Vitanuova for 2003
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I've been finding a lot of popular press coverage distressing. Maybe I should keep some sort of journal of my specific objections.

Here are a couple of bad habits which come to mind:

I got to celebrate the new year in Massachusetts with Eric and Kate, for what I think was my eighth straight year celebrating with Eric. I also saw a bunch of cool people whom I rarely see except at Eric's new year's party, and got a visit from Rachel and Vasilios, who graciously drove for hours and hours.

I did a countdown program in Python, using Tkinter. It's normally done with HyperCard, but Eric couldn't get HyperCard running right away, so I tried out Tkinter. I have to admit that I don't know an enormous amount of Tkinter, but it's pretty straightforward to get started with it. The most difficult part is probably the geometry management and packing stuff.

We thought we might be able to get the countdown to start a fire (as we'd hoped in previous years) -- lighting a candle, for example. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my solid-state relay to trigger from my laptop's parallel port, and I didn't have a voltmeter or LEDs or anything else to use for debugging purposes. So the computer control was out this year. We did try an experiment later on to see about the possibility of igniting something with electricity. Our experimental result is this: if you connect eight 9-volt batteries in series (which is very easy to do because of how the connectors are designed), a fairly large spark is produced by the 72-volt potential across the resulting gap when battery leads are brought close together. This spark is sufficient to ignite a small piece of cardboard wetted with 91% isopropyl alcohol.

A much simpler technique would be to get a thin wire like those used in cigarette lighters in cars, and connect this to a relatively small DC voltage. The wire should become hot enough to ignite things (like cigarettes). There is some detail about matching the internal resistance of the power source in order to maximize the power dissipated through the wire.

The theory here is pretty simple. Suppose that we want to cause heat by connecting a wire in series with a battery. Assume that the battery's total voltage is V, and the internal resistance of this source is Rs, the resistance of the wire is Rw. Then the total series resistance is Rs+Rw, current I=V/(Rs+Rw), power in the wire Pw=I*Vw=V^2*Rw/(Rs+Rw)^2. I did take dPw/dRw by hand (I'm ashamed to say it's the first derivative I've taken in a year or two), and found it to be V^2[(Rs+Rw)^2-2Rw(Rs+Rw)]/(Rs+Rw)^2, which has a zero when Rs=Rw. This implies that the wire will become hot most quickly when its resistance is exactly equal to the internal resistance of the battery.

(In that case, of course, the battery will also dissipate power at the same rate as the wire, so the battery may become rather hot as well.)

There's a much more general result, or technique, known to electrical engineers, and it's called impedance matching. I never got far into alternating currents in my physics class, so I didn't learn too much detail about impedances.

I'm glad I got to be here for the new year. I'll be back in California soon.

Happy new year!

I'm headed back to San Francisco.

After celebrating the new year in Hopedale, I took the commuter rail back to Boston, accessed a wireless network near MIT, and had more tea at Tealuxe in Harvard Square.

I'm reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson, which Riana gave me recently. It's hilarious! There's something incredibly amusing about historical linguistics, especially accounts of changes in usage.

Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice -- as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

(pp. 77-8)

There are lots of other funny parts. I liked the description of the Oxford English Dictionary (now discussed at great length in The Professor and the Madman). Bryson says that the famous dictionary insists oddly

that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledge that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)

When I read what Lessig wrote this morning about the Supreme Court's decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft today, I thought of what Rabbi Joshua says in Avot D'Rabbi Nathan when he sees the ruins of the Temple:

oi lanu al ze she-hu charev!

(Alas for us that it is ruined!)

Rabbi Nathan goes on to report that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (Rabbi Joshua's teacher) answers "b'ni, al yera l'cha" (my son, do not grieve). I hope Professor Lessig's teachers are even now writing to him: b'ni, al yera l'cha.

Yochanan ben Zakkai argues specifically that Rabbi Joshua need not grieve because there are alternatives to the Temple service ("yesh lanu capara acheret", "we have another atonement"). What is Eldred supporters' "capara acheret"?

Surely it starts with cultural struggle to show people that the public domain, and all the public's rights in copyright, are valuable; that, as the Eldred dissents recognized, the copyright law properly aims at a public rather than a private end; that no one is intrinsically entitled to property rights in creative work; that, as Professor Litman argues, legislation by private negotiation is not serving the public; and that copyright significantly burdens expression, and that the fair use doctrine may not always be adequate to remedy the harm.

The capara acheret is also to support all the people who are working on the accessibility of culture, from librarians in libraries through free software programmers through "vernacular archivists" (as Stewart Brand says) and the creators and operators of the "databases" so celebrated by Justice Breyer's dissent. And its includes supporting technologists who make creative work easier and cheaper.

It is odd that so many people should feel so comfortable with a tax -- the retroactive part of the extension -- solely to the benefit of heirs and assignees, where the creators of the famous works at issue are typically dead and buried.

Id cinerem aut manis credis curare sepultos?

(Aeneid IV, 34)

If you're feeling depressed about the Eldred decision, a little proofreading might cheer you up.

Having seen Larry Lessig argue this cause is one of the highlights of my life.

EFF has started publishing Cruelty to Analog, which will cover the activities of the ARDG.

If you use wavemon with an 802.11b wireless network, you'll notice that signal quality is measured on a scale from 0 to 92, and can be affected directly simply by bringing your hand near to your wireless card. The closer your hand gets to the card, the poorer the signal quality will become.

wavemon even has a mode in which a graph of signal quality over time is displayed. While many people use that graph (and similar graphs in similar software) to help find wireless networks, or physically locate base stations, or figure out the best orientation for a laptop using a particular network, you can also just move your hand up and down and watch the graph line go up and down as your hand moves.

This means that the 802.11 card can function as a rough proximity sensor for your hand. This evening I realized that that means you can make a wireless card into a sort of poor man's theremin -- you just need to map the signal strength to a tone, play the tone, and move your hand. You'll be able to play several discrete pitches or scales, although with much less precision than a real theremin.

