Novelist, 60s Icon Ken Kesey Dies. Well that's another old hero gone. Although, I rather lost the faith when he did a UK TV program searching for "Camelot" wearing a "Tommy Hilfiger" tour jacket. We all know Cuckoo's Nest was great, but the one you should really read is "Sometimes a Great Notion" about a logging family in the Northwest. I seem to remember they made a film of it as well which was OK, but not great.

The thoughts below about the Blog wars happening between Dave and Chris sprung an idea in my head. "Celebrity DeathBlog" in the style of photoshop tennis. Put three boxes together for the two participants and a referee. Add a commentary area below it for audience participation and a Swing-o-meter to let the audience vote on who's winning. Make the referee box a joint blog by two commentators. And then run weekly Celebrity DeathBlogs between famous bloggers. Could be fun and I might just have to do it. Drupal has already got almost all the code I need.

A good rant on DMCA from MindJack

Carol@Mirror Vorderman interviews a UK Blogger.

Why is it so hard to navigate round the O'Reilly sites. They've got some great content, but the navigation links suck. I was actually looking for the combined weblogs page. Took 10 minutes to find it. Of course once found, the URL was obvious.

This could be fun. It's The Winer (aka Cartman) vs Locke (aka RageBoy) with Searles (aka The Doc) as referee. Now if we could just hijack Cory's four blogs on a page, we could put them side by side. Yes, I bring you a new concept meme, "Celebrity DeathMatch Blogging".

But then it does make you wonder who the hell these people think they are, and why anyone except sad motherfuckers like me should be interested.

Mark Pilgrim has been assembling a list of Groove issues. Here's some more.

1. How do you backup your installation? If you don't have a decent backup, how do you rescue broken data store files? Yesterday Groove got into a state where it wouldn't even startup. It was throwing an exception. The only solution was to re-install the upgrade to 1.2 which
brings me to,

2. The only way to upgrade is from within Groove. My Upgrade was failing due to an in use DLL. Well, of course, Groove was running. I hacked round this by copying the installshield files before they got deleted, and running them outside Groove.

3. Groove-MS is the same business model as Visio-MS. It actually worked out pretty well for Visio. The MS Only Corporate box is indeed a pretty big box. And don't forget Ray's past. Notes->Lotus->IBM. It worked then, it could work now.

But mostly, Groove is Big Bloated Beta software that's not actually ready for prime time yet. Which makes it a perfect match for MS.

Uncle Sam Wants Napster! (washingtonpost.com) Staggeringly clueless commentary of the P2P show in DC. Yes, while the RIAA is trying to destroy Napster and it's friends, "the military wants to enlist their creators in the war against terrorism." Repeat after me a hundred times, P2P does not equal Napster, P2P does not equal Napster, P2P does not ...

Still, nice to see that the Mil-Ind-Comp recognises that only the smartest people hang round P2P. As shown by this quote. "Wardell said: You have a dispersed enemy who basically is operating on a peer-to-peer system, at a very low level. How are we going to attack that? Probably the same way." So now you have it. If Napster = P2P, do the P2P programmers = guerilla freedom fighters?

CNN.com - Cockroaches were alive before dinosaurs - November 7, 2001 Stubbon little critters aren't they (that's cockroaches not the RIAA). They've been around for hundreds of millions of years before us and they'll be around long after we've gone. It's an old joke but in the post apocalyptic world there'll only be two forms of life left. Cockroaches and sexually transmitted diseases.

O'Reilly Network: RIAA President Hilary Rosen Speaks to P2P Community [November 08, 2001] : Rosen said she feels there is "too much music available for the current distribution model" and looks forward to the potential for new "legitimate business models" in the future. Excuse me, while I puke! Too much music! So the record companies act as a filter to keep the people from the artists and limit the music available. Yeah, Right On!. It's not just P2P sharing models that blow this apart. It's people like Amazon too. The RIAA is stuck in the old ways of thinking that they can control the market, promote block busters, and turn a handful of tunes into megabucks. Ever wondered why the vast majority of middle of the road music that you get forced down your throat, sucks?

Meanwhile there's more music being created than ever before.

n/a

Hack the Planet blogging the O'Reilly P2P Conference : There are way more shaved-head people per capita here than on average. Damn it. I should be there.

I see Kevin Jones has surfaced again with his Collective Intelligence project.

I've been playing with Groove today. My Groove ID file can be found here. I've also set up a test space. If you know me you can join in.

High score Rating drugs on their effect on your ability to play computer games. Um, Yeah, Right.

Can software schedules be estimated? - A recent academic paper Large Limits to Software Estimation (ACM Software Engineering Notes, 26, no.4 2001) shows how software estimation can be interpreted in algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity terms... ...Software development is like physics: there is no objective way to know how long a program will take to develop. [kuro5hin.org] I love it. A mathematical proof that shows that software development schedules are impossible to predict. But then surely an empirical proof is all you need and we've got plenty of those!

Red Rock Eater Digest - Design for a Web Filtering Service A remarkably similar design that does for lists of URLs what syndic8.com does for RSS. I wonder if anyone will build this. It's turned up high on the top 10 on Blogdex so maybe they will.

Having a bad hair day? Then try the essential Swearotron

This Modern World "One day soon it will all be over. We'll just have to get the missile shield built and we won't have any more worries."