I just finished listening to George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children. If you have any inclination towards 20th century music, Voices is an amazing work. The texts are fragments of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, though many of the vocal parts are just abstract sound (vocalises). It's strange and wonderful music.

The CRi recording is excellent; the engineering (by David Moulton) is a masterpiece. The piece is full of textures that are incredibly difficult to capture: singers offstage and onstage, mezzo and boy sopranos singing into a piano, non-Western percussion instruments, even toys.

But just in case you're wondering what colors correspond to what book series, you can find out below.

Browser-Safe Color Equivalents of our Series Colors

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Was UK Prime Minister Tony Blair part of a great deception to convince Parliament (and the world) that a war on Iraq was warranted? The plot thickened recently when privacy and security sleuth Richard M. Smith peered into the file headers of a key Microsoft Word document Blair based part of his case upon. The same document was used by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his historic reading of the facts before the UN, and was used yet again as a corner post in President George W. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address where he pushed for war. A quick perusal of Word 2000 in a Nutshell, or several other books about MSWord, would have informed the editors of the document of this "feature." For the sake of history, though, I'm glad they didn't know to look.

It wasn't until a few months after my return to California that I saw my first cell phones in use there, heavy contraptions strapped onto the back or shoulder of the owner, too heavy and ungainly to take up into a hunting stand.

I've been to Sweden many times since 1984 and cell phone use is taken for granted now. You regularly see children and elderly people messaging, reading email, and looking at photos on their phones. Yesterday, though, I saw something that took me back to that forest in 1984. Some friends were over (she, 59, a bank teller; he, 62, a garbage truck driver) and before sitting down they set their cell phone on the table before them. During our visit their phone made a periodic beep, and each time it beeped the couple glanced at the display. After awhile I had to ask what was going on.

Their son, it turned out, was competing in the Vasaloppet, a 60 mile, marathonlike, cross-country ski race in the middle of Sweden. The phone was beeping each time their son passed through a town along the route. The couple had done the necessary "programming" to keep track of their son, though they didn't really understand the mechanics behind what they'd done, in the same way they don't understand exactly what happens when they program their answering machine, or use Amazon to order a book. This is significant, I think, because it demonstrates how cellphone technology has passed through the hands of techies and is being used by ordinary people to do advanced things.

Seen any cool cell phone tricks lately?

The first day started with a packed auditorium eagerly awaiting talks by John “Maddog” Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, and Richard Stallman, the creator of the GNU Project and the spiritual father of the free software movement.

Maddog’s talk, titled the “History of Free Software,” reminded me how important it is for the elders of any community to pass down their creation story. Lately I’ve met several people, old and young, who are new to open source. Though amazed at the ethos of the movement and the freedoms open source software offers them, they are nonetheless unaware of the hard struggles their predecessors endured to create the world they live in. But Maddog’s talk was not only for new initiates. Having worked at O’Reilly for many years I’ve been steeped in the history and lore of open source. Nevertheless, Maddog’s speech had a binding effect on everyone in the auditorium as we collectively recalled seminal events, the ups and downs and chance developments that culminated in this movement.

Richard Stallman gave a speech titled “The Danger of Software Patents,” the thrust of which was to warn his European brethren of the stultifying world that awaits them if the EC adopts software patent policies like those in the United States. Using logic and moral suasion, Richard carefully explained how software creations are different that the creation of physical objects, and that the methods used to protect patented objects smother the environment software developers work in. His most potent metaphor came late in his speech when he likened the creation of software to the creation of music. “Like musicians,” Richard said, “software developers build upon the ideas of those who came before them. What if European governments, he asked, had allowed the patenting of patterns, melodies, and sequences of symphonic music in the 17th century.” Richard paused and then said, “We wouldn’t have the music of Beethoven today.”

But the most moving speech was given late in the day during the presentation of the Free Software Award. This year’s award did not go to a hacker, to someone working on the next big thing, but to Lawrence Lessig for his work on behalf of intellectual freedom. In his short but fiery acceptance speech, fueled by his recent loss of Eldred vs. Ashcroft before the Supreme Court of the United States, a case so obviously righteous and logical, he told how an attorney for the media conglomerates battling the case came up to him and said “When have morals and ideals ever won against all the money in the world?” Lawrence took in his audience and admitted that never in human history have free ideals won against such odds, but they are, he said, in the world of free and open source software. It was a moving moment, followed by a sustained standing ovation.

When it was over, when the rooms were emptied and the halls were cleared, developers from all over the world filtered out into the cold, damp streets of Brussels, alive, united, and free.

Were you at FOSDEM?