Sunday
... was April Fool's Day.
There are a pretty good assortment of hoaxes on-line, although I don't think I've been fooled by anything yet.
In other news, Zack and I went to CompUSA and I got a new sound card, which I set up (after compiling Linux 2.2.19, which was remarkably easy). It's a SoundBlaster 16 PCI -- the cheapest common 16-bit PCI sound card with line in and line out. It uses the es1371 module; Creative Labs bought Ensoniq...
Oh, I got to try Mac OS X in CompUSA. It's very pretty, and I managed to find the shell (the default shell is tcsh!) without too much difficulty, and run ls, ps, df, and all -- on a Mac, running MacOS. So I can see how a lot of people will like this and will want to switch. And I do have a Mac that I'd be running MacOS 8.5 on if the hard drive hadn't crashed... but I do want to stay focused on free operating systems, not just Unix in its manifold glory.
I bought the sound card because I wanted 16-bit line in so that I could record a CD of myself singing. No, you can't have a copy (unless perhaps you are Wolfgang), but I'll probably publish the recording of "If I Were in Rescomp". It's turning out that there's a Jewish theme because the two other things my original plan calls for me to sing are "Eli, Eli" and "Shir Hamaalot". I really think that's just a co-incidence, though.
A side effect of having the sound card is that I can play WAVs from my little collection of ripped CDs. (I ripped some of my own CDs so that I could have them in digital form. I don't habitually trade illegal copies of music, even though I agree that the impulse to do that is very natural, but I think having access to music in an unencrypted digital form is very important. People reading my diary will probably already be aware that I think that.) So I can actually give a simple command like
cd /mnt/bigger
echo So/*.wav | xargs -n1 play
and I immediately get a CD-quality rendition of Peter Gabriel's So. But of course I can script things so that tracks play in a particular order or in response to a particular event.
If we give up control over digital media, we will be limited to the applications the people who control it can think of, minus those they think it's not in their business interest to permit, minus again those they think they can extract extra payments for.
I had a great time with Biella, who came by for dinner. We had a wide-ranging conversation, although supposedly we were talking about "Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry" by Cohen and Lemley.
Patents are an absolutely vast risk for the free software community. Aux armes! Fortunately, there are some more encouraging things going on in the world than just software patents.
I'm sorry that I still have secrets from my diary readers, that I can't remark on every single interesting or amusing thing that happens. I remember at dinner how something happened that I thought was funny, but it was already secret there; quo magis here. So if you read this, imagine some funny and interesting things happening that I don't mention. Thanks.
