How some packages don't update regularly
I recently had to install a laptop with Debian; but I didn't have powerpc install media for Debian directly available, nor did I have an empty CD-ROM (and booting directly from hard disk didn't work for a reason unknown to me since I had no time to find out).
What I did have, however, was an install CD-ROM for Ubuntu Warty for powerpc. So I installed that instead, then sidegraded to Debian unstable, which I run on all my workstations. That went surprisingly well; but there were a few issues worth noting.
- Ubuntu has something with python. What's the story there? python? Anyway. After upgrading to unstable, I had to remove a whole shitload of python library packages of sorts, which weren't being depended upon by anything I had installed, and which I'm also not very likely to use. Ever.
- There are a few packages that haven't been updated anymore since warty was frozen. As a result, they don't get replaced by the unstable version unless manually updated; Ubuntu packages contain a 'ubuntu<ubuntu version>' after every Debian version (which is sane, BTW), but that means dpkg considers it to be more recent than the 'original' Debian version. Packages that were affected by this: at, defoma, gs-esp, gtk2-engines-smooth, libcompfaceg1, and libpaper1. This isn't an actual problem, but it's something to remember.
- Finally, there were also a number of packages that simply are not in Debian but are in Ubuntu, like pmount; these must be manually removed. And while you're removing it, don't forget udev.
That's it. There's nothing here that a non-experienced user can't fix by him/herself, luckily. It's nice to see how both distributions get along so well...
Kiivi's buildd chroot broken.
The buildd chroot of kiivi has gotten broken while I was in transit, and I didn't have time to check it out and fix it yet. As a result, quite some packages, such as doxygen, failed to build.
Of course this happens while I'm in transit from Antwerp to Helsinki.
I've made sure buildd stops building once libgtk2-perl is finished (which seems to be working allright, so I won't interrupt it), and then I'll go ahead and fix everything.
Birds and bread.
There are two things that will make one remember being in a foreign country: the birds making different noises, and the bread being completely different.
In this case, there is a bird making a sound that is slightly similar to a child crying because it doesn't get what it wants. Quite funny.
Fixed the chroot.
kiivi's chroot should work again, now. Did an upgrade, and reinstalled gcc-3.3 to make sure stddef.h exists on the system again. Only wish libgtk2-perl hadn't finished building like five minutes after I closed my eyes, 'cause otherwise I would've fixed it yesterday night. Oh well, it's done now.
In slightly related news, I also uploaded pbuilder for Junichi Uekawa, since he doesn't have a working key in the Debian keyring currently. After this update, pbuilder should work with apt 0.6.
Jabber.org.uk down
I've been a long-time user of jabber.org.uk, only I can't reach them since a while now. Turns out they've been compromised. Grmbl.
Trying to get the IIci to work
Since I've got a (more or less) functional IIci set up now, I'm trying to create an emile package on it, here at DebConf5.
Not much is working, however.
One thing I forgot to do is to check the amount of RAM in this thing before I left. Turns out it runs on just 10MB, which is not much. Trying to run apt-get update over its serial line (no network interface builtin, and I don't have a NuBus network board) sorta works, but when it reads the package lists afterwards (and on subsequent apt-get upgrade runs as well), it hangs once it's reached 98%.
Been trying to get it to work almost all day yesterday, but so far no luck. It appears to be a VM deadlock of sorts — when it happens, switching virtual consoles is still possible, but no input is accepted; I can't even cleanly reboot the bloody thing.
So, I've just downloaded kernel-image-2.6.8-mac (which is installing as I'm typing this), and will try and see whether it works. Hopefully it does (there are known issues with some m68k macs and 2.6 kernels, though I don't know which models exactly or whether this model is affected), in which case I should be able to get a working EMILE package done.
If I get that to work, I'll also produce an emile-installer udeb. And if DebConf5 isn't nearly finished by then, there most certainly are other interesting things to do.
Watch this space.
Low sun
Helsinki is a nice place, but I don't like the sun.
Of course, I have nothing against sunlight per se, but I don't like it when the sun is rather low above the horizon for a few hours on end, when my eyes are looking at a window in a generally western direction. So I just moved my setup around, to be able to sit with my back to the sun rather than with my face. That works; only now I'm having trouble reading what's on the screen due to the reflection.
Guess I can't have it all.
Confusion.
