A new beancounter version has been uploaded to Debian, CPAN and my beancounter pages here; the Freshmeat beancounter record has also been updated. This version contains a few fixes and enhancements: we can now use FX data backpopulation via the PACIFIC server at the Sauder School of Business at UBC in Vancouver. Also, a new command 'lspositions' was added to show non-aggregated positions; thanks to Robert Schmied, we now catch (bad) market caps in trillions (as sometimes seen from the LSE); we updated the default currency mappings for Yahoo!'s semi-broken FX data service and make a few code cleanups and fixes here and there.

So, I've arrived at LCA (linux.conf.au) 2006, in Dunedin, New Zealand. You're going to be getting a lot of these blog posts over the next few days, from me and other people, but it's only a week-long conference, so weather the storm. Plane trip over was... well, it was a plane trip. I can be thankful that I didn't lose my luggage (as one bloke has already had done to him). Beyond that, all aircraft interiors are identical, so no need to discuss that. At the stopover in Christchurch, we all headed for the bar (as geeks tend to do). I handed over a brightly coloured note in the local currency in exchange for my beer, and I get my change. What is part of my change? An Australian 10c piece. <sigh> Mad props to the conference organisers so far -- one of the organisers was at the gate (the only gate) at Dunedin airport to pick up speakers, but he gladly took us ruffian attendees into town, saving us all a few bucks in shuttle bus fairs. It was a nice guided tour in, as well, showing us all of the useful sights (like the pubs, 24 hour minimart, and eateries). He also dropped us off at the registration desk, so I got my conference schwag already (see my separate review of the schwag). Dinner involved walking into the octagon (a loop street with, unsurprisingly, 8 sides) and finding a place that serves you raw steak and a hot rock. It's like a portable BBQ construction kit. Amazingly tasty. We're going back tomorrow night for more of the same, as it's so tasty and fun -- you are legitimately allowed, even encouraged to play with your food. I also got a "barmate" (don't mispronounce that in front of your significant other) -- a yard-high glass cylinder with a tap at the bottom, filled with your choice of beer. Much merriment ensued amongst the assembled geeks, as we all plied ourselves with Speight's Gold Ale. I think it's about 8-10 pints worth of beer all up. Value. No Internet access yet, as they're still working out the kinks with the special conference network. I hope it's all up and running by tomorrow morning -- my mail queue is starting to seriously bulge with all of this outgoing mail.

It's a conference tradition that you get a pile of schwag at registration -- some sort of collection of toys, brochures, and other miscellania to remember the conference by. Or something. LCA is typically characterised by a pretty good schwag haul -- I can't think of an LCA I've been to (all 2 of them up 'til now) where I've been disappointed with the schwag. This year is no exception. The organisers have clearly gone to a lot of effort to dredge up all sorts of geek-friendly gear to dish out. For example, the conference bag -- it's a laptop-friendly backpack-type apparatus. Lots of pockets, shoulder strap, the whole kaboodle. Very tidy. It's a pity I've already got my Targus carry-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink model, because this bag would make a very nice alternative to that. The stuff inside the bag is just as impressive. There's another retractable network cable, like last year (a bit of a pity, perhaps, but this one is Cat-6 rated, for extra... something), as well as a tiny little 1-AAA torch. There's the usual pad/pen, tourist detritus, and conference program. More interestingly, there's a very shiny yo-yo (puppy dogs, beware!) and (possibly most importantly) a keyring-mountable bottle opener. There's also what is possibly the world's smallest frisbee (less than two inches in diameter -- as one of the organisers said, "Throw it at a speaker you don't like, because it sure as hell doesn't fly"), a laser-cut placemat (tres cool), and a chunk of chocolate (because we're about 5 minutes walk from the local cadbury's factory). Finally, there is the T-shirt. Loved ones will be pleased to hear that the T-shirt this year is basic black, meaning that you won't have to worry about being seen in public with a red-clad Matt. (For those of you watching at home, my wife isn't keen on red coloured clothing for some reason, so last year's conference T-shirt was not a big hit). The speakers are going to have to work hard to top the schwag pile. I await their response with baited breath.