I wrote a three-line shell script which implements this idea (using Linux setterm, all on a beta test version of the LNX-BBC, it so happens), and later improved it a little bit with a small C program which wraps the Linux KIOCSOUND ioctl. It works just fine -- you can easily bring the tone up and down by moving your hand back and forth. That's a lot of fun. The most obvious problem is the discreteness of the whole thing. A real theremin is plainly an analog device. (The analogy is between the pitch level and the position of your hand.) This system is very obviously quantized, at best like someone playing a poor piano scale (and it's distorted sine waves rather than piano strings with their nice harmonics).

We can't really do better with the standard 802.11 drivers, because they definitely won't give anything more precise than the 92 discerete levels. You could modify the hardware (and build a real theremin, which is far simpler electrically than an 802.11b card). Another approach is to modify the way the tones are generated. What I'm currently thinking is something like this: we need to define a function i(s) and a function n(g, p), where i(s) is the ideal pitch in Hz corresponding to a signal strength measurement s and where n is the next pitch after some small constant time step if the goal is to reach pitch g and we're currently playing pitch p. So we use the function n to change pitch smoothly and always move gradually from the pitch we're currently playing toward a goal. The goal, at any given moment, will be i(s) -- that is, we do a loop like 

p=i(signal_strength())
while 1:
	play(p)
	p = n(i(signal_strength()), p)
	sleep(time_step)

Now the pitch will always change continuously, and yet the pitch will be directly responsive to the (discrete) signal strength measurement. If the signal strength rises quickly, the pitch will rise quickly. If the signal strength rises slowly, the pitch will rise slowly. If the signal strength stays constant, the pitch will stay constant. If you move the position of your hand to a position x centimeters away from the card at one time, and later move it to the same position, the pitch should in each case approach roughly the same value -- which should be i(s) Hz for whatever value of s happens to correspond to holding your hand x cm away from the card.

(There might not be a unique such value, because it also depends on a lot of other factors like the angle at which you hold your hand. Obviously there is lots and lots of radio hardware which would give you much better results -- maybe even an ordinary AM or FM radio if you tweaked the demodulation circuit and gave it a suitable input signal. But there's not lots of radio hardware you can get so easily if you're not a radio expert and get a single digital value out of so readily and at such a high frequency. We can hope GNU Radio will change this situation quickly!)

My little theremin script is apparently even famous in Italy. It has been published by Linux Journal. Some minor changes are useful, so I'll try to pass them along to Don.

On the ferry on Thursday, I happened across a discarded copy of the New York Times which happened to be open to an article about my colleague Fred von Lohmann. This was totally co-incidental -- I wasn't looking for the article or anything.

On Friday, I had the honor of meeting Whitfield Diffie.

I'm sorry I'm still so far behind in posting news from the past month or so. I think I'll be able to catch up soon. I've read two novels I haven't even mentioned here yet! (Well, one novel and one "romance".)

Hey, did you know that "romance novel" and "Romance language" have the same etymology? (And it originally dates back to the Roman language, which is even more obvious to English speakers in the French word "roman".)

As I was walking to the Ashby BART station this morning, I saw through someone's ground-floor window a wide-screen TV, left on in an empty room and tuned to CNN. The picture was showing the Columbia re-entry over and over again. "Oh, I forgot to watch that," I thought. It was supposed to have been visible from California very early in the morning. But I wondered why CNN would keep showing the same re-entry image. A caption, which was very difficult to read, said that the space shuttle had broken up over Texas on re-entry.

I didn't understand. The loss of a space shuttle was something that happened in the 1980s. It was an iconic event of the 1980s; "the Space Shuttle disaster" happened right before my sister was born, right before the Chernobyl disaster. And then Richard Feynman investigated it.

Now "the Space Shuttle disaster" is something this decade has to share with the 1980s, as when World War II came along and people had to adjust to seeing "the Great War" in a different context. But I don't know how I can think of a Space Shuttle disaster apart from the Challenger.

When I walked on to BART I thought about what John F. Kennedy, one of the most eloquent of all U.S. presidents, famously said a long time before I was born:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It's interesting to have govenment officials whose job includes opposing the government's policies. I guess public defenders are in some sense in the same position. The Canadian Privacy Commissioner's report is rather stirring reading.

I went with several other people to see Sumana's performance in the Apollo Amateur Night. It was horrifying -- not her performance, but the behavior of the audience. They were encouraged to boo, and they took full advantage of their power. Even the Golden Overtones were booed off the stage before they got underway. If you've ever heard the Overtones, you know this is a great absurdity.

There was an incredibly self-confident gospel rapper (Ashlei Williams) who seemed talented but whose lyrics I found impossible to understand. She didn't get booed at all. I know of three theories about this. One is that she was young and people were asked not to boo young performers. Another is that she spoke quickly and left no pauses in which booing could build up. The last -- endorsed by the Amateur Night's host -- was that she was religious, and most of the audience either endorsed her message or felt uncomfortable about booing an expression of somebody's religious beliefs. She was definitely not a "cultural" gospel singer; she was more of a "win souls for the Lord" gospel singer.

The students were discoursing glibly (as my example had instructed them) about some matter or other -- the intricacies of Milton's verse, or the import of his allusions to Virgil -- and I without thinking burst out, "No, no, he doesn't want your admiration; he wants your soul!"

(Stanley Fish; also reprinted in his The Trouble With Principle)

Hearing the gospel rap (and the host's claim that nobody would want to boo God) set my mind wandering back through the question of counterevangelism -- we could ask both why there is an impulse to counterevangelism and why that impulse is considered rude or immature. One of many interpretations of Socrates is that he behaved counterevangelically, insisting that many charismatic founders of schools did not know whereof they spoke and were unworthy of belief. The execution of Socrates would then suggest that counterevangelism was not especially popular.

Remind me to tell the story of the trilemma picket.

Anyway, the behavior of the audience prevented us from hearing Sumana's act. Fortunately, she performed it for us privately a little later on. Unfortunately, The Golden Overtones didn't grant us the same privilege.

I just had an article about the broadcast flag published in print in the March issue of Linux Journal (in a prominent position). Zack has an article in the same issue. Take a look when the issue reaches newsstands. It doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere, though I expect to have a somewhat expanded version of the same article on-line soon. This is probably the first time I've been published in a national magazine. Well, credited, anyway.

Why did NASA appoint a committee on Saturday to investigate the Columbia disaster? To prevent the president from appointing one, I imagined. It looks like it worked:

The White House said Bush was not pushing for a presidential commission to study the tragedy because he is satisfied with the makeup of a panel appointed by O'Keefe, which largely consists of military officers, Fleischer said.

No Feynman. Very possibly no Appendix F.

I'm snowed in! I'm in Washington, D.C., and I can't get home because of this amazing snowstorm.

The Washington area's Baltimore-Washington International and Reagan National airports both closed until further notice; BWI had a record 13 inches of snow by evening with more to come, National Weather Service Meteorologist Steve Zubrick said.

"If these accumulations actually occur, this storm would rank in the top five of all storms in snowfall recorded in the last century," Zubrick said.

Dulles International Airport had just one runway open during the afternoon.

(Associated Press)

It's been coming down really hard for about 24 hours, and the road conditions are just terrible.

I got home safely. I was supposed to come home Sunday, but I came home Tuesday because of the storm. The Metro was running very infrequently on Tuesday. But on Monday, it wasn't running above ground at all. When I called up ground transportation providers on Monday to ask about the prospect of getting to the airport, they started to laugh at me. So I came back Tuesday instead.

It was quite a storm.

Nobody should think that free software DTV demodulation is not real, because it's very real.

It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math

available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.

EFF filed reply comments, and so did many other organizations. I'll try to get a good list up at Consensus at Lawyerpoint soon.

I was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on Microsoft Palladium (now called Microsoft NGSCB).

On Wednesday, we had a conference call with Microsoft and had a briefing about a new technology Microsoft plans to announce next week. I hope to write something about it as soon as possible.

More sentences I'd never uttered before: "So, how does this relate to section III.J of your consent decree with the Department of Justice?"

Ed Felten pointed to a fascinating LawMeme article on the subject of the privacy interests of e-mail users -- not against search and seizure, but against ordinary Internet users who forward things indiscriminately. It's a good read and thought-provoking.

There seems to be a whole genre of thought-provoking articles of the form "our experience of the Internet contains a vacuum with regard to legal and social norms around ________, as was dramatically revealed by this singular event". (Variants include "how should our everyday off-line intuition and institutions map to the Internet world? -- a question highlighted by this singular event" or "the Internet is really maturing and becoming an important and complicated part of everyday life, because now Internet users even have to deal with problems such as _______, as was dramatically demonstrated by this singular event".) Maybe the most influential piece in this genre is "A Rape in Cyberspace". These essays used to be more common than they are today. They rarely propose any kind of conceptual solution to the problem or conundrum they explore. They are not useless. Even long-time, sophisticated Internet users haven't thought about all the gaps between kinds of experience.

The good thing is that the "et in Arcadia" ("et in Cyberia"?) pieces have gotten a bit less breathless and gee-whiz. They take for granted that there is this network, and it's useful, and people actually use it and rely on it. Maybe that evolution is helpful. There are conflicting influences about this. Remind me to write about the old days of Wired.

(That's the Douay-Rheims version of a passage from the Catholic apocrypha, which is inscribed on a Catholic church in San Francisco's Chinatown.)

Last week I bought a watch, and I became a member of the ACLU and the FSF.

I hadn't had a wristwatch for about three years, since my watchstrap broke. It's a great feeling to have one again; I'm trying to get used to actually knowing what time it is.

I'd delayed joining ACLU for many years because I disagreed with them about affirmative action (though I agreed with them about almost every other issue they work on). But when I read about some recent events (I have an unfinished diary entry about this), I thought that I really needed to join the ACLU. So I did.

It's pretty well known that ACLU membership is booming. Troubling times and events tend to increase their membership numbers -- a phenomenon we're familiar with at EFF. (If I remember correctly, more people joined EFF the week Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested than any other week that year.)

Suppose you are a station attached to an unswitched Ethernet segment through which traffic is passing. You don't have an IP address.

You can't get one through DHCP, because either there is no DHCP server or there is one, but it isn't configured to give your station an IP address.

The network has no access control (which is pretty obvious when we say "attached to an unswitched Ethernet segment") and it has a default gateway which is willing to route IP traffic to and from the Internet for all local machines with IP addresses appropriate for the local segment.

By observing local traffic on the segment (and perhaps by making non-destructive active probes), how can you identify the gateway's IP address and a valid but unused IP address for yourself (and, preferably, the IP address of a name server which will perform recursive queries on your behalf), and so autoconfigure yourself as an IP node on the network without the benefit of DHCP service?

I think I know a solution to this problem, which I call the "Ethernet mimicry" problem. The short way of phrasing the problem is "how can you autoconfigure yourself on a network which won't give you an address with DHCP"? I talked to Anirvan about this a couple of weeks ago and worked out an approach I think would work.

I talked about this with Dan Kaminsky at CodeCon. He seems more likely than I to be able to implement it. The basic parts of the solution include an ability to recognize gateways (they receive traffic not addressed to them and send traffic not originated by them, whereas ordinary machines receive traffic not originated by them and send traffic not addressed to them) and an ability to tell whether a particular IP address is in use on a local segment (by sending ARP queries for it -- a capability apparently already included in the current MacOS and used when you try to set an IP address manually).

When we told Kragen about this, he revealed that he'd already invented it. Oops!

I had a great time at CodeCon over the weekend. I saw an exciting GNU Radio demo, heard about a lot of other interesting work (Dan Kaminsky's Paketto Keiretsu, for example), and had some neat conversations with people. I got to hang out with Robyn Wagner (now "Esq."!) and Lucky Green, and play a bit of Scrabble with the former. I also saw Ben Laurie, visiting from far away, and talked with him and Raph Levien about a lot of interesting issues.

I went to dinner with an extremely geeky group on the first evening of the conference, and got to ask them a question about attacks on watermark detectors. The group came up with a great solution, which I might write up as a Cruelty to Analog post or try to publish as a paper. I also heard a lot about capability systems and (as on other days of the conference) found myself repeatedly impressed by how eclectic the interests of many programmers turn out to be.

