Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Jul 12, 2010 GMT

Last month I briefly blogged about my love affair with old automated musical instruments such as the player piano, player reed organ, nickelodeon, wind-up phonographs and my long association with the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector's Association (AMICA).

June, 2008 was the first time that I was able to physically attend a local chapter of the AMICA, and I enjoyed meeting other people who collected and played these ancient instruments. One of the downsides of collecting the older... more »

Jul 01, 2010 GMT

July has two conferences where I will be presenting, but first I will remind people that the Ohio Linux Fest has extended their call for papers another week to July 7th.

Since I have already submitted the abstracts for my Ohio Linux talks, on July 6th I will be leaving for the FOSSED conference in Bethel, Maine on July 7th to 9th. My good friend... more »

Jun 30, 2010 GMT

Sometimes you run across something so discouraging you want to just hang your head. That happened today as I received a letter from the folks at Creative Commons stating that The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of the groups that supposedly represents artists by licensing their music and paying the artists royalties, had sent out letters to their 380,000 members asking for donations to fight against the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge and Creative Commons (CC). These groups were portrayed as being “against the... more »

Jun 29, 2010 GMT

This past weekend I visited my family who now lives in Pennsylvania. My mother and father are long retired and living in a retirement community. This weekend was their 68th wedding anniversary.

My brother retired from the telephone company a long time ago, having been an electronic technician and lives with his wife.

Once a year my brother and sister-in-law attend a big family reunion that mostly centers on her family, since my side of the family is very small (and destined to get a lot smaller). I... more »

Jun 27, 2010 GMT

Last week I spent two days that the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Unlike a lot of conferences I attend, I actually spent much of my time in technical talks listening to some of the things that Red Hat was going to be putting into RHEL 6.0 which is due out in a short time1.

I enjoy listening to technical talks, particularly ones talking about kernel issues since I used to teach operating system design. I taught other types of programming (database, compiler design, networking, graphics) but in my opinion most... more »

Jun 25, 2010 GMT

There are a growing number of local and regional FOSS conferences happening around the world, and one of the oldest of them, the Ohio Linux Fest, asked me to comment on why people should consider submitting and giving a talk a conference such as theirs.

The first reason, is the concept of “sharing”. You have developed an idea, a project or a piece of code on which you have expended time and effort, and talking about it at one of these events gives that work visibility so that others may benefit from it. From this... more »

Jun 21, 2010 GMT

There will be a lot of Linux activity in Boston this summer, all before the middle of August.

The Red Hat Summit and JBOSS World leads the parade with four days of training and talks, June 22nd to June 24th. I have a great deal of respect for Red Hat and their engineering staff, having worked with many of them when they were at Digital Equipment Corporation, and I know that I will enjoy seeing some of the talks on filesystems,... more »