Georgs band “No Business” played on Saturday in St.Gallen. It was a great concert (and a great party at that). They are actually quite good, with a broad repertoire and the audience forced them to go on for over 2 hours. I was also amazed that Georg played the percussions for a while, and not even bad. Apparantly he has been torturing drums since he was a child. This band is always good for some (pleasant) surprises. Rock on.

I am a great fan of open source software and so far I’ve used Mozilla/Firefox browsers since their very early releases. However the newest Firefox 2 basically rendered my Powerbook useless. After loading a site it would spin the colored wheel icon for seconds until it allowed to scroll the page. Switching between tabs would take several seconds and would freeze the UI until done, scrolling up/down would take several seconds… (this happened basically for every single action)
So I’ve installed Opera for Mac now on my box and it feels like I’ve upgraded my internet connection, browsing hasn’ been such a pleasure since a long time. I do prefer open source, but this was not tolerable for me. So for now it is: good by Firefox2, Opera here I come (at least on the Mac).

Get one while they last… unfortunately only in Japan for the next couple of months. (Release in North America: 17. November, Europe March 2007)

The claim that the GNU GPL has never been tested in court, is not true anymore. It has been looked at by various courts in several countries looking at different aspects. This time it was examined whether the GPL breaks antitrust rules in the US. InternetCases reports:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has issued an opinion in which Judge Easterbrook declares, “[t]he GPL and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws.” The case is called Wallace v. IBM., No. 06-2454.[…]
Plaintiff Wallace filed an antitrust suit against IBM, Red Hat and Novell, arguing that those companies had conspired to eliminate competition in the operating system market by making Linux available at an “unbeatable” price (free) under the General Public License (“GPL”).[…]
Instead of being a restraint on trade, the court held that the GPL serves to foster creativity, by enabling the free distribution and building of new derivative works.

Glynn Moody blogs about Connexions, a non-profit organization started by Rice University, which is similar to MIT’s open courseware.

However, it is even more open than MIT’s offering. It’s based on the open source Rhaptos software, whereas MIT’s is proprietary. Anyone seems to be able to contribute modules and courses to the system. And, additionally to its open courseware, it is making materials available as print on demand books, that can be individually customised. It hopes that this move will enable it to become self-sufficient, helped along the way by another grant from the enlightened Hewlett Foundation.

Here is the self-description of Connexions:

Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help

• authors publish and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom courses
• learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines.

Our Content Commons contains small “knowledge chunks” we call modules that connect into courses. Thanks to a Creative Commons open license, anyone can take our materials, adapt them to meet their needs, and contribute them back to the Commons. And everyone is invited to participate!

Inspired by this post on the Top 10 shell commands I measured my own. I had to redo the commands though:

root:
cat ~/.bash_history | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | uniq -c -i | sort -nr |head -10
184 emerge
49 equery
48 emacs
41 ls
21 cd
15 rm
12 revdep-rebuild
11 dispatch-conf
10 man
10 less

spaetz:
cat ~/.bash_history | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | uniq -c -i | sort -nr |head -10
59 su
13 cd
11 emacs
10 ssh
10 mutt
10 ./Jokosher
7 ls
5 rm
5 graveman
5 eselect


Yesterday, the ETH president resigned from his post. Apparently the majority of heads of the departments did not support him anymore. I have never met him personally, so I can’t say what he was like. What I can say, however, that he has helped to grow the MTEC department where I work at within two years from 2 to 15 chairs (or some number like that). For that I am thankful. Good bye Mr Hafen and good luck.
[UPDATE]: To give credit where credit is due, I’d like to emphasize that, as Mr Hafen has been President only for 10 months, the MTEC extension has been initiated and pushed mainly by his predecessor Olaf Kübler, who has been president since Dec 1997. So my thanks go to Mr Kübler as well.

Booked a flight from Zurich to New Zealand (Christchurch), yes, I’m looking forward to that holiday. On the down side, my credit card bombed out when I was supposed to pay 1500CHF in the travel agency (I hadn’t even been using it this month a lot). Darn limits!