The Final Cut - heard it recently?

I just bought (again) The Final Cut, arguably Pink Floyd's best album. (Don't try to convince me that Dark Side of the Moon is better. I like it fine, but it lacks the lyrical genius.) What a great album. Though now I'm remembering why I threw it away two or three times in the past. Kind of depressing.

Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more: no one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no one kills the children anymore.

Stunning. But better with music.

Or how about this one?

ladies and gentlemen, please welcome reagan and haig
Mr. begin and friend mrs. thatcher and paisley
Mr. brezhnev and party
The ghost of mccarthy
The memories of nixon
And now adding colour a group of anonymous latin
American meat packing glitterati

Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?

They can polish their medals and sharpen their
Smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for a while
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead

Safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye
With their favourite toys
They'll be good girls and boys
In the Fletcher Memorial Home for colonial
Wasters of life and limb.

The present: just a rough collection of our past

George Eliot has this wonderful quote from Sir Thomas Browne in her classic Middlemarch:

It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both.

Not a new thought, but persuasively argued.

I find myself caught up in this all the time: assuming the good old days compared to current society/software/whatever.

But given that we can't even think coherently about the present but through the past...it makes me wonder all that I'm missing, if I could just get myself to see the world without baggage. Not trying to be deep here (at any rate, I would be failing if that were my intent) - I'm sincerely perplexed as to how to think clearly about the future without letting the past shape it too much.

This, I think, is one of the great problems of software today. We dearly want tomorrow to look like yesterday, and customers are begging for more tomorrow, less yesterday, yet our baggage keeps having us deliver more yesterday, less tomorrow. We really need to move on as an industry and stop fetishing our past.

Ratatouille, enjoyable even as proprietary source

My wife, son, and I went to see Pixar's latest creation, Ratatouille last night. I have to admit: I didn't care one bit about the underlying license powering the software that generated shockingly great animation. It was simply brilliant.



I suppose I'd be happy to find out open source was behind it. In fact, it is or, in the case of Pixar's RenderMan, apparently could have been.)

Regardless, the animation is amazing. I'm glad to hear that Linux et al. play a part. But, to be perfectly candid, I'm not sure I care very much. One of those few times that I was thinking more about being entertained than about consequences.... :-)