dive into mark

Just breath. I went to the Zen meditation group last night for the first time all month, and that’s what it was. No eyes, no ears, no wall, no room, no knees, no pain, no I. Just breath.

Today’s quote is a famous Zen story:

Two monks, on their way back from town, reached the river. It had rained the day before, so the current was unusually strong. A young woman was sitting on the bank, too frightened to cross. The older monk immediately picked her up on his shoulders, carried her across, and set her down gently on the other side. The younger monk watched, then quickly crossed and caught up, and they walked together in silence back to the monastery.

As they approached, the younger monk finally burst out, “Brother, our holy vows forbid us to have any contact with women, and yet you picked up that woman on your shoulders and carried her!” “Brother,” the older monk replied, “I set that woman down at the river’s edge. It is you who are still carrying her.”

Last night, I also spoke with Pat, the resident teacher of our Zen center. She has graciously agreed to accept me as a student.

Meanwhile, whinnied is in the top 10 searches on DayPop. It debuted at #4, and is currently at #2. This has attracted the attention of the fine, bored minds at MetaFilter, who are splitting their time between wondering what the hell is going on and coming up with a lot of really, really, really bad horse puns. I’d say they should find something better to do with their time, but then again, it’s all my fault to begin with. “Single black pot seeks single black kettle for informed discussion of color and romantic walks along the beach.” And so forth.

I realized this morning that I feel significantly less moral outrage about employer-mandated drug testing now that I’m not taking any. I had always hoped that I was taking a principled stand by opposing them, but apparently it was just self-serving.

Scoble is getting over a serious car crash. Monday wasn’t my day to go. Thank God for that. (If there’s ever a time to thank God, it’s after a life-threatening accident. You can worry about whether He exists later.) Good luck, Robert. Take it slow.

Someday I’ll be ready to talk about the life-threatening car crash I survived a few years ago, but not today.

In Defense of iPod

There’s been some consternation about Apple’s iPod, specifically about a comment Steve Jobs made to the New York Times (a link I can’t find at the moment, and it wouldn’t last more than 30 days anyway, so I won’t bother) that steps had been taken to ensure that music copied from your desktop computer to your iPod could not then be transferred to another computer. In other words, Apple wants the iPod to be an endpoint, not a midpoint. Short-sighted folks have been concerned that Apple is giving in to the RIAA, riding the wave of of DRM, no better than Microsoft, and so forth. All of these concerns are unfounded; if anything, the iPod lets Apple claim to care about being “against piracy” (ignoring, for the moment, the loaded meaning of those words) while still giving everybody everything they want.

So what do people want? Well, different people want different things. “Normal” people want to be able to listen to their music, wherever they go, and iPod+iTunes is an extremely easy way to do that. iTunes comes preinstalled with all new Macs, and with every install of Mac OS X. It could already rip, organize, and burn all your music, and now it can transfer it to your handheld music player too. By all accounts, iPod, while expensive, is worth it. The interface is slick, the battery lasts much longer than any competing product, and the sound is sweet. Normal people will be quite happy.

“Power users”, however, have much stricter requirements. They want to do all the things normal users want to do, but they also care about abstract things like freedom, file formats, copy protection, flexibility, extensibility, upgradeability, and so forth. They want to mount the iPod as a hard drive and store documents on it as well as music, and they can. They want it to store their music in the format of their choice, which at the moment is MP3, and they can. They want to upgrade their iPod when the next great music format comes out (maybe Ogg Vorbis, maybe something else), and they can (the iPod’s ROM is software-upgradeable, just like the iMac itself). And most of all, they don’t want copy protection, and the iPod doesn’t have any.

I know, I know, Steve said this and somebody heard that and you read some other thing. But repeat after me: the iPod has no copy protection. iTunes rips regular MP3 files, the same format as any other MP3 encoder. If you don’t like (or have, or use) iTunes, you can use some other encoder, or download MP3s from any number of sources, legal or otherwise. The iPod will play them all, no questions asked, no encryption, no questions, no checking back with the home server. No muss, no fuss. It’s your music.

And as for this silly business about “the iPod can not be used to transfer music to another computer,” it’s true that a normal user wouldn’t be able to figure out how to do it. But normal users wouldn’t care; only power users would care, and for power users, it’s trivially easy. According to MacFixit, the iPod stores your MP3 files in a hidden folder on its hard drive. Mount the iPod as a normal hard drive and use any number of utilities (FileBuddy comes to mind, MacFixit also recommends Resedit and, for Mac OS X users, Terminal) to show the hidden folder, and drag and drop files to and fro. You can even copy music files into this folder and your iPod will play them. (This leads me to believe that it should be trivially easy for people to come up an Linux version, assuming the kernel supports Firewire and Mac OS-formatted hard drives, which I believe it does nowadays.)

Google mysteries

I was doing some compatibility testing with Lynx yesterday and accidentally discovered that I couldn’t search Google with it. I get the home page, but when I hit ’search’, it gives me 403 Forbidden: “Your client does not have permission to get URL /search from this server. See the Terms of Service posted on www.google.com.” So I did. They make it clear that you can’t use Google for automated queries without their consent, which seems perfectly reasonable. But I wasn’t; I was sitting at my terminal, in Lynx, typing search words and expecting results. Why is this difficult?

And don’t tell me that it’s because Lynx can be used by automated scripts (via the -source or -dump command-line arguments). This is true, but it can’t be the motivator, because I can use the Python urllib module, which has come standard with every version of Python since forever, and it works fine. The urllib module clearly identifies itself to the server in the Agent string (”Python-urllib” + a version number), so presumably Google could easily block it if they wanted to. But they don’t. What does Google have against little ol’ Lynx?

The Register: Red Hat Hell continued A reporter at that fine bastion of journalistic integrity, The Register, has apparently been having some trouble installing the latest RedHat Linux 7.2, which came out last week. I’m sure it’s all true, and my heart goes out to him. But I also feel sorry for RedHat, who has done an incredible job trying to ensure compatibility with the wide range of wacky hardware out there (and this guy’s hardware wasn’t even that wacky). And sometimes it just doesn’t work, and nobody knows why, and nobody can fix it.

The Register: Bernes Lee: WWW royalties considered harmful. Tim predicts that adopting royalty-encumbered standards would inevitably lead to the formation of a competing, free web standards organization.” Meanwhile, The Register blames the whole patent-encumbered standards mess on IBM’s lawyers. If the open source community can continue to mobilise against RAND, then it throws the ball back into IBM’s court, daring it to be the company that talked standards while it broke the World Wide Web.

Zimrad Ahmed: Interview with Sleepycat President and CEO, Michael Olson. Fascinating look at a company that makes money on open source, specifically the Berkeley DB product. Released under a GPL-like viral license, they use this fact as leverage to force proprietary vendors to pay them money to get their product under a non-viral license. The key, as he correctly points out, is that the product is a library, not a standalone program; in order to use it, you have to embed it, which triggers the viral nature of the open source license (forcing you to release your own source code). Standalone products like web servers and office productivity suites do not have this advantage; end users can take them and use them as is, and developers, if they use them at all, don’t need to link to them in the way that would trigger the license’s viral nature.

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