The best part of CodeCon might well have been the opportunities for conversation with such a fascinating group of people. It was a really good conference.

I passed up an opportunity to go snowshoeing in the mountains in order to attend CodeCon, but I still ended up completely exhausted at the end of it.

Microsoft announced its Rights Management Server (or Rights Management Services, which is the platform the Rights Management Server is part of) last week, two days after telling us about it in a conference call. I'm writing something up about this, which I'll publish at my EFF site shortly (and link to from here).

Everyone is finding it amusing, or peculiar, that Microsoft now has a DRM product called RMS. While the capabilities and architecture of Microsoft RMS aren't precisely the same as Richard's depiction, there is some overlap with the functionality of the system described in Richard's 1997 science fiction story about digital rights management, published before the concept was widely known or widely implemented. (I think the story is better without the "Author's Note", but maybe that's just because I'm following DRM pretty closely. That story might be part of the inspiration for Kathryn Myronuk's clever slogan "Reading is a right, not a feature", which I've been quoting in e-mail since a little after Dmitry was arrested.)

What English word has six consonants in a row?

I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal about Microsoft Rights Management Services (subscription required, but the text is available in the Cryptography mailing list archive)

An employee, for example, might be ordered to do something illegal in an e-mail that effectively self-destructs. "If the person doesn't do the thing, he can be fired," Mr. Schoen said. "If he wants to prove the boss had asked him to do something illegal, there is no record of it."

and in the L.A. Times I was quoted about the ARDG

Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Federation, a group that advocates civil liberties online, said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the burden on Hollywood to protect its programs. But the studios' anti-piracy initiatives would shift the burden onto manufacturers so that "whenever you make anything technical, you have to go and ask them, 'How do I design this so that it protects your interests?'"

I saw Brian LaMacchia at the Berkeley DRM conference today and got to talk to him a little more about Microsoft RMS. I commended him on admitting the existence of attacks against Microsoft's DRM, something many other DRM vendors refuse to do. (Whenever I talk to a Microsoft technologist about a Microsoft DRM technology and propose an attack, the technologist always replies "Yup, that attack would work!"; do you know any other DRM vendor who'll react that way?)

Mr. Rogers died today; he was 74.

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.

(Fred Rogers, March 20, 1928-February 27, 2003, quoted in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984), n. 27 (citations omitted))

I've long wondered what he meant by his proviso "in a healthy way"; I ought to have written to ask him. It reminds me of Locke's proviso:

Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this "labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

(John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, para. 26)

What they have in common is that it's very easy to remember the general statement and to forget about the proviso or qualification. For Mr. Rogers, it was "in a healthy way"; for Locke, it was "where there is enough, and as good left in common for others". It's hard to imagine that either man would have wanted us to pass idly by his qualification. To Mr. Rogers, "in a healthy way" would surely have been a central part of his message.

I remember when Mr. Rogers ate some tapioca pudding on his show, because one of his neighbors had shared it with him. I was really jealous because Mr. Rogers got to have tapioca pudding, and I (at home) didn't get any. I thought Mr. Rogers was really lucky to have such friendly neighbors who wanted to give him tapioca pudding. But he was lucky in more ways than that; he was lucky to have the opportunity to help interpret the world to generations of young people.

Another time he asked his cameraman to turn the camera around and show us the studio (with its lights, cameras, scaffolding, and staff members). That was a shock; it was fascinating and horrifying; it was generous and courageous; it was a frame-breaking experience which set me up to enjoy Hofstadter and, maybe, in a small way, to weather other disillusionments.

I once wrote a fan letter to Mr. Rogers (long before I'd heard of the Betamax doctrine or knew that I had him to thank for it). I drew him a terrible picture of a fish and told him that I loved his show. He wrote back, thanking me effusively, and included a drawing of his own (a caboose, if I remember correctly, drawn with somewhat greater artistic skill).

Now sweatered Rogers, each and every day,
Was kind and gentle -- "in a healthy way".
He'll come no more on the T.V.:
Timor mortis conturbat me.

We'll miss you, Mr. Rogers.

Early this morning, Quinn gave birth to her daughter Ada. Congratulations to Quinn and her family!

As you can see from the link above, Quinn and her family decided to post frequent updates during the experience, and nearly instantaneous baby pictures of Ada.

I'm guessing I'm sick. I've been exhausted and a little dizzy for about a week, and there's a flu going around EFF (but my symptoms seem pretty different from anybody else's).

I got to go to the Berkeley DRM conference and Stanford spectrum conference (thanks to the organizers of each). They were very interesting, and I got my first glimpse of Marybeth Peters.

I also got to see Aaron Swartz and Bob Frankston, the latter preaching his very seductive gospel of connectivity.

Why, Bob asks, are CD sales down?

Because of Internet piracy! answers a hypothetical recording executive.

No, says Bob, because of cell phones. People used to buy CDs for entertainment while they were going somewhere, in a car or while walking around. Now they would rather talk to friends. If they have the ability to talk to friends, they find that more interesting than listening to somebody else.

Everyone nods.

Also at the spectrum conference, Judge Alex Kozinski served on a moot court panel and kept explaining that "property owners are very grabby".

I think I've understood the so-called "spectrum commons" argument (which may be misnamed), and I'm trying to write something up about it.

Even if you have a cell phone, which I don't, it's still worth buying a music CD now and then, at least if the CD is by Dar Williams.

Ben took me out to Borders in Union Square, where Dar Williams was performing and signing copies of her new CD The Beauty of the Rain. We each bought a copy and got it signed (and got to talk to Dar for about a minute).

Far and away the best song is "The One Who Knows", which is just lovely. (I would hold it up with "How Can I Help You To Say Goodbye?" by Patti Loveless, which has a sadder perspective on a related theme.) "The Beauty of the Rain" is pretty good too. In general, I don't think this CD is as consistently good as The Green World, which was a great triumph.

The Free Software Foundation has shipped its LNX-BBC-based membership cards! All of us at the LNX-BBC project are very proud.

If you join the FSF, you can get one. Even Jon Johansen is an LNX-BBC user!

