The Surreal Life

Yesterday was a pretty surreal day. Everything was fairly normal until late in the afternoon when John told me that Don King was coming over to the Chicago Google office with his son, Carl King, and a few other folks for a visit. While I was expecting a fantasticalicious whacktasticatudinous time, with possibly a few fights breaking out at the weigh in, what actually happened was much more mundane. Don and Carl and the guys were very low key, super friendly, and overall quite interested in all the cool stuff that we do at Google. I just about passed out laughing when Don pointed out that the picture on his Wikipedia page wasn't of him, but of a wax replica of him at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. Priceless.

Don even stood patiently while we got some photos in front of the big Google logo:




Now that's what I call an outrighteously sparklicious Americaneriffic jacket.

[Thanks to Rachelle for hanging out with us and taking the photo above]

Moglen Takes Aim at the other Foot

If it wasn't enough that Stallman shot the Free Software Movement in the Foot last month, Eben Moglen (former general counsel of the Free Software Foundation) put a bullet in the other foot of the Free Software Movement at OSCON last month. Tim O'Reilly had invited Eben to talk about free software licensing in the Web 2.0 era and Eben gave Tim a tongue lashing. For an encore, he took the opportunity to alienate thousands of open source developers when he told Tim:

If you hadn't taken this whole long 10 year wasted detour, talking about Open Source instead of concentrating on concepts of freedom we could have had the conversation you and I are about to have now... 10 years ago when you started this whole long deviation which is now coming to an end.

So what we want to have now is a philosophic discussion. spread this Open Source nonsense over to the edge, and say now we're talking about what freedom means...

(Emphasis mine)

Riiiiiiiight... Insulting me and ridiculing what I believe in is a sure-fire way to bring me over to your side of the argument. As with Stallman, it boggles the mind how someone so obviously brilliant could be so completely egocentric. Those two deserve each other.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude n. German. Pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune.

I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't jumping with joy at SCO's stock derailing at the announcement that they don't even own the copyrights to Unix. Their stock dropped 71% today:



And now I'm off to break open the champagne.

Progress Takes Many Forms

In 2000, when I first started hacking on Subversion, it took almost 10 minutes to build Subversion (way pre-0.17) on my weak old Pentium II whitebox PC.

Just now I built Subversion 1.4.4 on my Macbook Core 2 Duo in 2 minutes flat.

That rocks.