Month: March 2003

perl, python, ruby

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide

When we originally wrote this book, we had a grand plan (we were younger then). We wanted to document the language from the top down, starting with classes and objects, and ending with the nitty-gritty syntax details. It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, most everything in Ruby is an object, so it made sense to talk about objects first.

Or so we thought.

A friend who understands my weaknesses in programming far better than I do recommends I map my crude perl skills and understanding of objects to ruby.

Democracy in action

The FCC field hearing went off quite well today. The auditorium was full, which I didn’t expect, and the crowd was engaged and vocal in its opinions. Your humble scribe was quoted in the UW student paper, as well.

I was amazed at the quality of the panelists the FCC assembled and the wide range of points of view they brought to the debate. If I had been undecided when I arrived, I wouldn’t have been when I left.

It would have been better (or I would feel better about it) had we videotaped it: the production crew I booked never showed up but there were other crews there. I have asked for a tape for the FCC’s records and our own use from one of the videographers.

Observations: one station manager from Belo, the media conglomerate, who was on the news panel said that as a news director, he had never had his editorial policy challenged by his corporate bosses. While the audience hissed (this is polite Seattle, after all: we don’t boo anyone), it struck me that I would be happier if he had been challenged. Otherwise, how can we be sure he’s not self-censoring his own efforts?

And I found my eyes drawn to an immaculately groomed, patrician-looking fellow standing in the back near me: dark blue suit, handkerchief points in his breast pocket, tassel loafers. I assumed he was some player or other. Later I saw him leave with the Belo station manager from the news panel, the subordinate walking like a kid on his way to the principal’s office.

Frank Blethen of the Seattle Times gave a variation on the speech he gave at the Richmond hearing and the crowd roared its approval of his “public watchdogs turned to corporate lapdogs” line.

Everyone seemed to understand that news organizations with a media outlet cost money and are therefore the first thing to cut when a new owner without a stake in local news takes over. It was good to see that: we’ve seen that at the network level for years:”Friends” sells more ads that “Nightline” and can be syndicated for years to come, so which one will make the shareholders more money?

But a more pernicious aspect I hadn’t given much thought to was the siphoning off off of local dollars to out of town pockets. When some national company sells ads on its farflung affiliates, those dollars don’t stay in the community where they originated: they fly home to corporate and stay there. There are similar threads in the articles linked from Rebecca Blood.

A great experience, well worth taking part in. I’m glad so many “average citizens” (their words, not mine) felt it was worth their time.

professional blogging

FindLaw’s Modern Practice – Feature

as blogging becomes even more popular, more and more questions will arise. For example, can blogs be cited, like extemporaneous notes, as evidence of one’s state of mind or knowledge on a particular date? And in the patent law context, could blogging about a particular technology be construed as evidence of knowledge of prior art? In the small law firm context, blogging is an especially useful publicity tool. All the firm’s lawyers can post to the firm’s blog and build it up to be a real destination for readers. But what if the firm breaks up? Who owns the blog name? How about the archives? Was it all work-made-for-hire to the firm?

Same questions come up in any professional role: medicine, engineering, you name it.

This is actually something better suited to knowledge logging, as an internal unstructured documentation method.

convergence

University Week – Vol. 20, No. 15 – DSpace to provide easy access to digital scholarship

The UW Libraries has joined an ambitious effort to create an electronic repository of digital scholarly materials produced by UW faculty and students.
[ . . . .]
DSpace potentially represents a convergence between two traditional functions of libraries — archiving information that will be historically useful, and providing a large, accessible and searchable body of current information.

creative commons licensing?

I noticed that MovableType 2.6 has Creative Commons licensing built in, so thought I should take a look.

It seems I have been using the licence denoted by the symbol above for awhile: I just used the text “Reproduction with attribution encouraged” which seems to mean the same thing. Ahead of my time?

I think I may make it official though and sign up for the license. I’m feeling like I need to contribute something and all I have seems a small enough token.

As it turns out, all this stuff is available under a non-commercial, with-attribution, share-and-share-alike license.

And as an additional karmic gift, I took down my totally ineffective Amazon tipjar.

the day job

So I suppose I have something worth mentioning here. The UW will be hosting a rare field hearing by the Federal Communications Commission on Friday, all arranged by your humble scribe. I didn’t invite them — I work for someone well connected enough to do that, though — but the rest of the arrangements have been mine to manage.

It’s been interesting, to say the least. How interesing, you ask? Well, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic is on one of the witness panels, for one thing. More as it all unfolds.

media companies and RSS

So while I was looking at the Economist website for information on the Big Mac Index (a piece of genius if ever there was one), I noted there were CNN headlines in a little promo box (provided by Moreover). So CNN headlines are being snarfed by Moreover and appearing on the Economist, and CNN is OK with that. I guess as long as they link back — and they do — it’s no skin off their nose, but isn’t owning their content what they’re all about?

And coincidentally, it was Moreover’s spider crawling willy-nilly over CNN.com years ago that introduced me to RSS and syndication, though there was a gap between my exposure to it and any daily application of what I learned. I built an rss file generator that updated every hour when we fed new URLs to the search engines: useful while it lasted, but I had no idea where rss and rdf were headed.

contemporaria

Ben Hammersley.com: Blended to perfection, over time

So my continuing quest to be downright steampunk continues apace. With all this craving for another age, I’ve been thinking a lot lately – prodded into it by Tom Coates – about the temporal nature of blog posts. About how their very self contained nature removes them from the wider world. Or some such nicotine-addled rantings. Anyway, click on the permalink below to see a new section to my Individual Entry template: the Contemporaria. Built automatically from, at the moment, 6 different data sources, it’s a nifty Weblog Hack.

It is that: I wish I was clever enough to think of these things.