My head hurts, but it the evil is (nearly) done: I have implemented a telnet server/client that is reentrant and does not use any C library functions. I even managed to cut down on the use of pointers, there is only one ugly case left, where it was really unavoidable, let's just hope the function call gets inlined properly, but I'm not sure gcc will notice that it doesn't need to take the address of the variable then, and places the expression back into a register where it belongs. Alfie, thanks for reminding me of the concert. Oh, and if anyone cares, I'm also going to be at the Eläkel&

ObDebian

Remove dpkg-sig signatures from .deb files by opening it in vim, deleting everything starting from _gpgbuilder (or what you've signed it with), optionally ":set noeol bin", save it, and update the md5sum and filesize in the .changes file. Done so with xblast and xmms-sid because the update was fixing rather important problems which couldn't wait for the archive patch that will allow dpkg-sig signatures again.

ObNonDebian

Winderschlapfn and Corry got released. Get your copies now!

ObConcert

Die Krupps are on tour again! Going to visit them on thursay! Yeah!!

ObFTWCA

For Those Who Care About Multiple Signatures: The second signature on Joey's d-d-a mail was not broken, the inner signature was mine. It was a statement that we both are to blame for it.

ObXMas

Late, but still worth it: Grow Ornament (requires flash)

ObListening

Wir sind Helden on my:

ObMyMiniDj

Am in contact with a person who managed to reverse engineer the database format used by My Mini DJ. He's working on a patch for amarok to update the database, and I hope he'll share the format soonish so I can do a curses app for managing it.

ObCinema

"Organize isler" in turkish with subtitles. Maybe a bit brutal partly, but great and funny story. Definitely worth watching.

ObICQ

No, I'm not interested in random chats by bored horny people!

ObWork

The transition from bind9 (no debpkg link; not because it's not working currently, but because it was running on FreeBSD) to pdns is underway.

ObNonWork

Planeshift: I'm planing on fixing #284398. Might need something free like re-flex for its datafiles to be able to go to main, though.

ObBlog

I hope to blog more regularly.... *sighs*

This weekend, Terah and I drove up to Nebraska to visit Cliff and Marilyn. We have never met them before, or even talked to them on the phone. We just know them from blogs -- Marty (Cliff's nephew) introduced us to them. We really had a blast -- quite a fun weekend, and we met lots of interesting Morrows. I supose there's always something unexpected that happens when you visit people you've never met. With this visit, it was singing in a Baptist choir. Terah said, "Well, we've never even been to a Baptist service in English, but sure, sounds like fun!" I think it took Cliff about 2 seconds to decide we should both sing in the choir once he realized we're in our church choir back in Kansas. I suppose that's risk you run when you go and visit a choir director. Off course it's all fun with Cliff. We really enjoyed it, and Cliff & Marilyn's daughter did a fantastic job on the piano. When we first arrived at Cliff & Marilyn's place, the first thing Terah noticed was that Marilyn had set out a giant Hershey's kiss and a Dr. Pepper for her! This was great. Terah's still talking about it, and is very impressed with a solid piece of chocolate that large. At dinner on Saturday, I think Cliff and Terah were having a bit of a competition to see who could have the driest sense of humor and the most sarcasm. Maybe it was just a little Kansas bias, but I think Terah gave him quite the run for his money, and even edged him out by a bit. Terah was also something of a celebrity around the Morrows, in one way anyway. It seems that, one way or another, almost everyone had heard about her carefully-planned underwear rotation scheme. And had gotten quite a good chuckle about it -- as well they should. Cliff asked us to bring some photos of our home and family with us. I think he might be regretting that now. I downloaded as many as I could fit onto a laptop -- about 3000 -- to give us plenty to look at. Of course, we didn't look at 3000 photos, but you just never know what might come up. Cliff and Marilyn did a wonderful job of not falling asleep anyway. We also got to see their photos, and they have some spectacular ones. Marilyn enjoys stereo photography and has some incredible stereo photos. I especially enjoyed the pictures of Germany. Marty's parents were also around this weekend and were full of interesting stories. His mom makes a wonderful cheese spread. I think I need to have a putty knife to spread it on nice and thick. It's the sort of cheese spread that's good enough to layer on about twice as thick as the cracker. The cracker is just sort of a cheese delivery device. I kept hearing that Marty had told the Morrows all about me. They all claimed that Marty said only good things about me. But we all know how the Morrows like to tell stories. So I made sure to get a few about Marty before we left, just in case. Don't worry, they're all good, Marty. After church Sunday, there was a carry-in meal. We knew about this in advance, and Terah brought some of her famous chocolate-cherry cookies along from Kansas. Cliff later admitted to stealing "no more than one" during the sermon. But he couldn't quite say it with a straight face. Terah's cookies were a hit, though -- it seemed that lots of people were trying to figure out who brought them. A few enterprising people pulled out the lid from the pan, but of course seeing Terah's name there didn't really help all that much. I think she promised recipes to about half a dozen people. We went geocaching Sunday afternoon. Cliff, Marilyn, and their grandson came along. We found the Summit Lake #1 cache with their grandson -- it was his first time geocaching, and I think he enjoyed it. Well, that was a long post. I'll probably remember more to write about later in the week, and stay tuned for photos!