In a profile of Ed Felten, Jack Valenti says:

What does breaking the code have to do with research? Research for what? Are you researching cloning, or the laws of physics? We're not dealing with Boyle's Law here . . . we're dealing with trying to protect a piece of property, a feature film, from being illegally stolen.

I gave the 15th anniversary address at SVLUG, which is odd, because Linux is only 12 years old. My talk was called "The Empire Strikes Back: Constraining Free Software Development" (a title partly due to Eben Moglen), and Biella, Praveen, and Riana came out to hear me along with about a hundred other people.

Several people in the audience were "TV people" and were quite familiar with the issues surrounding ATSC. It was funny afterward to hear one of them complain to the others about what a bad idea it had been to add color to NTSC.

I used MagicPoint for my talk. I was a little annoyed by MagicPoint's handling of line wrapping, but in general it seems like a convenient way to do a presentation with free software. It would probably be difficult for people to tell that it's not PowerPoint.

Who knows a convenient way to convert an ATSC transport stream to something more readily displayed by common PC software? Would you use HDTVtoMPEG2?

I'm still sick.

I got diagnosed with something called viral labyrinthitis, a kind of inner ear infection. Some web sites suggest that it can cause permanent damage, but my symptoms are a lot milder than what those sites describe, and the doctor predicted I'd feel better next week (hopefully in time for the IETF meeting).

Via Electrolite: veterans try to explain what war is like.

When I saw Bowling for Columbine, I felt sick and had to leave. I felt almost the same way reading that article.

I'm still sick with my viral labyrinthitis. I'm tempted to read Borges in honor of it.

I missed a protest march because I'm still sick.

I read three stories by Borges -- "The House of Asterion", "Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth", and "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" -- on account of my labyrinthitis.

I'm still sick. I've been sick for almost two weeks. I wish I'd get better soon.

Riana came to visit and played Boggle with me, which cheered me up a bit. I spent an hour at the IETF meeting, but found it difficult because I continued to feel dizzy. There's a lot I'd like to hear and see at the IETF this week, so I hope I hold out.

Even when I'm sick, I'm a pretty good Boggle player.

I signed up for EMusic's service. They have the right idea (no DRM, immediate downloads) but unfortunately too few artists and tracks available. Obviously some of the bigger labels, or publishers, or both, said something like "how can you imagine putting tracks up for sale with no DRM?" [even though that's what CDs are] or "how can you pay us such low royalties compared to CD?" or just "why should we bother to sell things on-line?".

But EMusic, if only for respecting our first sale rights, deserves our support. (Beyond that, I'm starting to suspect that they're exactly the way I would like to buy music -- except I'd like it to be available in Ogg Vorbis format too. They could offer MP3 and Ogg downloads side-by-side, and give you a discount on your subscription if you chose Ogg downloads instead of MP3. It's cheaper for them, because they don't have to pay the MP3 royalties.)

I know over a dozen people who've said "I want to pay the artists, but I want an immediate download of an unencrypted track, and only the track I want". Maybe I know atypical people, but I know lots of people who could make good EMusic customers.

Maybe I'll write to artists I like and suggest that they either offer their own MP3 and Ogg sales or sign on with EMusic. (That's assuming they don't have contracts with labels which would forbid that, which is a huge and totally unwarranted assumption.)

I'm feeling a little better -- more tired than dizzy today -- and spent a few hours at the IETF meeting (ipr and sip WGs). But when I told Helen that I was sick, she said "I suggest reading a good fiction book", so I took her advice and bought William Gibson's Pattern Recognition at Borderlands and read it almost straight through.

I found the set-up much more exciting than the conclusion, but Gibson is still an enthralling writer and didn't butcher the technology as badly as he might have. The well-connected NSA agent in the trailer part was a bit much, though.

Pattern Recognition has a properly blood-curdling (or chilling) villain.

Even though my labyrinthitis may be on the way out, my arms have gotten really sore again.

I ate lunch from Tu Lan during the break in the IETF meeting, and it was delicious.

Cory takes me to task for suggesting yesterday that EMusic needs to support Ogg Vorbis. He argues that it would be more expensive for them in various ways (including storage costs) and that they're unlikely themselves to be paying any per-track royalties on MP3 downloads.

But in fact, the MP3 patent licensors are charging a percentage royalty on "related revenue" and EMusic could actually save money by allowing us an Ogg Vorbis download option instead of MP3-only. (That's assuming that the marginal cost of offering this option exceed 2% of their revenues, and that they can find an accounting model which distinguishes "MP3-related" and "non-MP3-related" revenues in their business.)

That 2% of related revenue would probably be defined as "reasonable and non-discriminatory" by most standards bodies. As one person commented in the ipr WG this morning, a little 2% here and 2% there soon adds up to 50% (if you were using 25 technologies with such patent claims against them).

I started to write a rant about patents here, and the collective action problem, but really, in this particular case, none of that is very relevant. Many existing businesses which are paying the 2% MP3 tax can probably realize substantial savings by the incremental step of offering Ogg downloads and streams in parallel to their existing MP3 downloads and streams. They don't have to stop offering MP3s. They can pass some of the savings along to their customers. (E.g., for every Ogg you download, you earn credits which you can redeem for extra bonus tracks.) If this were done, it could provide a specific and totally non-ideological way that Oggs could become appealing to random music fans, which would also facilitate support for the format in players.

Only a few people, like Ed Felten and Larry Lessig, have been able to communicate particularly effectively with "outsiders" about what is at stake in the current copyright wars. And even they, when they give speeches, are mostly addressing people who already have at least a passing interest.

Fritz Attaway testified last week that most people would not even notice if the broadcast flag mandate were adopted. While I question this (I think they would feel the impacts, but not know to attribute them to the mandate, any more than most DMCA opponents know to blame Bruce Lehman for that statte), I do sense a serious division between, say, slashdot readers and the general public, or LawMeme readers and the general public, or Freedom to Tinker readers and the general public, or Crypto-Gram readers and the general public.

This was a gap that Cindy Cohn bridged, and everyone working with her bridged, with great success in the Bernstein litigation: even though the "general public" was not thereby enlightened, some corners of the Federal judiciary were enlightened, with extremely remarkable results.

Do you remember when operating system distributors in the U.S. didn't bundle PGP and SSH? I do -- it was five years ago. Thanks, Cindy!