<mrvn> Yoe: does your slip work now? <Yoe> slip? <mrvn> Yoe: serial line IP or pppd to your mac. <Yoe> ah. * Yoe was thinking of underwear
Hmm.
jazz:~# emile --set-hfs
ERROR: to be bootable a partition must be of type Apple_HFS
you can change it to Apple_HFS using "--set-hfs" argument
... Right. What was I doing again?
Index: tools/emile.c
===================================================================
--- tools/emile.c (revision 4)
+++ tools/emile.c (revision 5)
@@ -605,7 +605,7 @@
if ((action & ACTION_TEST) == 0)
return 6;
}
- if ( (ret == 0) && (action & ACTION_SET_HFS) )
+ if ( (ret == 0) && !(action & ACTION_SET_HFS) )
{
fprintf(stderr,
"ERROR: to be bootable a partition must be of type Apple_HFS\n");
Google maps stuff
With everyone and their mother now having the ability to look up a satellite image of their own house on google, I was wondering whether this was also the case for me. Apparently not; You have to look very careful on the picture of the area in question, and if you're lucky you might be able to see something. The house itself is impossible to make out, but it should be somewhere in the middle. At least if I didn't get it completely wrong.
While I was there, I tried to look up other things. The Eiffel Tower, the San Fransisco Bay bridge, the Sahara desert, the Nile delta. Hawaï, Honolulu. Pearl Harbour. Especially Pearl Harbour. Not that there's much to see there, but it's quite funny how the military clearly and obviously objected to too detailed sattellite images being on the web for everyone to download...
Kinda makes me suspect google maps will never be complete.
Speed
Yesterday, Thomas Lange of FAI fame needed to build a new FAI CD for amd64. As that requires access to an AMD64 machine to build a local mirror and what is called the 'nfsroot' in FAI speak, he asked me to install FAI on this amd64 system I helped set up, and to run a few commands to create that mirror and that nfsroot.
So, here we go:
apt-get install fai
Less than a second after hitting <enter>, I had my prompt back. At first, I thought something had gone wrong; but when I had a closer look, I found out that this wasn't true: everything had went exactly as planned. It's just that the system and the network were both so blazingly fast, that everything – downloading, installing, configuring, whatnot – took place within the timeframe of less than a second.
Whew.
Do I look like it or not?
When I arrived here on DebConf, people told me I didn't look like my hackergochi at all. Probably because I hadn't shaved myself in a week or two or so, and had a full beard.
A few days later, I took out my shaving utensils and shaved most of it off, but left a goatee. Since that is how I appear on my hackergochi, the next day someone who newly arrived told me how much I suddenly looked like my hackergochi.
I didn't really maintain the state of my beard since then, however, and it now is already a week old again. So Steve Kowalik just told me he couldn't find me because "You don't look like your hackergochi, really".
On top of that, the Overfiend also told me I look like a lot more fun in real life than I do on my IRC, and that he has the idea that I'm looking like I'll be attacking people on that picture.
Hm.
While I like the fact that he considers me 'a lot more fun', it would appear I'll be needing a new hackergochi.
Recent buildd frustrations
You know what happens when someone installs apt with authentication support without checking whether it's possible to disable that? Ugly things. Someone told me on IRC that it's supposed to be possible to disable that authentication by specifying 'APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "true";' in a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d, which is exactly what I did. No luck, however.
Another problem is the recent upgrade to GCC4, which seems to be fairly buggy on m68k. GCC3, which exists for quite a long time is now fairly bugfree (the last Internal Compiler Error I've seen from GCC3 must've been months ago), but since I installed GCC4 on kiivi, I've seen far, far higher numbers of those bastards. According to the interface behind crest.debian.org, we're on 13 of these bastards (and counting).
Grumble.
Guess we'll have some work to do.
Warning: negative karma detected
There's some sort of a fight going on between Joshua Kwan and Marco d'Itri. I'm, like, ->this<- far away from suggesting someone else takes over maintenance of udev. Marco has a serious problem in 'listening to his users'; this is an incredibly bad attitude if part of the intended audience of your software are 'desktop users that do not necessarily understand the system'. And yes, this makes using his packages unnecessarily hard:
- A few days ago, I explained on the -devel mailinglist why I seriously dislike using udev, to the point that I far prefer using a static /dev over udev. One of the reasons I feel that way is that udev has a number of race conditions in it. Since race conditions result in unpredictable situations so that bugs appear sometimes, but not always, this type of bugs is usually rather hard to debug (except if you know about the sorry state of udev). Marco's reply was that the issue is basically solved with 'RUN rules', so I was quite pleased. However, the very next day Daniel Burrows reported how he's having problems with race conditions in udev. So either Marco was lying or overly optimistic or something similar in saying that the issue is solved, or the udev package ships without these RUN rules and requires you to write them yourself — including the ones for such default things such as mice. And no, the fact that Christian Perrier, who's sitting three chairs to my left as I write this, is also reporting problems with udev suggests that Daniel isn't mistaken or using an old version.
