The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Tue, 26 Jul 2005

Free Music!

I was searching around the web for information on a particular piece of music I was listening to (it was Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf BWV 617 by J.S Bach) and came across a Free Sheetmusic Library. This site makes available PDF files of public domain music in editions that are in the public domain.

I had always been curious as to why I need to pay $A30 and above for music in which subsists copyright that has long since expired, notwithstanding the fact that the music was composed well before today's modern copyright laws even existed. When buying Bach, apart from the costs of printing, transportation, etc, you are also paying for editorial additions (fingering, ornamentation and performance markings). This means the publisher can slap on another 75 years of copyright. Slighly odd is the fact that Urtext (original text) editions pride themselves on the lack of additions to the composer's manuscript. In Australia, Peters Urtext editions are usually more expensive than other editions, but this could be explained by a brand premium or the fact that the pieces of paper are printed overseas and imported.

Is the publisher of an Urtext edition entitled to claim copyright on the publication? Or does copyright only exist on the collection of works and not individual pieces? I think this is quite an interesting question.

The French word patron means manager or boss, and patronage of the crown or a rich nobleman was one "business model" for musicians of that time. I don't think Bach had a stream of royalties available from the publishing and sale of his works. Please note the interesting comparison to open source and free software here.

See the Wikipedia entry on copyright for some light reading, especially the section on unusual copyright grants.

Tue, 19 Jul 2005

Bug du Jour

The IRIX C compiler was found to give the following error (Samba bugzilla 2893):

cc-1184 cc: WARNING File = utils/net_rpc_printer.c, Line = 1356
  "=" is used where where "==" may have been intended.

                if (!W_ERROR_IS_OK(result) && (W_ERROR_V(result) =! W_ERROR_V(WERR_IO_PENDING))) {

Obviously this is meant to be the not-equals operator instead of bitwise not but gcc (version 3 at least) didn't pick it up. Score one for vendor cc.

Wed, 13 Jul 2005

A Blast from the Past

Anna needed to compile some ancient 12-year old Motif software under Linux the other day and ended up trying an install of a really old version of Linux. You would be surprised how much stuff doesn't work under modern versions of GCC, especially C++ where the standard has changed so much. I pulled out my InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource from March 1995. Here's a list of the contents:

• Complete Linux archives from tsx-11.mit.edu and sunsite.unc.edu
• Complete GNU archive from prep.ai.mit.edu
• Kernel sources up to 1.2.1
• Complete on-line documentation
• DOOM (the game) for LINUX
• Commercial Demos
• Slackware 2.2 with kernel 1.2
• XFree86 Version 3.1.1 (X-Windows)
• Bogus Version 1.0.1
• SLS 1.06 with kernel 1.1.50
• Debian 0.91/3
• JE Distribution and JF (Japanese FAQ's)
• MCC Version 1.0+

Some choice quotes from the Linux Installation and Getting Started guide. On memory requirements:

"Linux requires very little memory to run compared to other advanced operating systems. You should have at the very least 2 megabytes of RAM; however it is strongly recommended that you have 4 megabytes."

"You can run a minimal system with less than 20 megabytes; a complete system with all the bells and whistles in 80 megabytes or less; and a very large system with room for many users and space for future expansion in the range of 100-150 megabytes."

Due to the whole hard disk size issue, Anna had fun tracking down a hard disk old and small enough that would actually work. Also, creating boot floppies(!) from disk images using rawrite was interesting. Those were the days, eh?

Thu, 07 Jul 2005

XMLTV

I've been working on some scripts to manipulate guide data for the PVR. At the moment there's a client to fetch guide data from http://minnie.tuhs.org/tivo-bin/tvguide.pl and a script and database schema to insert the database into a sqlite database. Next step is to write some CGI scripts to browse and manage guide data.

I have this idea that RSS will be an interesting format to express recording information as well as sharing data with other XMLTV users. As with these things, ideas present themselves along the way.

Chris has bought one of the HDTV-Lite DVB cards and has set up MythTV. I think he agrees with me about the excess of user interface crack in the DVB card and channel configuration. (-: