EFF files brief in free speech case
Freedom of speech vs. intellectual property in the internet age.
(tags: eff copyright france USA comity arstechnica court law internet fashion photography)

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This is pure genius.
Have a listen:

Found vinyl gem: “Go Home You Foreign Communist”:
Xeni Jardin:
This blog entry includes a downloadable MP3 of an early ’70s funk-soul song titled “Go On Home You Foreign Communist.” There appears to be some confusion about who’s performing it, but one commenter credits it to Al C. Bailey, on [...] (…)

I kinda missed this at the time, so here’s my attempt at catching up - and a very geeky trip down memory lane.

Linked below is the very talented John Siracusa’s article on the fifth anniversary of Mac OS X. I know exactly where I was on Mac OS X’s launch day of Saturday 24th March 2001, because I was working in the Scotsys AppleCentre Glasgow selling it.

I was fifteen at the time, and it was an exciting day. It heralded the effective end of a system that I’d grown up knowing in the most excruciating detail, but also some kind of new beginnings. It also represented a huge challenge, since as with everything Apple, troubleshooting and compatibility information was a bit thin on the ground before the launch. Also, none of us had a scooby about Unixes.

People I demoed it to on the launch day were very impressed, and when I look back on how far it’s come since then, I’m almost embarrassed. Yet it did establish a solid foundation for everything that was to come: iTunes, Quartz, the new versions of QuickTime, the Intel transition and countless architectural improvements.

Typical of Scotsys (and Apple at the time that I worked with them), we didn’t have enough copies to sell. I think we had around one hundred, but most had been set aside for pre-orders. In any case, we sold out.

Scotsys has been taken over since I worked for them, but I heard various things at the time regarding an Apple Store in Glasgow. There was supposedly a three-year agreement between Apple and Scotsys not to open stores in Scotland until they had time to restructure their business.

I left Scotsys in March 2003.

I’m just saying…

Five years of Mac OS X:

Mac OS X is five years old. John Siracusa takes a look at the road behind as he ponders the critical role the OS has played in Apple’s revitalization. From closing the book on the original Mac to practically inventing a new platform overnight, OS X changed Apple and its users in ways that worthy of a birthday reflection.

Mac OS X 10.0 was the end of many things. First and foremost, it was the end of one of the most drawn-out, heart-wrenching death spirals in the history of the technology sector. Historians (and Wall Street) may say that it was the iMac, with its fresh, daring industrial design, that marked the turning point for Apple. But that iMac was merely a stay of execution at best, and a last, desperate gasp at worst. By the turn of the century, Apple needed a new OS, and it needed one badly.

(Via Ars Technica).

Citroën DS by the riverside

Originally uploaded by BigRedBall.

Just a Flickr test post. But a cool car nonetheless.
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That incredibly cheesy animated GIF is for whoever at Blogsome fixed the XML-RPC bug last night - it had been plaguing me for months. Now my del.icio.us daily post works properly, I can blog Flickr photos and I can blog from my phone. And using the site should be a little less annoying, as there [...] (…)