EVOL.reverse

Life is of wonderful magic, uniqueness and beauty.

There is so far no evidence for life now or in the past on any of the planets on our solar system. Structures have been found occasionally on extraterrestrial rocks that look somewhat like small versions of microorganism fossils but certain about these having to do with life or being formed by ordinary precipitation of minerals doesn’t exist.

That’s why I think, and today it really striked me, that life is the greatest gift anyone could ever gave me. And even more, the sole experience of contemplation that it offers is enough reason to live happy, and perphaps even, to die happy.

I know I still have much to discover and unveil but now all is different. Like Osho says: “Life is more of a mystery to be lived than an enigma to be solved”.

Think of people alone and interacting with each other. Think of birds, the sea, the planet and the universe. Every thing you do, hear, smell, watch is a unique moment of complexity and simplicity alltogether that science will never be able to predict but simply watch as it unfolds.

Its sad that some people because of poverty or diseases, etc.. cannot joyfully experience life as others can. If that is so, maybe our mission is to join some global humanitarian organization that can help some of these people to live better and help them. Or perphaps donate part of our income to those global organizations. I don’t know.

Even so, exciting new adventure: Life.

Credit where credit is due. TJ introduced me to Pandora.com, an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by The Music Genome Project and also the best freakin’ web-based application I’ve seen in ages.

The idea behind it is to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes like rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies or displayed instrumental proficiency to describe songs. You start by firing away your favorite band and Pandora will stream a song from that band and then follow with songs that match the attributes of your favorite band. The funky shit is that its works! It catched my ear since the first minute and I listened to it all day.

There are so many things I would like to say about this I don’t know where to start.

1. Pandora doesn’t require Login/Register/Sign-Up to begin using the application. You can have several previews first which makes all sense. First you see the real value of what you will be using, then you register. Not the other way around.

2. Can you imagine the amount of songs they index and have information about? It blows my mind thinking of it.

3. There’s an article on Pandora by Fast Company magazine called “Algorhythm and Blues” that gives an overview on the history of this application and the Oakland small company behind it.

4. For those of you who read Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start”, you may like to know the company behind Pandora nailed down a $1.5 million round of angel funding – including a sizable chunk from Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com, back in late 1999. No doubt well invested money, this is now definitely a million-dollar company (not that I would know).

Oh well, that’s it. Enjoy and relax. After all… “music calms even the savage beast”.

Light Blue Touchpaper (Security Research, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge) alerts users to upgrade their Wordpress to version 2.0.3 which should fix two XSS vulnerabilities they reported that are exploitable in the default installation and can readily lead to arbitrary PHP code execution.

They plan to post more details about the vulnerabilities in 10 days because, they say, “the nature of the problem can probably be deduced from the code changes, so there is limited value in waiting much longer”.

LinuxForums are reviewing the latest Ubuntu Linux Dapper version but I just wanted to bring forth a sine paragraph from it:

Of course a few things were said about Canonical Ltd. not having a viable business model, the distribution’s success being only a consequence of a trend of the moment, and Ubuntu being a bad fork from the Debian project. But as releases went by, and the distribution simply getting better, it soon became clear to a lot of people: Ubuntu was the most popular distribution.

Why is this interesting? Well, when back in What the Hack I saw a presentation on Ubuntu by Benjamin Mako Hill with his lovely hat (photo here) I though more or less the same thing, “yet another debian fork”, etc., etc. Of course when I tryed it the first time I knew it meant something more. Much more.

What caught my eye was the “Just Works” feeling. You’re sick of banging your head against stupid defaults and configurations and just want something to get things done. Half-world is changing to Apple because of this and Ubuntu is the nearest thing you can get in the Linux world. But I know other things that made the difference. The best marketing you can get these days is the “buzz” and Ubuntu has that too.