bmt online is moving, again
Important! If you did not end up where you thought you should have, please read.
I have decided to do the big step and get myself a domain name,
bmt-online.org. For
technico-laziness reasons, though, I am managing the URL transfer in
a not entirely satisfying way, in that requests to any of the
bmt.dnsalias.org sites will be redirected to this page. Sorry about
that 
In any case, please take note of the disparition of bmt.dnsalias.org. You can now access any site you formerly accessed on bmt.dnsalias.org by replacing bmt.dnsalias.org with bmt-online.org in the URL.
As a side note, the @bmt.dnsalias.org email addresses will not be valid anymore either and they should be replaced with @bmt-online.org addresses.
fri 2004-02-13
Found a job
I am happy to say that I have found a rather steady job with nexB, Inc, as a full time Java developer for their asset management system. I am still interested in hearing about what jobs are out there, but I do not pressingly have to find something any more.
fri 2004-02-13
The little green buddy
I was looking back at the october blog entries and I realized that I never got to show a picture of the little Ninja. Unfortunately, a quick search did not let me find it in the same color as I have (the all time famous Kawasaki green), but here's the yellow twin to my buddy, as found on the Kawasaki web site.
wed 2004-02-12
The SCO case
In the past two days, I have heard SCO mentioned twice in unspecific terms in
the mainstream media. First time was in the San Francisco Chronicle (or was
it the San Jose Mercury News ?) where SCO was described as a small Utah-based
software company. While this is technically correct, SCO is not just that,
a small Utah-based software company
. It is the company,
formerly known as Caldera, who took the name of the SCO
Group, Inc.
after it was released by the company now known as Tarentella, Inc.
. Before it was taken over, SCO meant
Santa Cruz Operations, as in Santa Cruz, California. So, not much to do
with Utah.
Now, a quick lookup on Google for sco
quickly brings the
whole deal about the SCO Group to anyone interested. Note, though that as I
write this, the first link on the results page, the web page of the new SCO
does not work. We'll get back to that very quickly.
So, anyways, yes, SCO is not just any small Utah-based software company, it is the company who has filed a lawsuit against IBM for copyright infringement, claiming that IBM copied code it had no right to from SCO's Unix technology into Linux. Were those claims deemed to be true, the implications would be huge!
Fortunately for the Linux community, and the open source community at large, it seems that SCO is not even trying to play fair. All the details can be found on more serious sites reporting about the case, but I'd like to mention (just for the good laughs) the claims that they could not make public the code that was alledgedly copied by IBM (I guess as it would break their production secrets), and when finally ordered by court to let IBM get their code for analysis (under of course the right kind of NDA) delivering it in paper form. After all, that's only one million pages, a truck load, a breeze to go through.
So, this company makes a claim with huge implications against a movement that is currently reshaping the face of business, a claim that then proves to be real shaky, and when pressed hard, they defend themselves as unfairly as they can. Gosh, either they have a hidden agenda, or they are managed by a bunch of assholes.
Which brings me to the second time I heard about them, this very morning on NPR. They were running a bit of news about some bay area company who claims to own patent on digital media streaming (a big story in itself too, I guess), and how they are trying to enforce their patents by asking offering a license agreement for 3% of the licensee's revenue or face a lawsuit. IMNSHO, that's another bunch of assholes with a patent formulated in vague terms and who is trying to extort money from where the money is.
The reporter concluded that while interested parties (those licensees
who chose the lawsuit rather than the 3%
agreement) try to fight back within the system, that is, with another
lawsuit, Internet evildoers, ticked off by the unruly behaviour of the
claimants fight back with their own means, and citing the case of the virus
MyDoom, whose aim was to perform a
DOS attack against SCO's website
(which is indeed why the site is not accessible today). Well, boohoo. SCO has
repeatedly shown that they were not even trying to play fair in the case they
brought up, so that there is no surprise that they end up irking some of the
more unruly members of the community they are threatening.
thu 2004-02-06
References
Of course, Google is your friend. However, to be a little more structure, you might want to have a look at the following websites:
