I never thought that this day would come: Microsoft is no longer relevant.

These changes didn't happen suddenly, it was an almost imperceptible change. One day I just realized that an overwhelming majority of my friends and peers use a variant of Unix on a daily basis. Many have not used Windows in years.

Linux users once felt like they needed to count themselves to prove that Linux mattered, now people are unaware they are running Linux. Eleven years ago, people were predicting the doom of Apple as their stock hit the bottom and Microsoft invested $150 million in them, today Microsoft is running advertisements attempting to save face from Apple's iconic "I'm a PC" advertisements. It's all pretty unbelievable when I stop and think about it.

So what changed? I'm not sure that I care about the "how" of the matter, I'll leave it up to the historians to figure that one out. I like where things are, I'm even more excited about where they are going.

Nobody has "won", not even close, there is still much work to be done. I get the distinct impression that the Free Software community has just finished laying down the groundwork upon which true innovation can be built - innovation born in the 1970's held hostage by incompetence until now ... that is a topic for another day.

There are still plenty of things to argue about in this area, there always will be. I just don't care to argue anymore, I don't have to. And there lies the crux of the matter: Free Software stands on its own merit.

So, "Q" has to be one of the coolest programs I've seen in a while: stupid simple, open source hardware emulation.

I just ran Plan 9 in an x86 virutal machine on my PPC Mac mini!

I wanted to download all the mp3's from the the Best of Bootie 2006 CD website, but there wasn't a way to download all the files at once. I got around this by doing the following in Firefox:

1. Select all the text on the page containing links to the files.
2. Right-click on the text that was just selected.
3. Pick "View Selection Source".
4. When the DOM Source of Selection opens, Right-click on the selected HTML and pick "Copy".
5. Open a Terminal and "cd" to the location I want to save the files in.
6. Type in the following command: "pbpaste | tr \> \\n | grep href | cut -d '"' -f 2 | xargs wget"

What this does:

• "pbpaste" is a Mac OS X command line utility that allows you to print out the clipboard ("xsel" is an equivalent in Linux). This prints out the HTML that I selected in step 4 above.
• "tr" replaces characters. I replaced the right angle bracket with a carriage return, so that every HTML tag was is on a separate line.
• "grep" searches text. I looked for "href" which gave me every link in the selected text
• "cut" can give you specific columns of text based on a separator you give it. I said to split at double quotes and give me the second column (the mp3).
• "xargs" takes input and will run a command with each input line as the argument of the command.