the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Freedom To Tinker: Fritz’s Hit List Archives
Let’s pause for a moment to meditate on the sublimity of a legal system that can treat fart noises as intellectual property. Take your time; I’ll wait.
This website has lots of thought-provoking stuff. The shots at the Hollings bill are funny enough, but his analysis of the media companies’ use of denial of service attacks/restraint of trade actions is quite serious.
Whatever their solutions, they ought not undermine the freedom — the freedom to tinker — that gave rise to the digital world in the first place.
I turned backlinking back on: it stopped working a while back so I removed it from the page layout. Tried it again this weekend and it worked, so it’ll stay there for awhile.
I wish this were somehow included in MovableType: I think there’s something inherently doomed to break in the current implementation.
I am testing an XML-RPC interface to the WayPath engine I use to display thematically relevant links to my posts. So far, it seems to work quite well: the results are as good as ever, but they come back quicker and that’s always good.
I have no idea how many lines of code were required on the server side, but client side, it’s very short. The comments outweigh the code . . . . and there’s none too many of them.
Laptops Win Over the Skeptics, Even in Maine
By some measures, Maine’s public schools are considered quite good: the National Center for Education Statistics ranks Maine as having one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country. But when it comes to students going on to college, Maine ranks low in the region. And in term of Ph.D.s earned in the state, Maine ranks dead last among states and Puerto Rico, according to a recent report from the National Science Foundation.
Improved college attendance five years from now would be a measure of the program’s success, but for now, educators are collecting all the information they can and are awaiting year-end test scores. In other parts of the country, smaller programs have had a significant effect: In Henrico County, Va., where 24,000 students in grades 6 through 12, have laptops, test scores have risen and dropout rates have fallen.
I hate to be self-referential, but I wrote about this here.
O’Reilly Network: Marshall McLuhan vs. Marshalling Regular Expressions [Jul. 08, 2002]
What does the success of regular expressions have to do with McLuhan? Simply put, the technology and Friedl’s book seem to embody everything McLuhan said was passé: they celebrate and support a reverence for text that McLuhan expected current generations to abandon. The actual message, as I will show, is more subtle and enhances McLuhan’s work substantially.
At first, I was pleased to see that Jeffrey Frield’s book on regular expressions had come out in a second edition: I was a reviewer on the first edition, but until I read this article, I had no idea how popular the book was. It is a great reference, and I know the author has been scrupulous on tracking and fixing errata: one of the reader reviews at Amazon.com claims the book has no errors, which doesn’t surprise me.
But back to McLuhan. It’s been a while since I read any of his books, but this article refreshes the core ideas well enough. One of the aspects of hacker culture or at least of the smarter ones I have known is the high level of literacy and of literary proficiency. They read and write well, and as anyone who has worked on UNIX systems knows, the text processing tools in that environment are the most powerful to be found anywhere. emacs, TEX, SGML and its better known offshoots of HTML and XML are all text processing tools. And why has it been necessary to create these tools? To write programming language source code, which is far more rigorous than human language,and requires more powerful, more finely controllable tools. Where most of us can get along quite well with simple search and replace in a word processor, reqular expressions make a myriad other text management tasks not just possible but simple.
Perhaps this is where the irony of using the word “programming” to describe producing televion, a passive non-creative activity, and producing software, its polar opposite, makes itself most keenly felt.
A closed, unprogrammable device fits McLuhan’s most dire assessment of automation and its numbing effect. But once a hacker breaks open the device and reprograms it, he reclaims not only the device itself but all media with which it comes in contact.
Reclaiming media is what the FCC hearing at the UW (was that just yesterday?!) was all about. There’s something very meme-ish about all this.
Last night was made memorable by my son testing the mixability of skipping, stocking feet, and hardwood floors. I think we’ve verified that you can safely choose any two. He now has the faint imprint of the edge of a wooden table running from his cheekbone to his lower jaw, like a chinstrap, along with some lingering pain in the TMJ area if he tries to open his mouth too wide.
I spent last night waking every two hours to test him for a possible concussion (I did 11 PM, 1 AM and 3 AM: Mom got 5 AM as she went to work), and there seems to be no lasting damage to skull or table.
Today was his first ever baseball practice with his pony league team (the Yankees: sadly, only black uniforms. no pinstripes). He did quite well, even when he stopped a chopper with his chest. He did pick it up and throw it back in before he realized “hey, that hurts!” He came to see me, in tears, and before I could do very much in the way of consoling, he recovered his poise, his glove, and ran back on the field, chasing a grounder with the rest of them.
He took some good cuts at the tee as well, so this should be fun.
Tonight a birthday party for a classmate who shares the exact same birthday (he’s had that happen in every school he’s attended: it never happened to me once). Tomorrow, we take it easy.
Ben Hammersley, as usual, has some good stuff to share:
- The Internet isn’t complicated
- The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
- The Internet is stupid.
- Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
- All the Internet’s value grows on its edges.
- Money moves to the suburbs.
- The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
- The Internet’s three virtues:
- a. No one owns it
- b. Everyone can use it
- c. Anyone can improve it
- If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
- Some mistakes we can stop making already
The Chimera/Camino team keeps griping about the name change and how it was forced upon them “for reasons beyond their control.” Perhaps the fact that there has been a browser called Chimera for quite some time (it’s at version 2.0) was a big reason.
About:
Chimera is a very small and nimble Web/gopher browser created using athena widgets. The original (1.x series) version has very restricted copyright (University of Ilinnois). The 2.0beta release is available under the GNU Public License. Chimera is capable of HTML 3.2, displaying a lot of graphics, and is very accurate about HTML syntax. Future releases may include security updates, bugfixes, and feature changes (e.g. gtk support, frames support, etc.).
This is why corporations have lawyers: to prevent engineers from making business decision w/o adult supervision. A simple Google search would have averted all this whining.
Here’s a Chimera screenshot.
Camino™ (formerly Chimera) 0.7 is available for download. Along with the new name, Camino has a new history sidebar, a new download manager and a new text encoding menu.
Saw it in my access log . . . .