See my post of 21st Sept. here.

Much more information about the conference can be found on the official conference page and on the conference blog. The slides from my presentation are available here.

Update: Jenny Levine has posted her notes from the panel on The Shifted Librarian.

Update 2: Lorcan Dempsey has also posted his reflections on the panel.

In February, I read Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. Overall, I really enjoyed it. Readers who are expecting a line-by-monospaced line breakdown of the birth of Linux will be very disappointed, however, as the book focuses much more on the circumstances that made Linus into a determined coder rather than on the technical details of his OS. The biographical narratives of his formative years are charming, and Linus has a dry, nerdy wit that comes through and keeps the story moving.

It took me a while to get used to the dueling narrators structure of the book. Rather than playing the role of ghost writer (or maybe rather than just playing the role of ghost writer), Diamond trades off narrating chapters with Torvalds. I think this would have been easier for me to take if Diamond’s chapters weren’t printed entirely in italics. I think the shift from first- to third-person narration could just as easily have been illustrated with a change in typeface, rather than style.

About the last quarter of the book is devoted to Linus explaining his opinions on copyright and free and open-source software (FOSS), which as you might imagine, are plentiful. Torvalds’s OS has become the defacto poster child for open-source, despite his very public conflicts with Richard Stallman, creator of the GPL, the license which has facilitated the protection and creation of FOSS. It probably says more about my geek orientation than about the quality of the writing, but I found this part of the book to be the most interesting and engaging.

Anyway, recommended as a quick read for those of you who are interested in the early days of open-source, nerd biography, or italics.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

It’s important to remember on this day that Dr. King saw the fundamental connection between civil rights, antiwar activism, and labor rights. He died in Memphis where he was addressing striking sanitation workers. I wonder what Dr. King would be fighting for today were he still alive. Health care access? An end to poverty and hunger? There’s a lot yet to be done in the spirit of Dr. King.

It’s also worth mentioning that in 1963 and after, Dr. King was considered by many, including J. Edgar Hoover, to be one of the gravest threats to the U.S. Hoover and RFK authorized COINTELPRO surveillance of King, and the FBI subsequently blackmailed and threatened him, going so far as to suggest in an anonymous letter that King ought to kill himself. At a time when too many Americans are willing to trade privacy and liberty for the appearance of increased security, it is illustrative to recall this precedent of unchecked warrantless domestic surveillance.

Dr. King would not have had the success he did were it not for the efforts of countless freedom riders, sit-in participants and other individuals willing to put themselves on the line for the cause of civil rights. Likewise, if not for the radicalism of activists like Fred Hampton, Elaine Brown, George Jackson and Bobby Seale, King would have remained at the fringe. The Black Power movement allowed King to strike a tone of centrism and reasonableness without compromising his fundamental ideals.

Frankly, your best bet would be to skip my set, have one more cocktail, and show up to hear my esteemed colleagues later on. LGE! will feature appearances from Mike the 2600 King (Litterthugz, Burlesque, Twelve Car Pileup), Dj Nikoless (aka Kevin Beacham of Rhymesayers and Redefinition Radio), King Otto (Run Ya Jewels, RSE Radio), Espada and Jimmy Two Times. Cover is $3-6 depending on who you believe. Enter through the side door on 1st.

I’m composing this on an old Gateway PIII box I had lying around. I finally decided to do something with it, and am running Linux via the Knoppix 4.0 live cd distro. It’s more user-friendly than I ever expected Linux to be. My friend Jeremiah is doing some pretty interesting things with a Linux box, most notably running Ampache. It will take me a while before I’m willing to tackle anything quite that serious, but I’m looking forward to a few challenges.

In the meantime, if anyone has any hints for a novice Linux user, I’d love to hear them. I’m particularly interested in any tips for making my box secure.

Well, this post is long overdue, but I wanted to make a formal announcement that the Vinyl Podcast is defunct. A number of factors influenced my decision to cease production of the podcast. I began a masters program this summer in addition to working full-time, and the 2-3 hours required to produce each show were harder to come by. Also, this fall I got a packet in the mail from BMI, informing me of the details of their podcast license. It wasn’t threatening, but I interpreted it as a friendly first warning.

As of this moment, it is nearly impossible to legally podcast major-label music. I give ASCAP and BMI some credit for introducing relatively low-cost blanket licenses for podcasting, but these only solve half of the problem. ASCAP and BMI cover rights to the composition, i.e. the part of a song that you could write down on manuscript paper, but they don’t cover the mechanical rights to the recording, the actual sounds produced by the musicians. In order to license a recording, each song has to be cleared individually through the Harry Fox Agency, at a rate which is determined in part by the number of copies you intend to distribute. This scheme is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. For example, at Vinyl Podcast’s peak, I had over 5,000 subscribers. Using an example from harryfox.com, a song 4:07 in length would have cost $455.00 to license for use in my podcast.

I took great pains in the design of the Vinyl Podcast to be respectful of the artists whose music I presented. The music I played was not available commercially except in the second-hand market or, in some cases, via import. Each Mp3 file I distributed included several minutes of commentary, and my voice overlapped the beginning and end of each song. Each recording was made from 20+-year-old vinyl, and was not cleaned up or enhanced, throwing the DMCA’s notion of a "perfect digital copy" out the window.

That said, I was well aware that the Vinyl Podcast was operating afoul of current copyright statutes, and it became clear that the wild west that was the early months of podcasting would quickly become less Black Rock City and more Las Vegas, and that the inevitable commercialization of podcasting would bring increased scrutiny to the legality of the show.

So, I hope those of you who listened to the show on a regular basis discovered through it some different music, or rediscovered some old favorites that may have been languishing in the attic. I hope a few people dusted off their old turntables, and discovered that the cheapest source of un-DRM‘ed music is your local second-hand record store.

I’m keeping a couple of my shows online for download here, specifically those containing music that, to my knowledge, is not covered by ASCAP or BMI license. As with most early podcasts, the Vinyl Podcast was a money-losing operation. I spent about $20/month on hosting. I racked up about $50 in Google AdSense revenue, which, should Google ever see fit to cut me a check, will be donated to the EFF. Thanks for listening.

I hope to outpace my goal significantly, but because I want an inducement to maintain a reading pace throughout the year, I’m not going to give myself credit for reading ahead. That is to say that if I manage to read two or even three books in January, I don’t get December off.

I’ve begun the year with John Battelle’s The Search, which thus far is a great retelling of the early days of search, and the wild late 90s, when I was in college, and it seemed that every month or so there was a new search engine on the scene. I’m a little over halfway through, and I’d recommend it.