Meanwhile, and famously, the entertainment industries are seizing a vast control over the kind of technology that's readily available to the general public. (Fritz explained at the Berkeley DRM conference that that was all the control they expected to be able to get.) At the same time, people who oppose this are spending hours and hours talking to each other. I'm doing that right this moment. I'm writing a complaint about what Bruce Lehman did to free expression, what he did to free software, what he did to research, and, as Will Rodger observed, what has happened to "intellectual honesty" about technology.

Not only will Bruce Lehman never read this complaint, but this complaint can never be expected to be interesting to anyone outside a circle of people who are already mad at Bruce Lehman.

I have a skepticism of the approach that grounds outreach in "consumer expectations", partly because, as Fred observed, we can't expect in detail things that haven't been invented yet, else they would have been. What we mean by "innovation" is that something we can't identify and haven't experienced is going to be found and is going to be of interest to us -- a peculiar faith indeed, and more surprising than the monument "to the Unknown God".

There are deeper reasons to be concerned about "consumer expectations", and the deepest of these is that they are so malleable. If CEA were to spend a billion dollars on TV advertising to say that you ought to expect to be able to do something, a lot of people would expect to be able to do it. Conversely, without marketing, or in the presence of a sufficiently clever campaign in the other direction, it would never occur to most people that they could "expect" to be able to do the things that new technologies could in principle enable.

In fact, this situation is constantly present outside of the copyright wars. We can do lots of things that we don't do, and there are constantly enormous struggles to redefine "normal" in people's minds. I'm alternately encouraged and terrified by the power of culture and popular opinion, since the world and human civilizations could logically be so different from what they are today.

As I was recently discussing with Rob Hamadi, and as Whit Diffie pointed out last year, we have expectations based on prior experience, but that doesn't really constitute an independent standard for anything. If we've been exposed to a particular lifestyle or technology, we may consider it normal and appropriate; if we haven't, we may not know what we're missing. If Universal City Studios had prevailed against Sony, the world and culture might have been poorer, but there probably wouldn't have been riots in the streets. (This is one of the frustrations of MPAA's argument that the popularity of DVD proves anything. As a technical matter, we could have had things much, much more capable and flexible; as a legal matter, we may yet someday. Already, implementers like the Videolan team in France are demonstrating some of the innovation which is possible outside the constraints of a DVD CCA license. But there are no riots against DVD CCA -- just a few small pickets -- because most people are usually prepared to choose the path of least resistance in the marketplace.)

And all this gets back to the observation about the gap, the gap which means that only people who already agree with me (or maybe one or two who are paid to disagree) are likely ever to read these paragraphs at all. I'm reminded of something I've quoted a number of times before:

Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."

(Cicero, de Re Publica, VI, 20)

The key part of Cicero's image for me is the "raris et angustis in locis, quasi maculis, vastas solitudines interiectas [esse]", that they live in isolated and narrow places, practically spots on the face of the Earth, and vast deserts stretch between them. So we have human habitation reduced to little dots on a ball. Practically pinpricks on the surface of a ball.

Demographically, that's not quite true, if it ever was, and physically now we have the ability to come across the cosmos in a little under an hour (well, almost!). We can even read the regular commentary of an Iraqi living in Baghdad. But how many people are doing that?

I have this strong sense of a general lack of outreach and a general insularity -- maybe I should say "macularity". We have the technical infrastructure to talk to millions of people, but somehow lack the means of getting their attention.

I went and spent hours two weeks ago giving a detailed presentation about tech mandates at SVLUG, which may have been useful in the sense that many people in the audience may have been able to do something with that information, but I suspect every single one of them already opposed tech mandates and anticircumvention and already knew what both of those things are. If I walked down the street in the Mission, could I find anyone (except that one guy in a Debian t-shirt over there) who knows what anticircumvention is or even what the difference between a copyright, a patent, and a trademark is?

Fritz is right to say that people in that situation won't know the broadcast flag is there, but wrong to suggest that they won't be affected by it.

In the past, I've thought that it's a serious problem simply that technical skills are today such an unusual and specialized thing to possess -- and that the concepts of programming and communications technology are not yet public knowledge. I've been influenced by the "literacy" metaphor to say that today we have a problem in that most Americans know how to read and write English but not yet how to read and write computer software. And there is in principle no reason to believe today that people who can be taught to read English cannot be taught to read Python. There are just enormous practical barriers to actually making this happen.

Most of these barriers are themselves cultural, not physical. In other times and places, people have learned skills which are much more different from what they routinely learn here and now than is computer programming! In Soviet Russia, the level of understanding of mathematics and physics demanded of ordinary students -- and, as far as I can tell at this tremendous remove, actually exhibited by them -- was astonishing.

But of course, it's one thing to insist that 70% of Americans, or Chinese, could be literate enough to write their own computer software (or that 70% of some population could be literate enough to write their own letters) and another thing to try to imagine how that kind of literacy could actually be developed, and exactly what else we would have to give up to make it happen. I could try to start teaching a weekend class, which, absent some kind of incredible marketing genius, would presumably attract exactly those children who already self-identify as technical. Perhaps they would be the proverbial "low-hanging fruit", and perhaps that means that this is exactly the right idea as a first step.

I do have a fear, which I've expressed many times here, that as long as programming is seen as esoteric, difficult, magical, and to be performed only by specialists, there will never develop a relationship to technology which makes it a subject of useful substantive discussion rather than nervous jokes by most people. And as long as software is seen as a commodity, delivered in a box and opaquely, it will never be widely recognized as speech deserving useful first amendment protection even if someone's economic interests are at risk. It seems essential to me that there should be a broad transformation in which harnessing the remarkable power of computing to any individual's purposes be made just as routine, and just as insisted upon, as literacy in natural languages.

Then we could forget, as programmers all seem to have forgotten, that spoken language predated written language, or that written language was a product of someone's conscious effort; we could rediscover these things, and be astonished by them, and speculate on their implications.

