Wow, what a blast from the past. My best friend in junior high had one of these. That was also around the time I first started noodling with BBS’, mostly through his introduction. If I remember correctly, he actually had a modem for this beast, I clearly recall watching the little monochrome screen, waiting for a connect.

If you wanted to help C.A., here’s the site where you can make a financial contribution. As of this writing, the community at large has raised almost $1800 to help him. Amazing.

In sending a link to a friend, trying to help answer a question I answered on my podcast last year, I’ve realized anything older than the last 30 episodes is a broken link from the episodes referenced on this site. I am not sure what I am going to do to fix this as we are talking about hundreds of MB of audio, if not several GB. My permanent hosting solution, libsyn, won’t work as I am limited to how much data I can post there a month. I also don’t have the already converted MP3 files, so if these files are completely lost, not available on a backup somewhere from the server where they were originally hosted, we are talking about many, many man hours to re-produce those files from the original GarageBand sources. Maybe if I am able to automate the conversions with a bit of AppleScript, we’re still probably talking a significant investment.

I am checking on what happened to those files, just to confirm, so stay tuned as I figure out what to do.

This is a feature cast.

Don’t forget, no news show this Sunday as I will be at RavenCon.

Despite getting to meet the maintainer of The Jargon File, no new hacker word this week due to the length of the feature.

I received a voice mail but I will hold that until next time because the feature audio is around fifty minutes long.

The feature is some panel audio I recorded at Penguicon this past weekend. I was joined on the panel by noted science fiction author, Vernor Vinge, and the topic was secure computing environments.

Download the show directly. No detailed show notes this week.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

William Patry has a clear explanation of a particular theory of copyright. This is undoubtedly only new to me but the idea that a theory could be based on consumer value regardless of any value directly to the rights holder suddenly makes sense of a lot of the shenanigans we’ve seen in recent years with DRM and file sharing.

Patry’s examination was apparently prompted by some disturbing commentary on the Gowers Report. This is a lengthy piece but well worth the time to read and understand as it so clearly reveals the basis for a lot of what we are seeing from the traditional media players.

The feature is recorded but I am feeling a bit too poorly to record the remaining bits this evening. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better by morning and will just publish the show tomorrow night instead.

The only reason I personally find this comment worthy is because of my fond, fond memories of ZDTV. I loved what they originally did with the channel and its programming and was very annoyed at what Comcast did to the channel after they bought it out.

This has nothing to do with their filing which is apparently based on depressed ad and subscription revenue. I am certainly familiar with their periodicals but have never been an avid reader. Working in the industry and being an early netizen, I always seemed to pick up much of what they covered via osmosis.

Best of luck with your re-launch, ZD!

This is a feature cast.

The feature this week is the second half of a lecture given by Professor Eben Moglen on the danger of software patents. This second part is around forty minutes, so no new hacker word of the week this week.

Download the show directly. There are no detailed show notes for this episode.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

On listening to the show from last night in the enhanced feed, which should really affect just the iTunes listeners, I realized the file was truncated. I have uploaded a new, complete file and amended the feed so you should get the fixed audio file if you already got the truncated file. I removed the entry with the truncated file so if you didn’t get it, you should only get the complete file.

I absolutely love the great new logo that Jared Axelrod and one of the reasons he created it was in response to my laments of not having something worthy of putting on merchandise. With con season spinning up, it seems like a perfect time to shop around for online, custom gear sites. I’m giving Zazzle a try based on a recommendation from a tribe mate (thanks, Tee).

My gallery is here and I have already added a ringer tee and mug. I have ordered one of the ringer tees for myself, to wear at cons during the warmer months. I’ll review the tee after it arrives.

I switched to using Skype voice mail for the listener comment line recently. I have been maintaining a SkypeIn number for interviews because it is relatively cheap, is often easier for guests to call me if they are traveling, and recording off of Skype works so well with my audio setup in the lab.

Up until now, it has worked well for getting listener feedback. However, I just, like in the last half an hour, received a call while I was actually logged into Skype. I didn’t want to answer because the only calls I get are ones I’ve scheduled or listeners looking to leave voice mail.

I wait a few minutes to see the voice mail show up. It did not. Digging around in the help, I realized that while voice mail kicks in automatically when I am not logged in, I have to explicitly enable it for unanswered calls when I am logged in.

I have enabled that setting in my Skype preferences and added an outgoing message. If you called today around 6pm, EST, please do call back and I promise the voice mail will pick up. As should all future calls whether I am online or not.

Just got a note from their support folks. I refreshed my feed subscription in iTunes and everything seems to be working fine, now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

According to the support blog there definitely was a problem over the weekend. I cannot ftp into their server from work nor do I have the files to try a re-upload via their web interface. I will check into things as soon as I get home, this evening, around 7pm EST, and see if we cannot get this resolved.

I noticed a problem trying to download last night’s show from Libsyn. This will affect subscribers to the enhanced feed only and anyone who regularly manually downloads the detailed show notes in PDF or OPML format. Since I uploaded those files to Libsyn any attempt to get them, at least from my systems, is met with an access forbidden error message.

I have sent all of the details of the problem to Libsyn’s support and am hoping for a speedy resolution, especially since the media files from the shown no the 9th seem unaffected.

You can either wait and try again after the problem is resolved. I’ll post an update as I hear back from Libsyn’s support folks. Or you can manually download the MP3 version, the link is here, on the site.

OK, I have dug out my notes from last year’s year in review feature. I have a few days to research and write this year’s before I have to record it. To get it out on 1/2/2008, I need to record it by Saturday, 12/29/2007. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please send them along this week.