- When Joshua and others suggested on IRC that it would be a good idea to ship a udev which supports a kernel that is actually in Debian, rather than one which isn't even supported on all architectures yet, Marco d'Itri tells him to 'grow up', completely ignores him, and claims that maintaining two branches, even if temporarily, would be too much a hassle. I'm getting increasingly annoyed with Marco's attitude of "I'm the maintainer, so I'm king and you can go fuck yourself" regarding anything he maintains. Marco, if you really insist on uploading stuff that requires stuff that isn't in main yet, then at least upload it to experimental. That's what it's for — and, yes, experimental is autobuilt these days.
Well. At least he hasn't been so crazy to make hotplug depend on udev yet. If he ever tries doing that, I'll just ITP something called 'hotplug-no-udev', which 'Provides: hotplug' or so...
Hotplug-no-udev
So I'm clueless. Rotfl. Whatever.
My offer stands, however. I've just downloaded the source to the hotplug package, and am planning to look at how deeply the udev support is entangled in there somewhere this week (maybe that's nothing for today anymore, however). If it doesn't seem to hard, I'll ITP a separate package hotplug-no-udev that will have a Provides: udev pretty soonishly. This should make both you and me happy: me, because I don't need to use udev; you, because you can drop support for non-udev systems and generally do as you please.
If you think that's an extremely bad idea, talk to me now.
Daytrip
Today, we went on a daytrip to Suomenlina ('Finland's Fortress'; not sure whether I have the spelling correct, though). Quite nice; went there by boat, had a guided tour on the island, and a picnic afterwards. Then back to the dorm (again by boat) and had dinner.
The only bad part about it is that I've got sunburn on my forehead, neck, and both arms now. But I guess I'll manage.
Mao and the art of piano hacking
A few days ago, I played the game of 'Mao' for the first time in my life. Quite fun. Of course, this had to be the day before the daytrip, so I quite expertly almost failed to wake up the next day, for the daytrip. Oh well.
As I've already blogged before, the daytrip went quite well—except for the sunburn. But I'll manage.
After that daytrip, we went to a sauna. Seeing all kinds of people get naked is some experience that I won't forget easily; especially not given what followed. The sauna was in a building that also had a central living area. That area happened to be having a piano. Being someone who loves to play the piano—even if I suck at it—I couldn't resist to try it out. Now although the sound was nice, there were some issues. For starters, the right pedal didn't work. So we removed the covers, and quickly found out that one of the screws holding the right pedal wasn't there anymore, whereas the other evidently wasn't strong enough to hold it all by itself.
Seen that the middle pedal was simply gone, we just used the one remaining screw of that pedal and used it to screw the right pedal into place.
One bug down.
Two to go.
With the right pedal put into place, we started playing it. It quickly became evident that the second F didn't make any sound, unless you played it very silently; this was because the hammer was too loose and never hit its snares. However, by applying a piece of wood I'd found outside in a (very) ugly hack, I was able to make sure the hammer would hit its snares. It played quite nicely then.
Two bugs down.
One to go.
Unfortunately, the final bug was that the piano hadn't been tuned right. We had to tag that one help, wontfix. Not that it mattered much.
Naked and dressed people alike soon started playing the piano. We sung a little bit. It was quite fun.
Today, then, I played Mao again, for the second time ever, and got to introduce a new rule. One which was called a 'good rule' by Ian Jackson—given his reputation in this game, a compliment I'm quite proud of.
But it's 4:10 now. Off to bed. Bye.
"What does 'mv' do?"
Just so James won't go behind my back telling stories about my cluelessness to everyone and their mother:
Yes, I did ask him what the mv command does.
...
Finished laughing? Good. The story is fairly simple, actually. James had downloaded his ~10800 emails that had accumulated over the course of a few days, and was feeding them to his gnus, so that all mail would end up in the right mailbox. This involved a command like mv -iv ~/xar .emacs-something-obscure, and then switching back to gnus to process the thing. Of course I know what mv does; what I really wanted to ask was what the point of those commands was—why the hell he kept copying (well, moving) files over that one obscure file.
