22 Jan 2004
Creative Class War from Washington Monthly
But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen
countries over the past year, I’m convinced that the biggest reason has to do
with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s,
the federal government focused on expanding America’s human capital and
interconnectedness to the world–crafting international trade agreements,
investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access
to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the
government’s attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the
economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries.
Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its
disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the
interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global
climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the
fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-
highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we’re
saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, “You don’t belong
here.”
19 Jan 2004
Two articles worth reading:
Technologists Claim KaZaA Can Filter Copyrighted Works: Someone finally
points out Kazaa could be using content fingerprinting, like the TRM that
MusicBrainz uses to help users tag their music files. Unfortunatly I
don’t see how this would help the content industry if all Kazaa clients were
open source (which they all would be pretty quick if something like this was
added to Kazaa).
Building bridges between P2P networks: A great idea. I use MLDonkey
to get stuff off eDonkey and Kazaa. One of the things we are doing in
Mnet is use the CP2PC interface to our daemon. Now that giFT
has Kazaa and soon eDonkey it would be neat to use xmlrpc-c to add a
CP2PC interface to giFT.
18 Jan 2004
This friday we closed on our new house. We moved some stuff in and we are
sleeping there. I’m working at Shellbook this weekend, but Laura is
painting and unpacking. I have more pictures, but no computer at home to
offload them.
One of the great things about living in Harrisonburg is that we have so many
friends here. Last night we ate Chinese food with Zeke, Jessie, Josh, Mel,
Denver and Keria (the last two we just met), and I was really happy. Plus, 5
minute drive home, versus 1 hour.
Laura met the people moving into our old house. There are really happy with it
and it’s a big step up in quality of living for them.
18 Jan 2004
I got a 160GB drive to replace a failing 120GB one, but since I don’t need the
data on the 120GB right now I unplugged it and put it away. Then I took the
new drive and made a dup of my music drive and brought it to work. Only
problem is there’s no linux box to put it in and it’s formated ext2. Enter
ext2fsd. I installed the drive, installed ext2fsd and I could mount my
drive. Now I have access to 140GB of music at work and I’m happy.
Only a few problems so far: I tried to get Musik to index all the drive,
and the computer just snapped off. Judging by the error I got when WinXP
recovered it had to do with ext2fsd. Either WinXP or the driver doesn’t know
how to deal with UTF-8 filenames. And last up, sometime renaming files causes
weird things.
22 Dec 2003
Christmas shopping with Winship and Parks
#photoblog