Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

So, the expiry of the 15 day lock-up period finally occurred and we were able to sell 5% of our Google shares today. It was quite a relief to finally be able to take a bite out of the carrot that has been dangling in front of us for several years.

Being at work was a unique experience today, as our small circle of friends compared trading experiences and prices obtained. It seems that everyone did very well and the market remained buoyant throughout the day.

While travelling in Iceland and the Faroes last month, we came across the music of Eivør Pálsdóttir, a 20 year old Faroese woman with a very strong voice and wide vocal range.

Her first, eponomously titled album was released on the Faroese label, Tutl, and is a mix of Faroese and Danish folk songs, infused with jazz and blues elements. It's surprisingly good. That may sound patronising, but I mean only that I had gone to the Faroes expecting to pick up a CD or two as souvenirs of the place. I had not expected to find music that I could imagine myself listening to over and over again.

Her second album is called Krákan (The Crow) and came out just a few months ago. It was released on the Icelandic label, 12 Tonar, and has been selling very well in that country, which is where I heard it, in the 12 Tonar shop in Reykjavík.

Eivør really comes into her own during these songs, all of which she wrote herself. Some, such as Nú Brennur Tú Í Mær are moody pieces, while others, such as Rura Barnið evoke memories of the sorely missed Dead Can Dance.

I highly recommend that you take a chance and splash out on one or both of these albums. You're unlikely to hear them on your local radio, although you'll find sound bites on Amazon's and Tutl's site if you want a taste of what you'd be getting.

Also recommended is the Kristian Blak & Yggdrasil album simply called Yggdrasil. This album features Eivør on vocals throughout and is another blend of Faroese and Nordic folk and jazz influences, making for a very pleasant chill-out album.

Thanks to Geoff for this list of the bumbling baboon's greatest achievements. It's obviously strongly biased, but the numbers and stark juxtapositions make for interesting reading, nonetheless.

As fun as a holiday is while you're actually on it, it's extremely tedious to get back home and begin the seemingly endless process of comparing, selecting, sorting, rotating and captioning photos.

Nevertheless, we've done the dirty deed and our photos of the Faroe Islands and Iceland are now available for your viewing pleasure.

This time, we've also put together a Favourites sub-album, so that you can have just a quick taste if you don't want to be clicking away for hours. We recognise that other people's holidays generally aren't much fun when experienced second-hand.

I'm getting really tired of people using the ability to post comments to blog entries for their own nefarious purposes, namely to drop in links to the latest site for cheap Viagra and penis enlargement technology. Presumably, they're hoping that Googlebot will find these links, resulting in an increase of their site's PageRank.

To combat this, I've written a patch to Movable Type 2.661 to detect this kind of spam at the time of entry. If a spam attempt is detected, the comment will be refused and the originating IP will be automatically added to the ban list. So, if you're a genuine user, don't play around with this feature and try to trigger it!

Sarah and I went to see The Divine Comedy play at Café du Nord in San Francisco last night. An unexpected pleasure turned out to be the support act, a woman by the name of Polly Paulsma. This 28 year old from south London impressed me with her folky songs, which for me evoked memories of Suzanne Vega and Kirsty McColl.

As she moved from guitar to keyboard and then back again, I enjoyed her breathless voice, self-confidence and lyrical prowess. I therefore highly recommend buying her first album, Scissors In My Pocket, which I purchased at the gig and hastily ripped and copied to my iRiver, so that I can listen to it on my upcoming trip to Amsterdam.

We'll be heading back to San Francisco this evening for a second helping of Polly and The Divine Comedy.

After a weekend spent showing Geoff around Amsterdam, we're at SANE 2004 for the next 5 days. We're currently in the Black Hats tutorial, which rather amusingly started with a number of examples of how you can use Google to find password files and such like. I knew that people did this, but it was amusing to see all of the good hacks in a single session. Some very creative use of Google's advanced features was demonstrated.

Incidentally, there's a public transport strike in Amsterdam today, but we hired bikes and rode here, so experienced no hassle.

It's good to be home and it makes me look forward to returning here on a permanent basis, the changeable and gloomy weather notwithstanding.

I didn't get enough sleep last night. (Note to self: try to avoid sounding like the person at work who blames all of his mistakes on lack of sleep and excessive devotion to the cause.)

Jules, Geoff and I went out for some Indonesian food at Orient, one of my favourite restaurants (on the Van Baerlestraat), then biked into De Pijp for some drinks at my old stomping ground, Café Krull. By the time we got back to our hotel, it was very late, but I still had a few things to do on the computer, like chat to my lovely wife, back in California.

SANE 2004 is progressing nicely. Gerald Carter's Tuesday Samba tutorial was very good, but largely irrelevant to me. We don't use Samba at Google and, besides, the tutorial was really for people who are currently running 2.2 servers and want to know what they can expect from 3.0.

Gerald Carter also hosted my Wednesday tutorial, which was about implementing [Open]LDAP. This was much more relevant to me, but my own knowledge of LDAP is fairly extensive, so I didn't pick up much new from the session. Nevertheless, it was still useful to listen to Gerald speak, as he recapped a lot of the work I've been involved in over the years and basically covered all of the material from his book in just eight hours. It was quite an involved talk, as you might imagine.

The tutorials ended yesterday with the Free Software Bazaar, which basically consisted of a talk by Richard Stallman. I'd seen the same talk before at Google a couple of months ago, but it was still amusing and gratifying to hear him compare one's moral obligation to copy software for one's neighbour to one's moral obligation to save a drowning man, unless that man be Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Kerry. I do respect people who dare to speak their mind

The conference proper began today. The keynote by Paul Kilmartin was about eBay's infrastructure through the years and went into a surprising amount of detail. Not a bad talk for a bigwig.

Wietse Venema discussed lessons learnt from open source security programming later in the morning, which was another very well-attended talk. He discussed the release and publicity surrounding each of TCP Wrappers, SATAN and Postfix and contrasted them.

Now it's the late afternoon and I'm starting to feel woozy. I've got to hang in there, though, because the social event is coming up this evening, which translates into a boat trip along the IJ river. That'll be a lot of fun if I can stay conscious.

On a sadder note, the occupants of a car returning to Amsterdam from Paris after dropping off Richard Stallman were involved in an accident that cost one of them his life; a compelling reminder of how suddenly one's fortunes can permanently change.

Tomorrow is the final day of SANE. It's hard to believe that Geoff and I began our journey to The Netherlands almost a week ago. Time passes very quickly in Amsterdam, unlike in Silicon Valley, where the weeks seem to drag on forever. On the other hand, it's gratifying to know that I'll see Sarah again on Monday, as I'm missing her and looking forward to being reunited.