Sunday, June 20, 2004

Here's a picture of fourteen Macintosh software developers grinning at an Apple executive that appeared on the cover a 1989 software catalog.  

I recorded Bill Clinton on 60 Minutes, audio only, as broadcast on WBZ-AM Boston. Commercials included. 

So I did another audio recording, and now I can't get a DVD to play. I tried re-doing Darryl's instructions, but no luck. I want a button that says "I'd like to play a DVD now, dammit, set it up so it works." If you have any fresh ideas, please let me know. The problem is Windows is still taking audio input from the microphone. I want it to play the audio from the DVD. 

I got a truly luxurious present for my parents, who are hard to buy for, especially my father, who doesn't hide his feelings about presents. I don't think, until this weekend, I had ever given him a present that he really liked. And it was surprising to me that he liked this one, because it wasn't exactly an intentional present. Sound weird? Keep reading.  

Dan Bricklin went to a reunion of people who worked on the Multics operating system. The name Unix derives from the name Multics. Unix is one "ic." Get it? And then Linux is derived from Unix, it's Linus's "ix." This is good, it's called standing on the shoulders of giants. It's respectful. There's another family of ancient operating systems (let's see if I get this right). First there was RT-11, then RSTS and CP/M, then MS-DOS (also known as PC-DOS, same thing), and finally MS-Windows. They all shared the same command structure, and at least for CP/M and MS-DOS and Windows, a common API. Windows went much further, and RSTS was multi-tasking. So while the Unix thread was scaling down, the RT-11 thread was beefing up. Meantime Macintosh OS was a wholly different thread, and it was not well-known that the pretty icons rested on a fairly powerful and well-designed DOS with a simple multi-tasking design. It worked. We were able to build interapplication communication on it.  

Command Post reports that bloggers will cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston next month. I've applied, haven't heard back yet. I wonder if the print and broadcast people know if they're approved.  

Thanks to a poster named Darryl who helped get my laptop audio working again, I was able to watch the full American Splendor, a great movie, and a parable for the blogging lifestyle. I love how the two characters Pekar and Letterman bounced off each other. Pekar shows humans as they really are, frail, scared, lonely, but also vulnerable, sweet and loving. Letterman throws him a softball, tell us about all the great projects you're working on. Pekar asks what he's talking about. He's a file clerk, always will be a file clerk, and hopes to have a few years of health between retirement and death. That's American Splendor. It's not pretty but it's real. A blogger's anthem. Very cool. 

Andrew is working on a project involving both RSS and Atom, and has some questions about content encoding in Atom.  

I am still wanting to watch American Splendor on my ThinkPad running Windows XP, and haven't had any luck. Help!