Travis B. Hartwell / Software Craftsman

I came across a link to this interview with They Might Be Giants on Slashdot, so most of you have probably already read it. I'm not really a huge fan of TMBG's music, but I really respect them. A couple of excerpts from one of their answers regarding their releasing digital music without DRM sums up how I wish the music industry (and entertainment industry as a whole) felt (emphasis added):

How would you eat, then?

That's my problem. Being a musician is an unreasonable idea anyway. The life expectancy of a professional career in music is five or 10 years. That would be a long run. It's not something you do because you're being sensible. We've been curiously blessed with an audience that was interested in what we're doing in a pretty sincere way. It's hard to say why we endure. I think the sad thing is that we're going to see a lot more actors making records and the whole thing is going to seem like a bad superprovincial version of rock. Popular music as its own self- contained world -- like the world our older brothers and sisters enjoyed while looking at the liner notes of whatever mid-'70s record -- is really fading out. People just don't get exposed to music in an organic way anymore. Ask the average person what songs are in the top 10 -- nobody knows what's in the top 10. You could make a pretty persuasive argument that the future of selling music is over.

If only others were devoted to sharing their music with others, having fun, and possibly being successful with it without limiting others.

Last night, to celebrate my first paycheck on salary, I went and bought a vacuum and a CD. You know that real life has set in when you celebrate by buying a vacuum. But that's not the point here. I bought the latest Hoobastank CD, "The Reason" because I really enjoy the title track. It is one of those songs that I could listen to over and over and not grow tired of. Since I enjoyed it that much, I hoped that the rest of the CD was just as good. I haven't yet had time to listen to the whole thing, but I doubt it will be a CD I'll just stick in and listen start to finish like I do my Creed CDs.

This brings up an interesting point. Personally, I would have loved to have been able to buy just the single "The Reason" in electronic format online. Sure there are many places I can purchase music online, such as the iTunes store, the Walmart.com store, Napster's new store, etc. As far as I know (and someone correct me if I am wrong, please!) each of these sites uses some sort of DRM or offers music in only a proprietary format (i.e., not mp3 or ogg). That makes the music utterly unplayable for me. First, my primary stereo is my Linux computer where all of my CD collection is encoded in either MP3 or ogg format. Secondly, I have a mp3-capable deck in my car. Of course, neither or these is capable of playing an DRM-enabled music. How am I supposed to listen to music that I legally own?

I wish the RIAA (and the government to a degree) didn't automatically assume that every consumer was automatically a criminal and a thief. I don't download music I don't have the rights to download. I don't share my music collection by burning CDs or giving the mp3 or oggs to anyone else. I just want to listen to the music I like, where I like to listen to it, on whatever devices I would like to listen to it on. I want to be able to support the artists that I like and compensate them for their creativity and work.

I wish the RIAA weren't so greedy. I wish the government would realize how horrible the implications of the DMCA are. I wish Senator Hatch and those supportive of his recent INDUCE bill that will supposedly only hurt the "bad guys" but potentially could be interpreted to make things as common as a VCR or an iPod illegal. Why?!

It is because of this and other similar such actions that I recently became a donating member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even if you don't feel like you can or want to donate, at least visit their Action Center. You can choose a specific issue and put in your name and location and it will give you the option to have them either e-mail or fax your Congressperson stating your support or feelings against a specific issue or bill. I encourage everyone to go check it out.

Update

I haven't kept my adoring public (yeah right) updated since I have moved to Austin. I think I really enjoy Austin. I like having my own apartment although it is a bit empty. Anyone want to donate a nice used couch and kitchen table and chairs? At least if anyone in the Austin area knows of any good deals (at a particular garage sale or thrift store or the like), let me know.

Work

I enjoy working at Roxor Games. I have my own office, and that is sadly lacking in wall adornment. I just need to pick the right posters for my wall. I'm thinking either some spacescape such as a picture of the moon and the Earth or of one of the nebulae or something. I currently have a huge whiteboard sitting on the floor of my office; I think it might be for my office. I have a fairly decent dual-boot Linux-Windows 2000 x86 desktop and an old Wallstreet Powerbook running Mac OS X 10.3 sitting on my desk. I also use my own Pismo Powerbook running Debian Linux for all but the x86/Windows/Mac OS X specific development and testing tasks. The work is good, though I am feeling a bit overwhelmed as I expected. The transition to full-time work has been a bit difficult as anticipated. I hope I am not expecting too much but it seems very hard to get everything done that I need to. Hopefully I will grow to better understand how to handle my various tasks and feel like I am making progress.

Random Bits

As usual, I have had bits and pieces of various ideas on my mind lately. I'm always seeking for tools to help me be a better person and do my job better. I need to proceed with the stalled work on Informant. It's for my own sanity. My habits of focus and concentration are highly erratic and keep me from my full potential. If I have Informant set up and monitoring those things that I care about, I think that would give me the peace of mind to allow my attention to be where it probably should be.