But yeah, brain fart. Ignore me.
DebConf is coming to an end already.
I've been here for close to three weeks, and it's almost over. I can't believe it. It feels weird to receive instructions on how to check out, and to see people from the organization enter your room and check whether everything is still allright.
This will be one DebConf to remember, for more than just the obvious reason. It's been a wonderful time that I'll never regret. Thanks. You know who you are.
Exploring Helsinki.
Deciding I couldn't really claim to have been in Helsinki if all I've done during the nearly three weeks I've been here is sitting at the dorm and enjoying debconf, I went to explor Helsinki today. Both because I wanted some sportivity after all this hacking and because I find €3,40 for a bus ticket hugely expensive, I went there walking. I left for lunch around 11 AM, and made my way to downtown Helsinki right after that.
Sorry, no pictures—I don't have a camera.
The first part of the walk was long, but nice. I was told before I got here that Finland has nice forests. Apparently, that is even true in urban areas. I followed a road that crosses two bridges and one island to end up at the land area just north of the peninsula that contains downtown Helsinki. From there, I obviously headed in a slightly more southwarth direction, which led me through a suburban area with some villas. Suddenly, I saw a bus from a travel agency. And another one. And yet another one. Then two bus drivers making smalltalk. It occurred to me that there had to be something interesting to see here, so I walked around the corner.
Turned out there was the entrance to some sort of park there. Looking on my map, I saw a rather large island, which was connected to the land I was on by a foot bridge—one that I could see right in front of me. It looked interesting, but because I wanted to see Helsinki and because the island seemed to be pretty large, I decided not to enter it, but rather to move on. I was later told by Hanna Olila (a local helper) that this is a rather famous piece of nature in the area, popular among Helsinkians (or whatever you call an inhabitant of Helsinki).
Some half hour (or so) later, situated in the hollow part of an interesting curve in the road, I stumbled upon a gravel court of tennis. There were some people already on the benches which surrounded it, and there appeared to be an entrance fee. Intrigued, I looked a bit closer at the court, which had all kinds of markings suggesting it to be the court where someone would soon be playing a match for the Davis Cup. So I asked someone queueing up what this was all about; I was told this was indeed a Davis Cup, one between Finland and Bulgaria. Finland was represented by Finland's top player, a guy called Jarkko Nieminen—I don't know the name of his opponent. Asking what the price was, I decided not to pay the entrance fee; €20 is reasonable for a match on that level, but it's not something I want to pay when I'm just casually passing by. Luckily the fence was not of the type that makes looking over or through it impossible, so I stayed and watched the first set (which was won by the Finnish guy by breaking his opponent's service at 4-3, giving him the advantage on his service game which he easily won to make 6-3), but I left after that.
A few minutes after leaving the tennis court, the building density grew higher, and I suddenly found myself in downtown Helsinki. I moved on, until I bounced on a port. This was not a surprise—as I said before, downtown Helsinki is located on a peninsula, which means there's sea everywhere on the northeast-south-northwest parts of the city. I then had a look at my map again, and turned towards the more central parts of the city.
After yet a few more minutes, I stumbled upon a bar that was actually open (after having found several that were not), and sat down for a while, enjoying a cola. I deserved that, after a two hour walk.
Next, I started walking through the city at random. I saw several nice places; the square next to the trainstation, the trainstation itself, a yaught port, a church on top of some 20m (or so) high rock. Unfortunately that church was closed; but standing in front of it, I had a nice view over the city. One building was standing out: the cathedral at senate square. So I moved there. This one was open, so I went inside and had a look. Nice church; I like looking at churches, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw.
The catheral is a protestant one. There was a statue of Luther, so I suspect a Lutheran church, but for all I know it could be Calvinistic. They were advertising a free concert at 20:00 tonight (which by now is probably over already), and the organist was practicing or testing out the organ, playing a few notes every now and then. Other than that, there wasn't really much to see. I knew protestant churches and cathedrals are much less decorated than Roman Catholic churches, so I (falsely) assumed there would be no decoration at all in this church.
Boy, was I wrong. The cathedral surely isn't as baroquely decorated as some Roman Catholic churches are, but in their soberness, they still manage to make it an immensely beatiful place. I stayed there for a while, looking at the surroundings.