Sorry. Couldn't resist. Following on from my previous look at XTech proposals, I wanted to comment on one of the hot topics contributed to the Applications track. While this track will push all the buttons (we've got Rails, RSS, web services, content management and more) one of the really striking things was the number of proposals on the topic of DITA. If you're not a regular in the tech docs world, then DITA is probably at best just another acronym you've seen whizzing by. DITA stands for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, and it's a new document format making waves in the world of technical documentation. From a casual documenter's point of view, the obvious question is probably "what does this mean for DocBook?" Does the mass of enthusiasm mean DocBook's on its way out? In short, no. DocBook and DITA compared  DITA and DocBook are actually rather different beasts. DocBook is a sound DTD for writing technical books and articles, with the structure that such forms imply. DITA is focused on creating modular technical documents, with the intent for easy reuse across varied delivery methods. It's intended for topic-oriented documentation, which may be chopped about and rearranged within a variety of contexts and for a variety of display devices. DITA is a DTD and a set of rules for writing online contextual documentation such as software help files. There's a lot more to it than I'll write here, but here a few more differences between DocBook and DITA:

• DocBook is hierarchical, DITA separates content from context allowing multiple architectures of information
• DocBook is a fixed element and attribute set, DITA is extensible, allowing the definition of custom information types
• DocBook is much more mature than DITA, with a variety of solid tool support options. DITA's the new kid on the block.
• DocBook is well documented, DITA's documentation is still in the early stages.

There's a real need for something like DITA, which addresses concerns that didn't really exist in the same way when DocBook first emerged at O'Reilly in the early 1990s. DITA and open source projects I'm looking forward to learning more about DITA, but one thing that immediately strikes me about it is its relevance to some of the documentation problems faced by open source projects. DocBook has never quite clicked as a documentation format for some collaboratively maintained projects, probably because the inevitable book-like nature of the result necessitates sole or restricted authorship, and heavy editing. Instead one of the increasingly popular ways for providing documentation has been the wiki. You guessed it, a topic-based architecture. What wikis seem to lack, however, is any way of providing a thought-out progression through the content. In essence, the information architecture side of things. Had I been able to attend every session from XTech last year, I'd have heard Paul Prescod talk about what DITA and wikis have in common.
There may be a downside, however. DITA looks impressively engineered, but it may be too industrial-strength for many. My initial investigations suggests that while there's emergent commercial tool support, there's not much going on in the open source field (although there is the DITA Open Toolkit, which looks to have been produced in close association with OASIS technical committee now in charge of DITA.)
As DocBook guru Norm Walsh observes, DocBook can play in this space too. With additions such as those Norm proposes, DocBook could play host to DITA's major features. (Norm writes "With a couple of hours of hacking, I've implemented on top of DocBook the four key features of DITA that I could identify.") Though these possibilities are intriguing, I think that, for open source projects, things need to get simpler rather than harder. More reading:

• DITA--Getting Started (XTech 2005 proceedings)
• To DITA or not to DITA? (Palimpsest blog)
• Cover Pages: Darwin Information Typing Architecture (Robin Cover)
• DITA FAQ (OASIS)
• Going DITA (O'Reilly weblogs)

How do you fight spam? Not through regulation. Spammers will find loopholes and exploit them. You can plug the loophole, but then they'll find another one. And some spammers will just not care, try to avoid the cops. Sure, eventually they'll get caught, but for every spammer caught there's ten more waiting. Not through technology; that's an arms race. Improve your filters, and the spammers will just modify their mails to slip through again. I don't think it is possible to fight spammers. But you can take revenge... Let's look at a typical nigerian scam:

From: foo@bar.baz
To: wouter@grep.be
Subject: PLEASE HELP
Date: some_date_in_the_future
Hi,
My name is <the name of a relative of someone rich who died>.
I have <some problem involving an amount of money that I cannot get
at>.
Could you please <do something which will cost you a lot of money>?
Thanks.
PS: please, reply on my private email address <scammer@scam.com>.

The important phrase is the last one: if you could please be so kind as to reply to their "private" email address. Obviously that email address is a throwaway one; but one would expect that they must read it and hope someone replies to it before the amount of spam on that address gets too high to reasonably be able to read it. Which is the catch. I wonder how those spammers would react if I would start adding their "private" email addresses to some database and, rather than throwing away mails which are so obviously spam, start forwarding them to random addresses from that pool...

This post, (via Ian M) meshed with some things I've been mulling on for a while about how we treat different types of data today. The relevant quote from that post is this:

I'll bet that we will look back of this era of quasi-networking and wince, "How did we ever live that way?" And the idea of wanting to carry all of your content with you will seem both old-fashioned and rather ridiculous.

I was recently very happy to acquire a large quantity of data files (about 15 thousand), each of which would take me hours to days to do anything with. And I have a few hundred CDs and DVDs with a terabytes or so of achived data on them. There is probably more stuff here than I would ever be able to look at in a regular lifetime if that were all I ever did. I'm adding stuff to the collection regularly. All of this is data that is not freely available; some of it is private stuff like email archives, some more is music, and every other sort of digital media known to man. Except oddly, software, which is almost nonexistant from the hoard except for a few bits that slipped in by accident. The chance that I'll ever look at any single one of these files is probably on the order of one in a thousand, although it's certianly possible that a computer might look at them all and search out some that I will be more likely to look at. Even though I know that I will probably never use most of this stuff, I hold onto it as archives mostly because it's easier to do that, than to decide if I really need to keep it. Or to get it back if I mistakenly discard it. That basic tradeoff, plus the fact that it's very easy these days to aquire large quatities of data and hold onto it cheaply, are the main factors behind this hoarding. What I've described might seem extreme, but it's not very uncommon and most of the people reading this probably do it too, to some extent. But the really interesting thing to me is that if this data were the only data I was able to use, I'd be very unhappy and bored and unable to accomplish much. The interesting thing is all the other data that I don't bother hoarding, because it seems so likely that it will be easy to get it if I need it. Some examples of this data -- and there are untold terabytes of it out there -- include: the complete source and binaries for a dozen operating systems; the complete revision control history of a thousand free software projects; tons of archived web sites, concerts, and movies in the internet archive; every usenet post ever made; every mailing list post I've ever read (or ignored); dozens of bug tracking systems with millions of bug reports; probably not very good scans of any artwork of any significance; more ephemeral blog posts than even boing boing can link to, etc. I don't hoard that data. The tradeoffs dont make hoarding it worthwhile; it's easier to just hope that most of it will always be available, and use my limited resources to keep the small parts of it that I'm responsible for backed up and available to others. Which tends to feel like a better use of time and resources than hoarding data, by the way. I suspect that there is more of this sort of data out there that's important to me, than there is for the average person right now. After all, most people don't find old bugs in bug tracking systems and the history of software's modification in revision control systems interesting, and I understand there might even be a few to whom usenet archives from the 80's arn't fascinating. And I know that the amount of data out there that's important to me has gone up over time. So the big question to me is, will I begin to find my hoarded data is useless, will it ever stop being important, and will I stop adding to the hoard? Some technological advances, like faster bandwidth, could tilt the balance that makes some things worth hoarding now. But at least for me, data still seems to be worth hoarding if the cost of accessing it is more than the cost of keeping it on media, or if its future availability can't be guaranteed. There are a lot of services that don't meet these criteria, things like itunes, and bittorrent, and netflix. These things won't stop hoarding; they'll just make hoarding easier, despite themselves. If it were still the 80's I'd be hoarding nearly every freely available thing I listed 5 paragraphs above. Some of it no longer needs to be hoarded thanks to technological change, some of it due to new services, but it seems to me that the really important change that tilts the balance from hoarding data to not is a growth in trust, and a change in what kinds of data are valuable. I trust the Internet Archive. I (sorta kinda) trust Google. And so I trust them to keep their content available, and so I don't try to hoard it. More and more I find freely licensed data, whether it's Free software, CC licensed media, or whatever, to be more valuable than proprietary data. And because it's freely licensed it can be archived online for everyone, by everyone, with network effects, and no need for hoarding.