I would welcome other people's suggestions on what might be possible either to promote any of these transformations or to try to deal with the macularity problem and stop everyone from preaching to the choir all the time. Wars ought to be a sobering reminder that a failure of effective communication doesn't just mean bad political outcomes at the ordinary scale, with a loss of freedom that you can nonetheless survive -- it means children torn into little pieces in front of their families, prisoners raped and tortured, and everyone nearby breathing poisons even if only conventional weapons are used. It means the original sense of collateral damage: not lawful copying prevented in the pursuit of suppressing unlawful copying, but civilians blown up in the pursuit of destroying military targets. And all that means, as Cindy would be quite literally the first person to remind me, that how many people learn to program is not the most important issue in the world.

After over four weeks of being sick, I'm finally starting to feel better.

I've had a lot of strange dreams while I've been sick. A few days ago, I had a dream which involved attending something at the Ninth Circuit.

I woke up from the middle of that dream, and, half-asleep, wondered if the dream would pick up where it left off if I were to go back to sleep.

The answer came to me: "No, silly! You can't just fall asleep and go directly to the Ninth Circuit! Your dream has to start out in the District Court, and then you have to appeal it."

I saw the Custom Made Theatre Company's production of Animal Farm. In the program appeared this quotation:

You must understand, sir, a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time -- we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will be one of those.

(Arthur Miller, The Crucible)

Somehow I feel like this is a quotation worthy of being letterpress-printed on fine paper and framed, in a typeface with serifs. If I were in touch with Willow and Willow had access to a press, I might ask her -- she did the beautiful "quæcumque enim scripta sunt ad nostram doctrinam scripta sunt" which hangs on my wall, and even thought to use the ligature "æ" instead of "ae".

Custom Made chose to set Animal Farm in America instead of England, so that the revolutionary song was "Beasts of America" instead of "Beasts of England", and the later anthem "Animal Farm" ("never through me shalt thou come to harm") was sung to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner"!

They may have been reminded of the Arthur Miller quotation by a piece Arthur Miller wrote in the New York Times on February 23 in which he quoted his own play.

I saw The Hours in Oakland with Sunah. It was beautiful and very, very sad.

I'm a sucker for parallel-lives and parallel-worlds movies. I wrote about that a while ago (giving examples like Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors). I love that device: you could probably make a really bad movie with a parallel-lives story, and I would probably like it a lot anyway. But The Hours is not that bad movie.

The biggest trouble with it that I know of is the portrayal of Vanessa Bell. The movie seemed to make her out to be very superficial, and I don't know why that should be.

We saw the movie at the Parkway in Oakland. Sunah wrote

What is great about the Parkway?

All of this seemed to be true. The Parkway has a whole little restaurant inside, so you can get dinner and a movie at the same time.

I need to get out and explore more.

How far ahead of the unclassified world is the classified world?

By 1981 or earlier there was a whole classified literature on compromising emanations, yet the unclassified world -- the "open literature" -- is only starting to examine this subject in earnest now. (Wim van Eck's paper on emanations was published in 1985, four years after that, but later FOIA requests suggest van Eck's work only scratched the surface -- the state of the military art was much broader than what van Eck referred to.)

British researchers invented public-key cryptography years before Diffie and Hellman (and also figured out RSA before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman). But the public only found out about this recently, because the invention was classified.

Civilians are starting to get good satellite photos, but how many years behind military spy satellites are they?

I've been to two incredibly good Japanese restaurants recently. I'd been to each before, but the new visits reminded me of just how good they are.

I went with Praveen to Ryowa Ramen (2068 University Avenue, Berkeley), which has the best ramen I've ever had. (My fellow California loyalty oath opponent Jimmer Endres introduced me to Ryowa.) And then I went with Ren to Minako Organic Sushi (2154 Mission Street, San Francisco), which has the best sushi I've ever had. My opinions on Japanese food may be perceived as eccentric because I don't eat fish, and some people can't imagine how you could have a proper opinion on Japanese food without eating fish.

But actually, I think my first meal at Minako was the best meal I've ever had -- from any cuisine.

Speaking of great restaurants, I also went with Praveen and friends to the Indian Oven, which has been rated as the best Indian restaurant in San Francisco. It was also excellent, and I'm tempted to go there for my birthday.

My ear infection is finally gone. That's a relief; I was feeling sick for over four weeks, which contributed to the lack of diary entries here. I'll try to get back in the habit of writing more regularly.

Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of arm pain again. It's funny how problems can seem to line up in series, so that they're experienced one at a time (seriatim, as the Latin adverb-wielding lawyers put it).

I visited Kragen and Beatrice and tried out wedding cake (remember: choose the strawberry!) and got to meet some of their friends and make pirate jokes.

We had a meeting at the headquarters of AC Transit in Oakland to talk about privacy issues in the new TransLink system. If Lee doesn't mind, I may publish some notes soon. Transit privacy is an interesting issue which is becoming more so as more transit operators accept more payments with stored-value instruments linked to large databases.

I went to the RSA Conference and saw various people I knew, and got to talk DRM with several interested strangers. I also had the latest of my meetings with Microsoft on trusted computing, had an informal meeting with AMD, and resolved to finish a paper on the subject. In other RSA news, I got to ride a Segway scooter for the first time, thanks to a company using it as a booth attraction. It is a wonderful feeling. (I don't see it as a healthy replacement for a bicycle, or a practical replacement for a car, but it's fun!)

Supposedly I'm going to get e-mail with a digital picture of myself riding the Segway.

While I was in the South of Market, I dropped by a convenience store where I used to shop, and bought a few things for old time's sake. I told the owner about moving away from the South of Market area because of the rents. During the boom, I told him, they tried to increase our rent to $3,000 a month, or was it $4,000? The store owner said he thought those rents were back down around $2,000 now.

It's sad to wander around there and see the CoffeeNet closed down (and even painted white instead of purple, the only signs of its former glory being some purple spots on the sidewalk where the paint had dripped) and the Something Wonderful gone, too.

I was astonished the other day by the following experience:

I booted an LNX-BBC test image and started a test download of something using BitTorrent. BitTorrent was downloading into a RAM disk (actually a tmpfs, which is kind of like a dynamically-sized RAM disk) with a maximum size of about 128 MB.