Next, I went for some Sushi. I had already seen the Sushi bar at around 15:00 (IIRC), but found that way too early to eat, so I decided to wait a bit. In the mean time, it had already become 18:00—a not uncommon time to eat in Belgium—so I went back looking for that place and ate there. I've never done that before (mainly because I know of no Sushi bar in or around Antwerp, where I live), and although it certainly wasn't bad, I wasn't really fond of it either. Maybe that's because I was alone; I can imagine it being a lot more fun if you're with a group of people. The 'Sushi Train' concept is quite nice, though. They should apply that concept to other types of food.
After that, I wanted to go back to the dorms; however, on my way back, I stumbled into an open-air exhibition called "Earth From Above", a bunch of pictures all of which were made from a helicopter, from all over the world (and yes, by one person). Those were quite nice, not just because of the subjects of the pictures or because of the immensely beatiful colors; also because of the stories they told. Every picture came with a short text describing what you were actually seeing (which often was necessary, because some took me some time to understand). There was one picture of an abandoned city near Chernobyl; another of cut trees floating on the Amazone river; yet another one of uranium mines in Australia; a fourth of Scarlet Ibises flying over a black background where the story told that they were endangered by extinction because of them being overly hunted. And so on. The message the artist wanted to relay to his audience was pretty clear: we need to rethink how we interact with the world, or there will no longer be a world in the future. All in all, he did so quite successfully, I'd say.
In the center of this exhibition, there was a huge world map, approximately 20m x 10m large (but I'm extremely bad at guessing sizes). It was nice to have a look at such a large map, and figure out where in the world you've already been...
It was almost 20:00 by then, so I decided to call it a day and get back to the dorms. Which I did. To find out that people thought I'd already left, including Jonas Smedegaard, whom I still had to buy a beer, and who had already left for the airport. Sigh. Guess that'll have to be handled differently, then. Oh well.
Arrived in .sk, no network
After leaving DebConf5 where I've met loads of interesting people, I now am in Slovakia, where I arrived today.
Everything seems to go fine, except I don't know where to get food—and there appears to be no Internet connection available at the hotel that allows me to plug in my laptop. Also, I need to find food "somewhere", even if it's only 17:36 here. Thing is, my body is still in .fi time, and I didn't get a lot of food today (you know what airplane meals look like, right?), so I'm getting hungry. Fixing that should be doable. I hope.
Mean time, It'll probably by very easy to catch up with my mail that has been accumulating 'cause, hey, there's no new mail coming in. Woohoo.
</sarcastic>
Bratislava and hotel plus
So I arrived in Bratislava yesterday. Since the ensemble has left for a 2-day trip to Tatra yesterday morning and I only arrived yesterday around noon, I have yesterday afternoon and the whole of today for myself. The ensemble is supposed to be back by midnight today.
I didn't do much yesterday afternoon, however. I spent the night of 2005-07-17 to 2005-07-18 awake, since I didn't want to miss my airplane. That went well, but it of course also meant that by the time I arrived in Bratislava, all I wanted is a bit of sleep. So I laid myself down on this bed, and had just that. Even if the matress is stone hard.
In the evening, I went to the city by bus. Bus tickets to downtown Bratislava are supposed to be 18 SKK, however I got a very strange look from the driver and some unfriendly sounding Slovakian when I attempted to pay him, so I didn't pay anything to get to the city. I'm sure I've missed something. Upon arrival, I stumbled upon the first English-speaking person I found outside the airport or hotel (naturally, he was not Slovakian—he was a Canadian from Toronto who only lived in Bratislava), who showed me where to find the historic center of the city. Went there, found a bar, ordered a beer ("We only have 0.5l beers, that's no problem?" "of course not"), consumed it while reading a book. After that, wanted to walk around a bit, but I stumbled upon a bar called "Café De Zwaan", which was all covered with ads for Stella Artois. While this may mean nothing to most of you, let me tell you that 'De Zwaan' is Dutch for 'The Swan', and that Stella is a well-known brand of Belgian Beer.
They even had Hoegaarden, my personal favourite. A Belgian bar, in the middle of Bratislava? Hmm.
I sat down and ordered a Hoegaarden. It didn't taste right. The waitress couldn't pronounce the name correctly. Oh well, I finished a few more chapters in my book.
By that time, it was a bit past 23:00, so I walked back to the bus stop. To find that the bus I just saw driving away was the last bus. With not enough money for a taxi. The first ATM I tried refused my bank card. Panic.
