What is the Book of Song?

In late 2008 I was getting tired of lugging around the thick three ring binder that held all the songs my little troupe of folk musicians had learned up to that point. Over time the lyrics to the songs we did, complete with chords and sometimes with some of the history behind the tunes had been stuck into a binder. The separate sheets had ended up in plastic sheet protectors, and I’d gone so far as to create a table of contents page just so I could actually find a specific song in what had become a huge tome of tunes. This meant I had to pencil in page numbers on each page and keep the pages in order in the binder. The book had grown to several hundreds of pages thick and was ornamented here and there with artwork I (and others) had drawn, it included some sheet music for melody lines to the less well known songs or instrumental pieces which were included in haphazard fashion but the thing was growing too darn heavy, and keeping up with the Table of Contents was a pain. We each had our own books that had grown in similar fashion so we wouldn’t have to look on with each other when we got together. The different books might have notes specific to the part we played, sometimes things were crossed out or alternate keys were scribbled in. It was hard to mark up the sheets since they were in sheet protectors – if something changed you had to take them out first which was a pain. I decided that I’d compile and lay out a complete “Book of Song” with all our notes which we could print using an online print service (I’m a fan of lulu.com) so we could each have a nice professional looking bound copy. This would also serve as a sort of “yearbook” marking all the tunes we knew to that point. Its now many years later and the time has come to make a new Book with tunes learned since the last volume was created and this time I wanted to do it all with free software if I could. This is the story of how I created these two song books. Warning: this is a LONG post.

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Luckily I really haven’t had to go shopping since I got married many years ago. I hate it, and usually avoid stores, malls, etc. at all costs. Needless to say I’m a very happy Amazon customer and a big fan of UPS. Today I had a few extra minutes after hitting the bank and I knew that the company candy machine had run out of gum (that could be a blog post all its own btw) so I decided to swing into a local CVS and pick some up. After what seemed like 10 minutes, though am sure was far less I finally found the correct aisle, only to discover that they only had a couple kinds and only in packs of three. A big yellow tag on the Trident I wanted announced “2 for $4″, while the single pack price was $3 and change. I decided to get two and headed for checkout. I hand the packs to the lady at the desk and this exchange follows:

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OK kids, make sure you have python installed so you can fire photons in this python remix of the classic Fortran Super Star Trek classic terminal game from the mid 70s. I played this game (poorly) in High School and had gotten frustrated trying to run the original Fortran version some while ago. Turns out ESR had ported (a C port of) the original Fortran code which runs great. Make sure you pull out the latest version from git since its got some essential bug fixes from: https://developer.berlios.de/git/?group_id=2492

Here’s ESR’s original G+ post and there’s some more banter about the history of the game in the comments to his blog post.

There’s a nice writeup of the history of the game and how its played here.

Here it is, running happily in terminal under Ubuntu 11.10:

OK, so I’m not a sports fan, but I admit that I did *try* to watch the superbowl since its supposedly the American thing to do. Since I don’t pay for cable TV at $100 a month, I don’t get any of those cable channels showing the game, but thought I’d be able to get it on broadcast NBC but no. Apparently whatever deal NBC made meant that the game would NOT be shown on broadcast TV (which I’m normally able to receive with my QAM antenna). Failing that, I tried to get the game over the internet but since I run Linux on all my machines I was presented with a message that I’d need to install Microsoft Silverlight to view it. I’m not a fan of Silverlight (or flash for that matter) and its riddled with DRM but OK, fine, I’m willing to install it so I could watch the game. Several minutes later I was presented with a rather annoying message that Silverlight is not compatible with Firefox 9.0! Well, F you NBC and F you Microsoft. If you want my eyeballs on your advertisements you can pay ME. I’m gonna watch the Linux Action Show instead.

There are many reasons so many folks who work the web are opposed to these bills. Beyond the fears of enshrining government sponsored censorship (ala China) which could easily kill your access to non-American news media (especially important in a crisis) and stifling innovation (by creating a precarious legal climate for startups), existing businesses models that allow users to link to content (youtube, twitter, flickr, imgur, you name it) could be put off the internet in one fell swoop at the whim of another industry. But theres another way to look at this issue – the economics of it don’t make any sense. All signs point to this as being a massive lobbying effort by the publishers and movie industry to break the web once and for all and theres a great article by Julian Sanchez (of the Cato Institute) on Ars Technia discussing the economics of piracy which goes into great detail exploring the claims of the RIAA and the movie industry for the supposed harms of piracy. 

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