I expected the download to run out of space at some point, since the file I was trying to download was about 1 GB, much larger than the RAM disk. After a little while, I went to check on it by looking at how much disk space had been used.

The system said that only about 50 MB had been downloaded. Then I remembered that BitTorrent preallocates space for the files it downloads. I couldn't understand how the download had even been able to start. The BitTorrent FAQ says that

BitTorrent pre-allocates the entire file when your download begins, then writes in pieces in random order as it gets them. As a result the file jumps to its full size immediately. BitTorrent will tell you when the download is complete.

If this was the case, how could a BitTorrent download of a 1 GB file even start on a 128 MB RAM disk? Furthermore, how could the system claim that only 50 MB had been used?

My confusion was compounded when I went to look at the size of the preallocated file, and ls reported it as occupying 1 GB.

Nick, who was visiting, explained that Unix supports sparse files and a file's size in the filesystem may be substantially larger than the amount of space it's actually taking up. When BitTorrent allocates a complete file's size on a Unix filesystem, it will only use a trivial amount of actual storage, and the amount of storage used will increase as the download progresses.

I found this totally astonishing. I'm familiar with sparse files, but I always thought they were a VMS thing and never realized that they've been a standard part of Unix for a long time. I don't know how I missed that.

The basic consequence of this is that the file size reported by ls -l can be totally different from the file size reported by du. Blocks not yet written will just not be allocated on disk, and reading them will return zeroes.

Here are four problems:

  1. you have a collection of strings G which were generated by some unknown formal grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
  2. you have a collection of strings G which were generated by some unknown formal grammar and a collection F which could not be generated by that grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
  3. you have a formal grammar G and a string S; determine whether S could have been generated by G
  4. you have a computer program P and a string S; determine whether, for some input, S could have been generated by P

(Another twist is to replace "grammar" by "Unix regular expression" and "generated by" with "matches".)

I would find these problems more straightforward to talk about if I had taken a compilers course, or an automata course, but I never got that far in CS. I did study formal languages only briefly, and I once read Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, which talks about the different classes of automata.

(1) and (2) are easy because you can just say that the grammar is ( string1 | string2 | string3 | string4 | ... ). This is a trivial solution and not very useful -- it has no economy and no predictive power. It's tantamount to saying that the laws of physics are "All observed phenomena occur and all non-observed phenomena are impossible". (What's amusing is that this isn't even true, partly because some observed phenomena do not actually occur.) It would be nice to have a more interesting solution.

(4) is as hard as the Halting Problem, but it is solvable for some programs. You can see quickly that it isn't solvable in general (even if you didn't know that the Halting Problem is unsolvable and if you just had an intuition that there is no magical way of solving all math problems with the same technique). You could just write a program which verifies whether something is an exception to some conjecture. If you can tell whether "yes" is ever an output of that program, you can tell immediately whether the conjecture is true.

(3) is pretty interesting, and it can actually be solved. The regular expression version is a standard part of many programming languages. The efficiency of a solution is also an interesting question.

I regret that I didn't get to go on this hike, because it was beautiful.

The recordings on Out There Live are very good. Some of them are better than the studio recordings on some other Dar Williams CDs. I have to recommend this CD very highly.

I went to Stacey's with Zack, at the end of a fairly unsuccessful series of errands.

I got the 2nd edition of Friedl's regular expression book from O'Reilly, which might shed some light on my problem (3) above, in that it discusses implementation issues related to RE matching. Friedl's book is one of the most useful books ever published by O'Reilly, but it's not particularly well-known. But it is a triumph.

I also got a Chomsky book on the Vietnam War because of the publisher's successful attempt to suggest that it had a new relevance or resonance today.

I also got a copy of Practical Cryptography, the latest in the series of "Schneier books that criticize earlier Schneier books". (So Bruce Schneier is like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cliff Stoll -- interesting company.)

"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you say it?"

"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?"

"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."

(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)

(Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)

Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.54)

I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder, although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a ladder.

(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel")

If, like me, you hadn't noticed sparse files before, and you want to see a large sparse file, do 

#!/usr/bin/env python

foo = open("sparse", "w")
foo.write("sparse")
foo.seek(2 ** 30)
foo.write("file")
foo.close()

Codd's tuple-logic vision brings
"A world made of facts, and not of things";
And now he joins the ranks of history:
Timor mortis conturbat me.

The Emerging Man party in San Jose was among the geekiest events I have ever attended, and naturally great fun.

Hooray for Emerging Man!

In a rare moment of good news on copyright law, MusicCity and Grokster were held not to be subject to secondary liability for copyright infringement based on their publication of file-sharing software; the court reaffirmed the Betamax doctrine and recognized that software publishers are like VCR and photocopier manufacturers.

I worked on that case -- spending a whole day in a cage to protect others' freedom -- but most of the credit on our side goes to our lawyers, especially Fred von Lohmann. Congratulations!

I just met Ada Norton, and she is cute!

I had a great time seeing Alex, with whom I worked on the Morpheus case when he was at Wilson Sonsini and they were co-counsel.

My father and my stepmother each just sent me a wonderful thing. My father sent me my grandmother's copy of a piano score for Mozart's Requiem. ("Klavier-Auszug", or "Piano excerpt".)

The publisher of that score, Edition Peters/C.F. Peters Musikverlag, is still around, and still selling the Requiem.

I have high-resolution scans of a few pages linked above, but here's a lower-resolution version of the title page:

I like Mozart's Requiem a lot; people who know me might recall that I named my computer after it! I never knew that my grandmother liked it too.

I never really got to meet her, since she died when I was an infant. She was a pianist. If she'd lived longer, maybe she would have played music for me, or even taught me to play the piano.

My stepmother sent me a beautifully hand-decorated t-shirt. The t-shirt includes a patch which reproduces a picture of me from when I was eight and dressed up as the Rambam for a pageant. It turns out that that was the first time I was ever photographed with a beard!

(It's easy to find out what the Rambam looked like if you're curious. I didn't look a whole lot like him -- more like an eight-year-old in a costume.)

My mom's putting on a major Virginia Woolf conference at Smith College in June -- it looks like a lot of fun!

If you know any humanities fans or Western Massachusetts fans, let them know.