Luckily, one of the taxi drivers pointed me towards another ATM, that did take my card. The taxi was 244 SKK (plus tip); the bus would've been 18 SKK (if I had figured out how to pay them). Next time I'll be more careful not to miss the last bus.
This morning, I was woken up by the chamber maid. Who replaced the sheets and blankets of my (absent) roommates, but left without giving me any. WTF?!?
AAAAaaaaargh.
Over the last week, I'd implemented a gtkjstest program, to test joysticks using a GTK+ interface. Just a few seconds ago, however, I removed a few files too many, and those ~250 lines of code (that finally worked somewhat) are gone.
Aaaargh.
Guess I'll have to rewrite it, then. But I'm thinking of implementing a gobject-based library to allow for event-driven joystick access first. That will greatly improve the maintainability of the code—'cause really, it was ugly. Only it's not clear to me at all how gobject is supposed to work. Pointers are welcome.
Google is my friend... or it should be.
I've received quite some mails regarding my post about Bob Marley's infamous song. So much of them, in fact, that I've come to two conclusions:
- I should STFW a bit more often.
- I should start writing that comments thingy for my blog that I've been wanting to write since quite a while now.
In any case, the answer appears to have been number 2: "The original studio version that they made was nice, but The Wailers changed it sufficiently on that concert, and this version was deemed much better; as a result, people keep putting the live version on Best Of collections, and collectively forget about the original studio version." Or something similar, at least.
Considering the fact that between the release of the original studio version and the following live concerts tour, the band lost some members and gained some others (and changed its name as a result), it is quite obvious that the sound of the band (and, thus, the sound of this particular song) changed. Still, I'd like to hear that one version of the song. If only just once...
No Woman, No Cry
That song is one of the most famous Bob Marley And The Wailers songs ever, which appears on every 'Best of' collection I've seen, both when on CD and when on vinyl.
What's strange about this song, however, is that there appears to be only one version of that song (at least I've never heard of a different version), which is a recording of a live performance. This wouldn't be strange, except that the audience at the time exhibits behaviour that one does not generally associate with people who have never heard a song before (cheering upon hearing the first notes, singing along, etc). There are a few possibilities that would explain this:
- The song 'No Woman, No Cry' is not originally by Bob Marley, but was a well-known song by someone else at the time, of which they made their own version that they performed at this concert, and never on another occasion (in other words: this is the only recording that ever existed). While it would not entirely explain the audience's reaction, this would make sense.
- The original studio version that they made was nice, but The Wailers changed it sufficiently on that concert, and this version was deemed much better; as a result, people keep putting the live version on Best Of collections, and collectively forget about the original studio version.
- Something happened to the original studio version, and nobody has it anymore. The live version isn't the only version ever, but it is the only version that still exists today. I would find that unlikely, but it's of course not impossible.
- I'm simply not enough of a Bob Marley fan, and need to look harder. That, of course, is quite likely as all I know about Bob Marley is the few CDs I've seen in CD record shops and the one CD I bought while on a trip to .au.
And the odd documentary I've seen about him, of course.
Mysteries are fun, sometimes...
Solo!?
Yesterday, the ensemble played a concert on a plaza in Bratislava. A few minutes before the concert would start, I had a look at the list of pieces we'd be playing, in order to take my scores and put them in the right order.
Big surprise: the second piece was the Concerto Grosso by William Boyce that we play. This in itself is no big deal, except that I play solo in that piece.
Well, that and the fact that I didn't realize this, and hadn't had a look at it for about 2 months.
blink. Whoops.
All in all, it went quite well—only made one (little) error—as did the rest of the concert. But I was panicking there for a little while.
BB King rocks!
I bought a CD of BB King ("Live in Japan") the other day, for only €10 (well, €9.99). Boy, this guy's good. I knew him by name, and I had a general idea of the type of music he does, but I had no idea it was that good. For only €10? People are giving away treasures these days.
How dare the BBC introduce people to Beethoven!
Got this through a (Dutch-languaged) mailinglist somewhere: Apparently the BBC had the idea of putting all Beethoven's nine symphonies online somewhere for people to download freely. The copyright on Beethoven's music is of course long expired, and as the music was performed by the BBC's own orchestra, they hold the copyright to the performance as well. No issues there, one would think.
Wrong. Apparently some music execs now want to sue the BBC for unfair competition.
Rotfl.
"How does one recognise a music exec?" "By the dollar signs, rather than love, appearing in his/her eyes when they hear music"