So, I've arrived at LCA (linux.conf.au) 2006, in Dunedin, New Zealand. You're going to be getting a lot of these blog posts over the next few days, from me and other people, but it's only a week-long conference, so weather the storm. Plane trip over was... well, it was a plane trip. I can be thankful that I didn't lose my luggage (as one bloke has already had done to him). Beyond that, all aircraft interiors are identical, so no need to discuss that. At the stopover in Christchurch, we all headed for the bar (as geeks tend to do). I handed over a brightly coloured note in the local currency in exchange for my beer, and I get my change. What is part of my change? An Australian 10c piece. <sigh> Mad props to the conference organisers so far -- one of the organisers was at the gate (the only gate) at Dunedin airport to pick up speakers, but he gladly took us ruffian attendees into town, saving us all a few bucks in shuttle bus fairs. It was a nice guided tour in, as well, showing us all of the useful sights (like the pubs, 24 hour minimart, and eateries). He also dropped us off at the registration desk, so I got my conference schwag already (see my separate review of the schwag). Dinner involved walking into the octagon (a loop street with, unsurprisingly, 8 sides) and finding a place that serves you raw steak and a hot rock. It's like a portable BBQ construction kit. Amazingly tasty. We're going back tomorrow night for more of the same, as it's so tasty and fun -- you are legitimately allowed, even encouraged to play with your food. I also got a "barmate" (don't mispronounce that in front of your significant other) -- a yard-high glass cylinder with a tap at the bottom, filled with your choice of beer. Much merriment ensued amongst the assembled geeks, as we all plied ourselves with Speight's Gold Ale. I think it's about 8-10 pints worth of beer all up. Value. No Internet access yet, as they're still working out the kinks with the special conference network. I hope it's all up and running by tomorrow morning -- my mail queue is starting to seriously bulge with all of this outgoing mail.

It's a conference tradition that you get a pile of schwag at registration -- some sort of collection of toys, brochures, and other miscellania to remember the conference by. Or something. LCA is typically characterised by a pretty good schwag haul -- I can't think of an LCA I've been to (all 2 of them up 'til now) where I've been disappointed with the schwag. This year is no exception. The organisers have clearly gone to a lot of effort to dredge up all sorts of geek-friendly gear to dish out. For example, the conference bag -- it's a laptop-friendly backpack-type apparatus. Lots of pockets, shoulder strap, the whole kaboodle. Very tidy. It's a pity I've already got my Targus carry-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink model, because this bag would make a very nice alternative to that. The stuff inside the bag is just as impressive. There's another retractable network cable, like last year (a bit of a pity, perhaps, but this one is Cat-6 rated, for extra... something), as well as a tiny little 1-AAA torch. There's the usual pad/pen, tourist detritus, and conference program. More interestingly, there's a very shiny yo-yo (puppy dogs, beware!) and (possibly most importantly) a keyring-mountable bottle opener. There's also what is possibly the world's smallest frisbee (less than two inches in diameter -- as one of the organisers said, "Throw it at a speaker you don't like, because it sure as hell doesn't fly"), a laser-cut placemat (tres cool), and a chunk of chocolate (because we're about 5 minutes walk from the local cadbury's factory). Finally, there is the T-shirt. Loved ones will be pleased to hear that the T-shirt this year is basic black, meaning that you won't have to worry about being seen in public with a red-clad Matt. (For those of you watching at home, my wife isn't keen on red coloured clothing for some reason, so last year's conference T-shirt was not a big hit). The speakers are going to have to work hard to top the schwag pile. I await their response with baited breath.

Well, probably not, but it's a nice catchy headline. <grin> What I do think is that there is a pile of unexplored functionality hiding in mapping more things to regular filesystems. FUSE has lowered the barrier to providing access to non-traditional filesystem places -- there's versioned filesystems, SFTP (of the SSH variety) filesystems, filesystems into tarballs and zip files, and so on. Implementing a FUSE filesystem is as simple as whipping up a few callback methods in your favourite programming language (the native bindings are, of course, in C, but there's FUSE libraries for Python, definitely, and I'm fairly sure I've seen Perl and Ruby ones as well) to implement things like stat, open, read, and so on. Then you run the program as per normal and suddenly you can read and write things you've *never* read or written before... Beyond the mundane extensions of reality listed above, there's whole new vistas of relatively unexplored territory for filesystem-like operations, which are (a) waiting to be explored, and (b) much easier to implement due to the fun of FUSE. For example, SQL databases are very hierarchical in nature. Databases contain tables which contain rows which contain fields which contain values. If you can track your foreign keys, some of those values can be symlinks/directories to other records, or a directory of records for join tables. Sure, it's horribly inefficient to update whole tables by for i in *; do echo 12 > $i/fieldname; done, but at the very least it could be an interesting way of viewing data, and with some judicious caching (depending on use-case) the performance could probably be made half-sensible. A more refined version of this is the idea of reporting into pseudo-flatfiles. Imagine if you could open a file and have a spreadsheet of all of your data. With FUSE, it's possible. A killer one that my boss Dave Kempe came up with is a search filesystem -- you create a directory in this FUSE filesystem that is named after a search query -- perhaps "2005 financial". A Google Desktop-style search then results every time you enter that directory, and all matching files are available for your viewing pleasure. I understand that gmail works something like this "virtual folders with search" model, and I know that applications like Evolution and Liferea already have some sort of virtual folders type of thing, but we don't think that anyone's written something like this for filesystems. Considering that you can run a FUSE filesystem over Samba, you can easily have a company-wide document search-and-retrieval with persistent (and shared) queries, which is probably a pretty valuable thing. Even all of these, though, are relatively tame ideas when weighed against the myriad of things that my tiny mind can't even dream up. I don't think people have put much thought into how far a filesystem really can go, because before FUSE, if you wanted to write a filesystem, you were pretty much restricted to kernel-mode programming -- a very limited (and dangerous) world for your average application programmer.

