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The MP3 on Linux HowTo is useful for those of us who fancy running Linux as our desktop operating system. I’ve been keeping a journal of my adventures with Linux at home, but it’s not quite ready to be published.

Salon has a brief retrospective on the life of Rich Stevens the writer of seminal Unix guru tomes “Unix Network Programming” and “Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment” who died on this day last year. For some reason, I completely missed that he had passed away.

Wired has an article about how it’s becoming more difficult for startups to hire people at low salaries with crappy benefits in exchange for potentially worthless stock options. All I can say is that it’s about time. Speaking only for myself, what matters most is quality of life at the company. I’m not willing to take a job that requires me to sit in a shoebox every day, spend my entire life at work, or deal with lots of stupid, pointless bureaucracy, it’s just not worth it. ...

Did I notice this morning that eGroups is now putting the ads they insert in email messages at the top of the message body instead of at the bottom? A federal judge has ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department can be sued under the RICO statute, which was initially created to allow the government to more harshly punish organized crime organizations. Of course, since RICO was instituted, the government has used it to abuse all sorts of people, whether they have ties to organized crime or not. It’s nice to see the legal equivalent of reductio ad absurdum at the expense of the corrupt LAPD. ...

The developer of the Palm GameBoy emulator Liberty “accidentally” released a trojan horse masquerading as a cracked version of his application. The News.com story is really a pathetic piece of reporting, but this is the first known trojan horse for the Palm, and thus is linkworthy. If this starts a trend, it could mark the end of promiscuous application sharing among Palm users. Velocity is a templating system for Java servlets that’s part of the Apache Jakarta project. It’s patterned after WebMacro, which has fallen into disfavor due to license issues. ...

The Agenda VR is a handheld with 8 megabytes of memory that runs Linux. Pretty cool. The New York Times has a long, rambling article on open source software today. There’s not much of interest in there for people who already have a handle on the whole open source thing, but it’s a decent introduction for the uninitiated. Salon has a great article on the huge copyright land grab Congress passed last November on behalf of the major recording labels, classifying all recordings as works made for hire (thus giving the copyright to the labels instead of the artists). The change was made without public debate, as a one line clause slipped into an omnibus spending bill. Not only does the article once again demonstrate just how evil the major labels are, but it also provides some insight into the utter corruption of the legislature. The Republican party is often associated with this sort of lawmaking for sale, but in this case, the corruption was very much bipartisan. ...

Emulex lost two billion dollars in market cap when a fake press release was posted to Internet wire and investors freaked out. Shares in Emulex’s sector also took a pounding as investors reacted to the fake news. Investigators are looking at investors who shorted the stock as potential suspects. The herd mentality among investors never ceases to baffle me. Some grassroots journalism led to the discovery that CNN had linked to the DeCSS source code from one of their news stories. This is news because CNN is part of Time-Warner, which participated against the suit against 2600 in which the judge ruled that 2600 was not allowed to link to the DeCSS source. How can it be legal for CNN to link to it, but not 2600? You have to love corporate schizophrenia. ...

Here’s another comparison of C# and Java, this one from genamics.com. After getting caught in miserable traffic this morning, I’ve decided I need a strap-on helicopter to make my commute to work more pleasant. A clever person has set the DeCSS source code to music (6mb MP3). The song is better than you might think.

Declan McCullagh surveys recent cases attempting to makei it illegal to create certain links to other sites. For example, Judge Kaplan barred 2600 from linking to sites distributing DeCSS, and Mattel and the Mormon church have sought to have certain links removed from sites as well. I hope that the Supreme Court puts an end to this sort of lawsuit once and for all in a ruling one of these days. ...

Sad news: DeepLeap is closing up shop. I’m sure the story will be told elsewhere, but I imagine it boils down to lack of funding. Dr. Dobbs has an overview of C# (doesn’t everyone these days). There’s some information in the article that I haven’t read in others, including the laugh-worthy statement that the presence of goto in C# is an innovation. Edsger Dijkstra’s famous paper on goto was published in March, 1968. ...