I just found one of the most horrible songs I've ever heard. In line with the idea of spreading evil to the world, hehe, I've decided to share. Try to sit through the whole thing... It's the musical equivilent to that old (movie) stinker Find the Lady.. Oh, on the same web trip, I also heard a really horrible pop remix of the russian national anthem... Imagine it reset to explicit beats with some electric guitar and all the horrible embellishments possible. I'm sure that Lenin shudders in his grave every time this song is played.. and people like me, with a fine appreciation of kitsch and self-parodying works, are the people sending most of those shudders.

Some impatient scientists are unwilling to wait for the scientific review process, and are pushing alternative, 'fast track' journals. Admittedly, the journal is doing two things here, and one of them is probably good if it works out -- easy access to the public for scientific journals is certainly a good thing. However, there's still that emphasis on less scientific review, and that's really a big point. I'm sure the public can wait awhile longer to have studies that are more scientifically valid.

On The Linux Kernel Mailing List, the makers of Bitkeeper and people who oppose what happened are at loggerheads again. The issue is version control. For those of you who don't program or who don't follow Linux kernel politics, here's the deal.. Programs are written by programmers in a programming language. Writing in that kind of language involves sets of instructions telling the computer where to put data, how to manipulate it, and what to do next. These commands live in sets of functionally organized files, each file typically being a software component corrisponding to a logical concept (plato would smile on this, although mistakenly). As large numbers of people begin to work on the same project, and as people develop, systems have evolved to manage versioning and simultaneous development. Common software to do this includes: CVS - The most popular open source tool, provides the basics but has several weaknesses SVN - A recently-completed sequel to CVS, hopes to remedy most of its weaknesses. Does a lot, but has some seriously odd things in its design that will hamper adoption. Open Source. MS Sourcesafe - Microsoft's product. Only used by microsoft shops, and is so broken that microsoft doesn't use it internally. Oops. Closed source Bitkeeper - Another closed source tool, has a lot of neat features, and is kind of complex.

Anyhow, the bitkeeper developers, some time ago, convinced Linus Torvalds, the initial/lead developer of Linux, to go from CVS to Bitkeeper, and there's a LOT of controversy within the open source community caused by this, as Bitkeeper is closed-source, and one of the flagship products of the opensource movement is being developed with heavy reliance on a closed tool. It's clear that CVS was incapable of what was needed, or at least was a pain to use for that, but I'll argue that it was a wrong thing to move to BitKeeper, and that even if CVS was unsuitable, it's better for the community to stay within, so the pressure to develop improvements to CVS was still present, and no inertia will keep people with a closed solution. Because of some fine details of the license, some kernel developers are not permitted to use it, and others are not using it out of principle, and so although Linus's decision was very pragmatic, in the end it leaves me disappointed. In my view, it's completely wrong that Linus effectively needs to make life tough or impossible for some kernel developers, and effectively needs to force the rest to abide by a license that restricts the kind of software they can write, for a product that's a flagship open product. Even if subversion isn't yet up-to-snuff, I think the sooner the community moves from bitkeeper, the better.

Oh, I'm at Coffee Tree, and just met another person online -- a senior at Chatham. We had some interesting conversation on culture and philosophy.. Two interesting bits: (19:39:09) person: being unique is too much work (19:39:16) person: I'm too lazy to be an individual ... (19:42:26) Improv: It's amusing -- the americas have inherited the taste for british comedy, but not the capability to produce it :)

There was also a cute girl who walked by, who noticed the bizarre way I hang my power cord for my laptop, and got rather flustered, mentioned that she was on her way to Kiva Han, and suggested that I hang out there with her sometime. Cool.

Finally, an ex-Lubovich atheist Hebrew guy showed up, who I mentioned before, and we had an interesting discussion that eventually spanned into the linguistics and traditions of the different Hebrew 'subraces'. He made a linguistic argument that the Yemenite Hebrews maintained a more pure strand of the Hebrew language than either the Ashkenazi or the Sephardi, and how much of the more fundamentalist factions within Judaism were cultish. He seemed to be wishing he knew more people like himself .. I wish there was something like the SFF community, with its fair share of atheistic Hebrews, here for him. Anyhow, it was one of the best conversations I've had for awhile, and I got two more book reccommendations from him.