Gosh, I just lost 3 posts. Let’s try again (the quick stuff first)
Awaretek’s python podcast turns out to be interesting and entertaining. Good for newbie like me. Here’s Pycon 2005 audio recordings while we’re at it.
Btw, the awaretek guy has a nice list of tutorials and aPython Liberation Front Weblog. Links to the vault of Parnassus, a catalog of python apps (did I blog about this before?)
Donald Pittenger rounds up what historic classical music recordings to buy . Michael Blowhard ponders Web 2.0
Two essays by Maciej Ceg?owski: why the space shuttle is irrelevant, time travel etiquette. Here’s his take on Paul Graham:
I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the “what is a hacker?” essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider’s view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports (“Management secrets of Gengis Khan”, the “Lexus and the Olive Tree”) that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.
Library studio on the legal status of early recordings. The news is very bleak.
Despite bankruptcies, abandonment, and long-dead record labels, under current U.S. law an overwhelming majority of historic recordings—in this study 84 percent—are still owned by someone. This is true even for the earliest periods, with more than 60 percent protected for every period after 1895. The figure exceeds 90 percent after the 1930s. It is also true for every genre of music studied. Most of America’s recorded musical heritage of the last 110 years, even recordings made in the nineteenth century, is protected by state and common law until 2067.
…
Despite laws discouraging unauthorized reissue activity in the United States or the importation of reissues of U.S. recordings from other countries (parallel import laws), foreign labels and small entities in the United States have made available a considerable number of such recordings. Our study found that other entities have exclusively reissued 22 percent of historic recordings, versus rights holders’ 14 percent. To the extent that rights holders reissue older recordings, they concentrate on recent periods with larger potential markets, while third-party distributors serve all periods more or less equally. As a result, third-party entities reissued more than rights holders did in every five-year period prior to 1945. But current copyright law has made such activity difficult and risky for small organizations and so has driven much of this activity overseas. It is worth noting that a label such as Europe’s Document Records, which has made available thousands of rare, pre–World War II American blues and gospel records not reissued by rights holders themselves, could not exist in the United States because of copyright restrictions