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According to a column by Leslie Walker in the Washington Post, AOL’s v.9 will bring free blogging to its 34 million users, including RSS support. AOL is calling them “journals” because its market research showed that AOLers don’t understand the word “blog.” (Thanks to Bill Koslosky for the link.)

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Continuing my evening attempts to get all linux-y… [Previous entries here: 1 2 3 4 5]

One of the commenters on previous postings said that I really have to get over my Windows-based instinct to reboot whenever I have a problem with linux. But I just switched the monitor over to the linux box for the first time since last night and my screen is frozen. Keyboard and mouse input do nothing. So, I can’t see anything to do but press the Off switch. I can’t say that so far linux has been a never-reboot experience.

This time, GRUB the boot loader showed me two linux installations I could boot from. What’s that about? Is it because I updated the kernel during the previous session? I let it choose whichever it counted as its default.

Tonight I’m going to see if I can make any progress seeing files on the Windows machines on my network. I have instructions from my nephew, who is a serious linux admin, about how to do this. First, I check to see if Samba is installed by going to the services panel under system settings. Nope, it’s not there as “samba” or as “smb.”

I try browsing for more info, but I forgot that last night I unplugged the ethernet cable. I plug it back in. Linux doesn’t recognize that I’ve done so. (XP does.) I know how to force XP to recognize a new connection but I don’t know how with linux. It’s here somewhere but I don’t even know where to look. Aha! Network Device Control. It sees the ethernet. Click to activate. Nope, can’t activate it. I don;t know why. Press configure. Tell it to get the DNS from the server, although it concerns me that that wasn’t the default config I’d been using. Confirm. And, baddabing, I’m back on line.

Now Add/Remove Packages. RedHat is checking which packages are installed. Windows File Server isn’t. Also, it looks System Tools may be needed. I’ll install them off the RedHat disk. RedHat computes the dependencies among the packages; apparently doing this by hand is a major pain in the butt. But the installation program terminates abruptly and then it stops recognizing my mouse. So, I tell it to log me out, but it does a full cold boot. I have to say that I’m doing more reboots than with a normal XP install, although that may be due to Gnome (the desktop GUI) and in no small part is due to Stupid User Syndrome.

Ok, re-do the Add/Remove Packages. It seems to have worked the last time. And I can now see files on my Windows machines. Yeah!

When I try to open an html file on one of the XP machines, the linux apps say they can’t access files at smb locations. Go to System Services and turn on smb…it’s now listed. Still can’t open the files though. On the advice of my nephew, I go to LinuxQuestions.org where there are detailed instructions – not quite detailed enough for the likes of me – on how to do mount a samba share. Hmm. It won’t let me mount the share unless I’m root but it’s rejecting my password as root. Yet it accepts that pwd when I login as root for other admin activities. Odd. I’ve just added myself to the adm group but that did nothing obvious. So, I’m logging in as root. And the mount command seems to have taken; smbfs is listed when I do a “mount.” But when I navigate there through the GUI, I still can’t open the file.

Meanwhile, another window refuses to close. This happened a couple of nights ago, too. I don’t see it listed in the System Monitor. Oops, it’s gone away now. I re-open it – it was the System Settings panel – but now Gnome tells me that Nautilus (its Explorer) has no viewer capable of opening the applets. Funny, they opened before.

Gnome seems really flaky. Far worse than XP. One of the comments to an earlier blog recommended I install a different desktop manager, but even after only a few days I feel like I’ve invested too much in Gnome to switch right now. So, off to bed and still not able to open files on networked XP machines. But the linux workgroup is showing up on the XP machine; it can’t get any further than the workgroup icon, but that’s progress.

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Akma points us to Scott McCloud’s online comic. I’m a fan of McCloud’s stuff in one of the PC gaming mags I read. So, I signed up with BitPass; you use PayPal to give them, say, $5, and they pay McCloud $0.25 for each of the three chapters you read.

Good story and I love the way he draws. Totally worth a quarter.

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On the NPR sports program “Only a Game” this morning, while interviewing the author of Uneven Playing Field (?), a book on racism in sports, the author pointed out how wildly wrong many people’s estimates are of the total number of African-American professional athletes there are in this country. “All sports, all teams,” the host added. Can you guess within an order of magnitude?

To see the answer, drag select the seemingly-blank space between the x’s:

X one thousand, two hundred X

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After blogging about the ghosting I was getting with the hardware switch that’s supposed to let me plug two computers into one monitor, and after getting the usual helpful advice from y’all – how exactly did you get to be so smart – I’ve discovered that my monitor has a second set of video inputs. Look, it’s a big-ass monitor that’s angled into a corner and can’t be moved without rollers and mules, ok?

Anyway, there’s one of them 5-input connection sets in the back, which apparently is called BNCx5 or RGBHV (are those two the same?) and after poking around in Google Groups – always an experiment in guessing contexts – it seems that I should be able to get a cable that converts from the usual 15-pin video out into the 5-strand video in that I need. It also seems that the BNC will give slightly better quality at 1600×1200, so I should I attach my Windows machine with the high-end graphics card into it, not my new, minimal linux box.

How wrong am I getting this?

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