Fred Wilson: “I will not buy music that I cannot remove the DRM from.” I agree wholeheartedly, though the strategy I use is the one Fred dismisses in the first paragraph, namely burning the music to CD and ripping it back, sans DRM, to MP3 format. Yes, it’s a pain, but it beats having to jump through all the digital hoops at some indeterminate point in the future when all I want to do is queue up a song I’ve legitimately purchased and have probably forgotten where I bought the thing, let alone what magic pixie dust I need to decode it. Sure, the MP3 format has issues too, but at least I know my music will play anywhere. (Since I’m on the subject, I’m looking for some sort of a virtual CD burner, which the operating system thinks is a CD burner but which is actually a piece of software that converts the tracks it “burns” to MP3 format. Anyone know if such a beast exists? That would certainly do wonders to curtail my contribution to the world’s coaster supply.) In practice, DRM isn’t as much as a problem for me as it seems to be for other people. Personally speaking, I don’t want to be in the music storage business—I’d much rather stream music on demand from some digital jukebox in the sky, which is why I’ve been a Rhapsody customer since 2003. (Greg Papadopoulos sums up my thinking pretty well exactly here: “I’ll bet that we will look back of this era of quasi-networking and wince, ‘How did we ever live that way?’ And the idea of wanting to carry all of your content with you will seem both old-fashioned and rather ridiculous.”) In my case, DRM is normally a non-issue—I simply route around it. Rhapsody has come a long way since I first started using it in 2003: They added a Rhapsody To Go service, which more or less solves the “disconnected operation” problem (though I still tangle with DRM issues from time to time if I go for too many days untethered), and they finally embraced the web, though the current web offering leaves much to be desired—the Linux plugin still doesn’t support Firefox 1.5 nearly two months after its release, the web interface has huge gaps compared to the jukebox software (you can’t access your music library on the web, among other things?!), and they don’t seem to be taking advantage of the new web platform at all (where, oh where, are the RSS feeds of my favorites, recommendations, etc, so I can mash them up with other stuff?). At the end of the day, I suspect the “economic boycott” James Governor calls for is the right way to fix the DRM problem. For my part, I’m voting with my wallet by supporting the model I want to win out in the end (that your music library will live on the web, not on your PC or in your pocket) and by buying music, in those rare cases when I do want to manage my own music library rather than letting someone else do it for me, from legitimate music services but opting out of the silos the platform providers are trying to build around me as a byproduct. Above all, I resist the temptation to climb into the big, beautiful lockbox Apple is building for us. As Clayton Christensen recently told BusinessWeek, I’m firmly convinced open standards will win out in the end:

Look at any industry — not just computers and MP3 players. You also see it in aircrafts and software, and medical devices, and over and over. During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn’t yet adequate to meet customer’s needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution — because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that day can’t arrive soon enough for me.

That'll be about World Cup 2006 in Germany.
Poland has Germany, Equador and Costa Rica in its group. It's always hard to play with an organizer of cup, but maybe we can at least draw with them. Rest of teams seem to be within our range, but at previous cup we disregarded potentially weak teams and didn't promote to second round ;)
Good luck to every competitor!

This time it's free of ads for everyone (no need to register).
It's still free as in beer, but on some slow machines launching Firefox could take ages, so it's pretty good alternative.