We just open sourced an AI that places real phone calls on your behalf. We named it after the dog.

Quick roadmap:

• Meet the actual Banjo, and why the name isn’t just a cute mascot choice
• What the software does, in one real example
• Five ways the dog’s actual personality shows up in the architecture
• Two bugs that made it to a live phone call before we caught them
• What’s still held together with tape, said plainly
• How to run it yourself

Meet Banjo

Banjo is a rescue terrier mix. Nobody in the family agreed on his exact breed mix and everyone agreed on the verdict: the little terrier with the big personality. He has ears that stand up like he’s perpetually mid-question and a face that looks skeptical of your plans by default. There’s a photo of him in a pirate costume on the beach in Asbury Park, standing his ground against wind that’s actively trying to remove his hat. He did not ask for the costume. He tolerated it, the way he tolerates most indignities, with visible reservations and zero actual protest.

After dabbling with Frontier over the last five years, I often miss the outlining features of Frontier’s built-in IDE when working in other environments. I’m intrigued however with
Dave Winer’s latest announcement regarding the eminent release of the Frontier kernel as OSS.

It will be interesting to see what OSS license UserLand chooses and if they intend on releasing any of the non-kernelized code such as part of the CMS framework, Manila and/or Radio.

Give that old PC a new life by turning it into a retro gaming console with the KnoppiXMAME Live CD Linux Distro.

“KnoppiXMAME is a bootable CD/DVD image with hardware automatic probing and configuration for playing MAME games. No games are included, but they can be added to the ISO image, as well as new versions of X-MAME, gxmame, and the Linux kernel”

Of course you’ll need to legally obtain a few MAME ROMs, but you knew that anyway ;-)

After reading a bit about the Sentinix GNU/Linux distribution, I wasn’t entirely interested because it’s described as a Linux distribution for network monitoring intrusion detection, penetration testing, auditing, statistics/graphing and anti-spam.

The anti-spam feature seemed to be a minor addition.

That is until I read an article about the current Sentinix release from November 2003 on NewsForge.

Ignore the title of the article too and scroll down to the middle of the page where they mention how the OpenMosix clustering enables it to be a Spam/Virus filtering super-computer.

I just read via Boing Boing that the copyright on the original Night of the Living Dead movie has expired and the entire film is available online for download via Archive.org! (Brewster Kahle, I’ll say it again, you rock!)

Incidentally, not only does the Internet Archive have a huge collection of Public Domain movies, it also has what appears to be a growing compilation of Open Source movies (and I don’t think they are talking about code)

I’m constantly amazed at the influx of customized bootable Linux CDs (aka Live Linux)

For example, check out some of the distributions on this list

The distro’s geared toward kids and education are starting to look particularly interesting to me these days.

Kazaa is promoting a BitTorrent-like distributed P2P alternative that can be embedded in other P2P networks and web links, which they are calling Magnet links (via Anil Dash’s Links)

More here…

“Magnet links allows users to directly download large media files saving website creators and bloggers money on bandwidth costs and effectively propagating files on p2p networks that attract millions of users per day.”

“Magnet links” uses…

“MAGNET-URI, [which] is an open URI-scheme and supporting practices/code for enabling seamless integration between websites and locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools.”

Looks like Mandrake has joined Knoppix in the bootable Linux CD distro trend…

“The MandrakeMove Download Edition is a new product based on Mandrake Linux 9.2 which provides a complete personal desktop operating system on a bootable CD. With MandrakeMove, bring your Mandrake Linux system everywhere: demo it, use it to connect to the Internet, listen to MP3s, watch DivX movies — the possibilities are endless! In addition, the MandrakeMove Boxed Edition provides the ability to save configuration and personal data to a USB key.”

This is a handy legal explination of Open Source Software by Red Hat’s Mark Webbink, Esq.:

“Mark Webbink, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Red Hat, Inc., wrote this article for corporate attorneys, explaining free and open source software and comparing various open source licenses, detailing how the GPL really works, explaining US copyright law, and listing some corporate law office best practices for software, from the standpoint of what policies are prudent for the corporate environment.
He also explains how derivative works are defined, touches on the indemnification issue and the difference between open source and “shared source”, and highlights some of the main myths and misconceptions about the GPL and open source.” (via /.)

Build a test Open Groupware server simply by rebooting your system with the
OGo Knoppix CD!

“OGo Knoppix CD is a bootable CD which contains a complete Debian GNU/Linux system, a fully configured OGo installation, a Cyrus server and some more Linux software.

I think this is worth a burn and reboot!