I also have a great desire to get some content and a decent design on my website. I have long toyed with the idea of using Nevow, but just haven't seemed to have got the motivation to figure out what exactly I want/need to do. Lately, however, I have started considering using Muse. It actually seems to be a bit easier to figure out for my purpose, since I really don't need dynamic stuff, just templating.

Additionally, deeptape has shown me Personal Organizer that he uses to keep track of a lot of different kind of information. He has notes, logs, journals, etc. from a few years, IIRC. It made me realize I really don't have any organized way that I use to keep track of information that I might one day need to easily access. I'm not sure what I want to use to capture and organize things. I have been using Emacs Planner Mode for planning, scheduling, and journal writing for the last couple of months, though probably not as much as I should. Since it is based upon Emacs Wiki Mode, it is naturally fitted for organizing and linking data. Also, with the addition of planner-remember.el, I can just simply hit the key I have bound to (remember) in Emacs and it will pop up a buffer where I can take quick notes. Hit C-c C-c and it will save that on my page and I can link to or organize it later. But I somehow want to integrate bookmarks and other things into this somehow. I probably should take some time to write and brainstorm about what I wish to accomplish.

I should wrote more rambles more often to get these ideas out.

Jobage

A lot has happened this last week. One week ago today, my present part-time employer, Roxor Games offered me a full-time salaried position. I will be relocating to Austin, Texas from Logan, Utah Memorial Day weekend (that's the last weekend of May for your non-USians). It's all happened so fast.

I'm shipping some of my big stuff (like my computer and printer) to Austin and then packing the rest of it into my car. My sister is helping me drive down and then flying back to Salt Lake. I just made her reservations and also motel reservations for the trip down.

I've got my apartment all taken care of. I am renting my own 1 bedroom apartment. This will be my first time living all by myself. I'm looking forward to having "my own space". It's unfurnished and I've been living in furnished apartments. I guess now I'll really be acquiring stuff.

I'm excited for this new opportunity and the exciting things I will be doing with Roxor. Moving across the country to a new place is exciting. Two weeks doesn't seem all that far away though. Gulp!

• Actually create a website design so I can add content
• Make links to all of the materials for the presentations I have given
• Write up and post the scripts used to auto-created a chroot jail for sshd and scponly
• Finish writing up system security techniques
• Update resume
• Have link on tm.com/services/consulting updated for my new e-mail address/homepage
• Fix spam filter on colo box
• Finish writing goals list and categorize into time frame
• Pay summer rent

I just found out that my apartment is being rented out to girls this summer. In other words, I have got to move. I have to be out of my apartment in 3 weeks. There is no way that I will be making the move to my future place of employment at that time. My plan was to tentatively stay at my current apartment until I was able to make the big move. I made the mistaken assumption that the apartment would still be rented to guys and I could just go sign up for the room next week or something.

I have no idea what I am going to do now. I know that it will all work itself out -- I just have some extra work to do in the meantime to figure out where I am going to live.

I've got a lot to do if I am going to be moving out of this apartment in 3 weeks.

Work

Work has been a little frustrating, but I am surviving. Combine telecommuting, working on a project that needs the input and work of others, and those others busy with other projects and it makes for a lot of waiting. It is picking up, and now I have a new set of problems to deal with. Learning valgrind, getting valgrind and nvidia's OpenGL stuff to play nicely together, learning more about better coding practices in C, etc. These seem to be ones I might have a bit more control over, lets hope so.

On a brighter note, my first major project for work will probably be demoed tomorrow. I only hope that this birthday will be better luck than last (I fell on the ice and cut my hand open on the edge of the concrete and had to get stitches. I also accidentally let my cell phone swim in the toilet. Not a good day). I hope the customer is pleased with my work. My boss seems to be.

Colo fun

My colo-friends and I are having fun getting mail set up on our box. I haven't done most of the work, but it has been interesting watching them set up exim, courier-imap, squirrel-mail, and postgres to store the virtual user info. Our next challenge is to install a system-wide Spam Bayes setup. On my personal box I had created a daemon that listens on a FIFO. I wrote a small C program that is called from procmail and writes what it receives on stdin to the fifo. It then reads the classified message that the daemon has written on another fifo. This seemed to work best in my situation and avoided having to start a Python interpreter and load the spam database for each message.

We are now adopting this to be system-wide. One of my friends has wrote a C program that receives a message on stdin and then communicates with a Spam Bayes daemon I wrote via a socket. It then delivers the mail either to a pipe, another e-mail address, an mbox, or a Maildir. The new daemon I wrote is written with Twisted. This should be interesting to see how it turns out.

More to come...