Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Had a great time in Nashville- besides very, very drunken Thursday and Friday nights with some folks I hadn’t seen in ages, Krissa and I went to the state capitol, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Parthenon. Yes, they have a full-size replica parthenon in Nashville. Sort of a turn of the century attempt at virtual reality. Sort of cool, actually- which really surprised me.

yes, the parthenon, really.

Only downside of Thursday and Friday nights was going to Coyote Ugly(r) (well, that and the felt-like-food-or-alcohol-poisoning feeling that nearly ruined Saturday). Yes, that’s right, a bar that has a registered trademark, a gift shop, and as one guy put it, waitresses with ‘just a little too much self-esteem to become strippers.’ It felt… dunno, very phony; very demeaning. I much preferred the previous bar on our stop- also sort of creepy (waitress dress code could best be described as ‘catholic school girl’) but at least there was no faux-enthusiastic dancing on the bar. And it had 200 beers, which I’m always in favor of. Anyway, outside of that (which I felt like I had to write down) it was pretty good- lots of folks, lots of beer and Jack (it was tennessee, after all) and lots of fun.

The victim, early on during his bachelor party.

The wedding itself was… well, it was very Southern. The church was spectacularly Southern- very classic look. The grandmothers were listed in the wedding flyer as ‘Mrs. (husband’s name)’. About 400 people attended, many of whom actually had to introduce themselves to the bride and groom, because they were nth cousins or had at some point been acquaintances of the parents of the bride and so some sort of reciprocity required them to come to the wedding- it was very much an ‘event’ and not just a family/friends thing. Apparently tuxes are expected at weddings in the South if the wedding starts after 6:30, but not 6:00, or maybe not- the two older gentlemen I overheard having this conversation couldn’t remember the exact time, so one had worn the wrong thing, since it was a 6:00 wedding. It’s some kind of ‘no white after labor day’ rule, I guess. (The younger set had been given permission by the bride to wear dark suits instead of tuxes, so we were spared.) Reception was at a country club which was a converted plantation house (fascinating mentions of the club in this article on Bill Frist); the tree in the back yard had a nice little plaque noting that the three had been at the house since the Revolution. Definitely an experience.

The church.

The Country Music Hall of Fame was a blast too. I generally don’t like country music, but I thought what the hell, and I’m very glad I went- I don’t judge jazz, blues, or rock by the 80s or 90s, and after spending a couple hours wandering around the very modern, well-presented museum, I realize I shouldn’t judge country by those decades either :). There is a pretty rich heritage there that I realize I need to explore.

Twang!, outside the hall of fame. Part of a series of guitar art throughout the city.

We had a spectacular brunch this morning at Mere Bulles, near our hotel- if you’re a foodie, and find yourself in Nashville for some reason, I highly recommend it. I was able to stuff my face with fried chicken on biscuit with spinach and country ham- sooo southern. So yummy, so not really possible to get in Boston.

As an aside, fun link explaining open source to lawyers in their terms, via Joi Ito, who it turns out installed Ubuntu today on his T42 and was pleased.

CVS and I do not get along*, but despite that, Marcus’ rocking liveCD scripts are in CVS, including my changes to make them basically functionally equivalent to what I had before. I’ve also nuked my old crap. Marcus’s stuff + my changes *should* work, but I warn that it isn’t exactly tested in the current configuration. Bugs are my fault.

I uploaded a 2.11.90ish liveCD for people to play with. Known bugs include busted sound, lots of 2.10 mentions in the docs (taking patches for those!) and lack of a handler for .ppt. For details, location, and discussion, see the marketing-list.

TinyERP is an interesting-looking use of pygtk; includes a new project management tool and an accounting tool, as part of an open source but for-profit ERP/CRM suite. Pretty nice to see more people using the platform. If someone packages these for Breezy I can throw them on the liveCD ;)

Have seen this a couple places now, touching on how suse needs a fedora ‘competitor’; I couldn’t agree more, except the part where he says evolution has been held close to the vest; clearly not paying attention to the generally good things Novell has done there. (Not to mention GPLing YaST, etc.)

Off tomorrow to Nashville for a college hallmate’s wedding. Will be there all weekend, probably reading/writing for big chunks of it.

*also cp.

Took most of the day off from writing to futz with the liveCDs. Given the current state of breezy, this was shockingly productive ;) I will definitely upload a 2.11 CD tonight. Has some rough edges (sound is busted, some X stuff is slightly funky), but Marcus Bauer’s awesome scripting work has made creation much easier, and he nuked some stuff that made the CD much smaller. The latest build is actually under 500M, with hula, jabberd, and a bunch of other extra stuff thrown on there.

As punishment for being a bit of a jackass on nautilus-list, I sat down and looked at some nautilus code; it was very clear and easy to read, even for someone like me who sucks. I actually understood the problem and was going to start asking about what vfs apis to use to solve it when Christian Neumair swooped in and fixed it. Yay. (can I call him a cap’n now? :) Hopefully the fix will greatly reduce the appearance of the irritating-but-theoretically-necessary ‘mismatched types’ warning.

