Linked List: October 14, 2005

Friday, 14 October 2005

The gang at Coudal Partners are posting a slew of Kubrick-related links today. It’s like Christmas in July. Er, October. Must-read link: Filmbrain’s PDF version of Kubrick’s 1969 Napoleon screenplay, perhaps the greatest movie never made.

Apple to Hold Special Press Conference in New York Oct. 19 ★

Jim Dalrymple:

Apple doesn’t say exactly what the press conference will be about, but the invitation sent to MacCentral asks to join them as “we unveil Apple’s latest pro innovations.”

So this is where they’ll unveil the new Power Macs, and, I hope, new PowerBooks. Or, as they’re joking in the comments on the Macworld article, maybe they’ll unveil iTunes 7.

Take Control of Permissions in Mac OS X ★

90-page $10 ebook by Brian Tanaka covering a topic that confuses the hell out of most Mac users.

Jon Rubinstein to Retire in March; Tim Cook Named Apple COO ★

Rubinstein will be succeeded as head of Apple’s iPod division by Tony Fadell.

Ftrain ★

Paul Ford is one of my favorite writers, and he’s now back to writing on Ftrain.com after publishing a novel, Gary Benchley, Rock Star, which is as good a reason for a weblog hiatus as any.

Jackass of the Week: BitMover CEO Larry McVoy ★

BitKeeper is a proprietary, commercial source code management system. Mercurial is an open source, free source code management system. Bryan O’Sullivan works at a company that uses BitKeeper, but on his own time, he worked on Mercurial. Larry McVoy (CEO of BitMover, the company behind BitKeeper) contacted O’Sullivan’s employer to “[convey] his very legitimate worry that a fast, stable open source project such as Mercurial poses a threat to his business, and that he considered it ‘unacceptable’ that an employee of a customer should work on a free project that he sees as competing.”

What’s ironic about this is that BitKeeper’s home page prominently features a quote from open-source demigod Linus Torvalds. (Cf. the Wikipedia entry on BitKeeper for more.)

Reality Distortion Mouse Ears ★

Is the Apple-Disney deal a sign that Pixar and Disney might get back together?

What I Did This Summer ★

Paul Graham on the Y Combinator Summer Founders Program, which seems to have been quite successful so far:

Startups can be irresponsible and release version 1s that are light enough to evolve. In big companies, all the pressure is in the direction of over-engineering.

I just noticed that Graham uses double <br> tags instead of <p> tags; how retro.