Get your nearest mirror here!
It just occurred to me, as I fired up my VMWare copy of Ubuntu and
searched its universe repositories, and searched my local RPM
mirrors on Fedora Core, for packages of
"dar", the Disk Archiver of
which I am enamoured, that surely there are local Ubuntu mirrors that
I can use here on the ANU campus (I'm doing this from work). I've
already found the local mirrors of the various RPM repositories that
I use: http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au,
http://mirror.optus.net,
http://mirror.pacific.net.au/,
http://public.www.planetmirror.com/,
and others.
I know other people on campus use Ubuntu. I know about http://debian.anu.edu.au, although I haven't configured my Ubuntu installation to use it as a source. I personally think it makes the Internet a better place to get your new and updated packages from the closest mirror you can. If your ISP has a mirror, then definitely use that because it almost certainly won't use up your download gigabytes per month quota.
So imagine if there was a system whereby users could submit and update yum and apt-get configurations based on IP ranges. Then a simple package would be able to look up which configuration would apply to their IP address, and it would automatically be installed. Instantly you'd get the fastest, most cost-effective mirrors available. You could probably do the lookup as a DNS query, too. It'd even save bandwidth for the regular mirrors and encourage ISPs to set up mirrors and maintain the configurations, knowing that this bandwidth saving would be instantly felt in their network rather than relying on their customers to find their mirrors and know how to customise their configurations to suit.
Hmmmm.... Need to think about this.
posted at: 18:28 | path: /tech/web | permanent link to this entry
Right music or wrong music?
I find myself in an ethical, legal and preferential dilemma.
I've been saying for some time that I should start looking at music from new distribution systems - Magnatune, to be precise. Magnatune's licenses permit DJ-mixing for non-commercial use, such as mixes that are given away - which is what I do with my mixes. It seems particularly appropriate to use Creative Commons licensed music when mixing at LCA[1] - something that a couple of people have asked me about in the past. So finally I got the playlists from all the Magnatune artists that I thought I'd like and started listening to them. I picked a rough guess at about $50 as what I'd pay the various artists whose work I liked and was going to use.
Technically, it's good stuff. There's a fair variety of styles, from techno-industrial to downtempo to electro breaks to drum and bass. But, though I hate to say it, none of it is of the quality of, say, Push, Man With No Name, or Astral Projection (to name some artists whose styles are pretty recognisable and, in my uninformed opinion, fairly duplicatable); or Nic Chagall, Perry O'Neil, Stalker and the remixes of 'Sand In My Shoes' by Dido, to name some tracks that I've bought on vinyl recently. The feeling of giving the tracks a value of $50 was akin to the feeling of paying for a minor filling - I could see the value and the correctness of paying but I didn't feel I'd get any pleasure out of the transaction. But not paying any money feels even more wrong.
My main disappointment came when I got an email through Discogs from a guy selling a whole bunch of stuff (1111 releases, to be precise) on eBay, some of which was on my wantlist. I would use up the $50 just in buying two of these albums at full price, if you could find them in a store; I could buy three to five second-hand CDs from the UK for the same price (depending on how I spent my money) and I'd get names I actually recognised: Transwave, early Trancemaster and Reactivate, Infinity Project, and Man With No Name, just to name a few. That's quality I can trust.
Of course, with buying those CDs I'd be back at square one: none of them have any license which allows random DJs to mix tracks off their albums for free. Oh my wordy lordy no. Foolish for even thinking about it.
So my dilemma is simple: buy the right thing that I can legally and ethically use but that doesn't turn me on, or the wrong thing that I know I'll like but am not allowed to use.
Tricky.
[1] - Linux Conference Australia. The fact that I still persist in using proprietary, closed-source software on a proprietary, closed-source operating system to do these mixes is the one great thorn still in my side. I'd pay money for people to program a free, open-source alternative to MixMeister...
(I'm also considering putting a "Tip Jar" beside me when I'm DJing
at LCA 2007, with a sign saying "80% of this goes to the artists that
created the music". I wonder what
the reaction will be...)
posted at: 16:57 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.