Was pleasantly surprised to flip down the fast-user-switcher applet today and discover my hackergotchi in there, from the ‘about me’ capplet. We should have a spectacular level of rocking when we have about me, f-u-s-a, gdm, gnome-screensaver, and gnome-power-manager are all kicking ass and taking names together in 2.14.

I’ve been reminded that Summit is rolling around again. It’s a very low key event, but should be a lot of fun. Dates, details, etc. are on the wiki. Come one, come all, but particularly come hackers- this one is for you.

Frankly, it’s not that tough for ISVs to build native Debian packages, and if they can’t offer a deb, you can’t well expect them to support the RHEL-packaged version of their application on Debian.

eweek hits nail on head about the new debian core consortium’s RHEL flirtation. In general, lots of people coalescing around Debian is not a bad thing, though.

Built a 2.11 liveCD tonight. Still has lots of rough edges. Am wiped, will finish/post it tomorrow.

Paper continues to progress; have written 8 pages (of a theoretical 12) but (1) it is going to have to go way past 12, I think, and (2) those 8 pages will wither to 4 or 5 once I actually attack them with my economist style guide. ;) So still a long way and a lot of research to go. Research sucks when you’re not already a domain expert, I’m rediscovering…

Beautiful day today- spectacular weather. Spent three hours in the commons reading selections from The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law and getting some color, one of which I mostly failed at, and the other gave me a sunburn. Still nice, I guess :) Had dinner at Kashmir on Newbury (outside seating, of course ;) and then walked from Kashmir to the Loews on Boston Commons to take in the new Batman. Was fun. Need to get off my ass and finally read the Frank Miller source material.

Yesterday afternoon spent time at Thunder’s house, eating delicious turkey burgers, good salad, and yummy coconut and mango ice cream. Delicious. Afterwards went to see Boston’s pro lacrosse team play. Fun- cheapest pro sporting event I’ll ever see, I figure :) And a beautiful night to sit outside and soak up the fresh air.

More reading and writing next week- Friday I got six or so pages of my paper written; enough to guide the rest of my research, but also too verbose- need to tighten it up to 3-4 pages before going further.

Whereas previously I had blasphemed, and been known to say that saturday morning breakfast should be fresh french toast, waffles, or pancakes, I have seen the error of my ways. I am now a firm believer that saturday morning breakfast should be homemade mango ice cream. That is all.

Had a really great bug day today- 50 or so people in channel all day, and a very, very active group in the morning- first four hours went by in a total blur. There are almost exactly 200 fewer unconfirmed bugs in our target areas than there were at the start of the day, which is pretty nice. Maybe more stats in the morning, if I can dust off my sql-foo.

On the flip side, am pretty frustrated by the stop energy on d-d-l. Not just stop energy, but after-the-fact stop energy. That is the best kind! (rolls eyes)

@!#!#@!@!#@!#@!#!. poster ate my post. Hate it when that happens.

Anyway… bug day tomorrow in #bugs; details on the wiki. If every reader of p.g.o closed an unconfirmed bug, we wouldn’t have any left, so come on by.

Made the mistake of finally settling down with Harry Potter last night at around 11. Finally got in bed around 4am. And finished the book around 2pm. Very good; it isn’t just the characters that are getting more mature- Rowling is shifting her style as well, with less fluff (as much fun as it was) and more attention to nuance and character. She is no Shakespeare but she is clearly having a blast.

Got approval from my prof to write on my intended topic for my paper for the class I’m taking now. Working title is ‘Trademark in Commons-Based Peer Production: Why Trademark Fails Where Copyright Suceeds’. Obviously the foundation’s ongoing struggles with trademark (compared to our general success with the GPL) are part of my motivation for reading and writing on this one. Hopefully I’ll get the first section of it written tomorrow, since getting onto paper some of my thoughts on GPL-as-social-contract-and-economic-relationship will hopefully inform and focus the research on trademark law.

I really want a ‘ProfessorTom’- tomboy-ish instant-apply personal wiki, but with separate fields for:

• book ISBN- autograb all other book data from there, and should be have a dropdown showing books which were recently cited
• page #
• quote
• discussion of the quote or ideas raised by the quote. This field would be wiki-ish, like the main tomboy page, so autolinking to other notes would be possible.
• Not sure if it needs tags or not- I think yes, but am open to discussion on that.
• note title would be autogenerated from the book name and page #, but could be edited to refer to the idea if so desired for easier linking.
• Of course search on any/all of the fields, with search for an author’s name automatically going to the right notes (even though I’d only entered an ISBN.)

This notion is based on my high-school history prof’s index card-based note taking system, which was sort of bunk without search, but with search would have been a great way of easily building a list of references and searching them once you needed them. As a bonus, making it easy to link from an outlining tool to each of these individual notes would be mad cool. Obviously I could fake most of this in current tomboy, but I’d like to have the structured data in case I want to do something else with it later, and more importantly, I want some things autocompleted so that the whole process is less time consuming- since the goal, after all, would be to make notetaking suck less :) Anyway, that’s my software wishlist/dream for the night. I think maybe I’ll go to sleep.