Robert "kebernet" Cooper

For Les

2010-04-14T11:28:00.001-07:00

screaming-penguin.com

2006-10-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Mark Twain - Wikiquote

2006-06-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object — robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician's trick — a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor — none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
For in a republic, who is "the Country"? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is "the country?" Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn’t.

...

In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country — hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.
This Republic's life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands.

--Twain

USB/IP Project

2005-11-24T10:49:00.000-08:00

USB/IP Project: "The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates 'USB protocols' into IP packets and transmits them between computers. Original USB device drivers and applications can be also used for remote USB devices without any modification of them."

2005-11-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

Test.

technorati tags: test

BBspot - Microsoft Releases Box Set of Rarities and Oldies

2005-09-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

BBspot - Microsoft Releases Box Set of Rarities and Oldies: "Redmond, WA - Microsoft has announced the release of a box set of their 'greatest operating systems of all time,' stuffed with their previous releases and tons of extras. The box set - entitled 'Microsoft 1975 - 2000: The Early Years' covers the company's rise from the early garage days to today.

Fans of the company should find everything they need in the box. Not only does it contain classics like DOS 3.30, Windows 3.11 and 95 OSR2.5 – it also contains rare cult material like Microsoft Bob, Windows 1.0 and ME. Die hard fans may complain about the decision to include the updated and patched versions instead of the original releases, but they are likely to have the entire collection, anyway.

"

Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy - New York Times

2005-09-11T02:49:00.000-07:00

Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy - New York Times: "On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.

'He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me, this is what I saw myself,' ' the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled.

State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan to prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal with two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and imposing law and order."

Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme

2005-09-11T02:46:00.000-07:00

Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme: "Brushed Metal: Calculator? I’m out of iTunes and you tell me I’ve still got Calculator? When is the Special Event scheduled for the next version of Calculator? Oh, that’s right, there is none, because no one gives a shit about Calculator."

You ever wonder why it is...

2005-09-11T02:43:00.000-07:00

Your friends give you shit when you aren't getting laid for not getting laid, then when you are they give you shit for getting some? Seriously, what is up with that.

"HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS"

2005-09-11T02:41:00.000-07:00

screaming-penguin.com: "

You know, this line is haunting me. I don't know if you saw Brian Williams on The Daily Show this week, but he talked about reading this line in the National Weather Service bulletin on his blackberry on Sunday, and the press weren't even sure if it was a legitimate message because they had never seen anything like this from NOAA before. It turns out it was literally from the last guy in the office just trying to make the most loaded statement he could so people would get it. There is a story in there that somebodyh ought to tell.

Somehow it seems to me to be a story that is much to frequent anymore. Whether it is the FDA or the EPA or the ACoE or NOAA, it seems like there are constant stories these days about professional scientists and engineers and logisticians warning everyone who will listen what is coming people just don't seem to actually take them seriously. In a world where all the coverage seems like 'Someone says sky is green, scientists disagree, ' it is not hard to understand why people might just ignore shit. I mean, obviously there is no consensus that the sky isn't green!

It doesn't matter if it is the Greenhouse Effect, a Hurricane, Plan B, or that maybe the dinosaurs did actually live 65,000,000 years ago, it seems that if any fucktard wants to ignore the truth, then it is 'open for debate'.

Now we go back and look at the resume of everyone at FEMA, and unless they have 'Acting' in their title, it is obvious that they are in no way qualified for their position. Maybe I am just a 'big goverment liberal', but you know, the reason we have a beurocracy is to put beurocrats in charge. Not Nordac the IT preventor or other Dilber nightmares, but people who are professionally trained and responsible for doing their job, not for a political agenda. FEMA, the FDA, the USDA, NOAA, the EPA, DOE or NASA, and you know, even the Pentagon, I expect to be staffed with people who understand the real world dynamics of their field, not people who worked on the commitee to elect whichever jackass is in the Whitehouse (even if it is my jackass).

I can't help but think, in a democracy where we now pick our leaders on the "who would you want to have a beer with" standard, it seems that the "who you would want to have a beed with" standard applies to every role of our government, and should we be suprised?"

Google Google Google

2005-08-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

screaming-penguin.com: "I just wanted to post a kind of wrap up of the stuff from Google lately.

The new Google Desktop, specifically the Sidebar is kinda cool, but mostly pointless. Google Talk is cool, and I think the fact that it is open and Jabber based will mean that you will see a RAPID exspansion of the 'built on top of Jabber' applications that will extend its functionality. However, a lot of the new Google stuff suffers from one common theme: lack of integration.

Why do I need a Google Talk window? Why can't my buddy list live inside my Sidebar? Why isn't the whole Hello! messaging system deprecated and moving to somthing Jabber based? Also, why doesn't Sidebar have the the extremely cool context function that Beagle Dashboard does on Linux? (Honestly, that's what I thought the cool of Sidebar would be.) Why didn't my Talk profile just start up with all the Gmail accounts that are in my Gmail contacts list?

Sidebar has some cool stuff. The autodiscovery of your browser stuff into the Web Clips box is pretty neat, and the kind of thing that only a good client app could do. Sidebar, however, isn't nearly as cool as Tiger Dashboard or Konfabulator. Not even talking about the 'slick' factor, but the fact that Dashboard and Konfabulator are stupid simple to write modules for, whereas Google Desktop means 'DontNET' only. Google Talk might be cool, again, one day, but the voice stuff isn't nearly as good as Skype's P2P stuff, it's not cross platform, and unless Google wants to open up their (supposedly great) proprietary audio codec, you won't see external support there. At least Skype is releasing binary API versions of their system.

Now, I think Google providing mainstream support for things like VLC and Jabber is great, but I guess I am missing why I should buy into the Google 'way' if it doesn't really give me 'better'. The whole Windows-Centric thing, right down to Blogger For MS-Word is starting to grate on me too. They finally added RSS support to Go"

About all that

2005-02-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

The reason I copied all that stuff in, was so I could get the ATOM feed with Freedom of Expression in it to convert to audio. You can get the book here.

Freedom of Expression: Introduction

2005-02-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

In 2003 Fox News sued Al Franken and his publisher, Penguin, for
naming his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair
and Balanced Look at the Right. The veteran satirist, who had publicly
quarreled with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in the months leading
up to the book’s release, used the news channel’s slogan “Fair
and Balanced” in the title. The company claimed this use trespassed
on its intellectual property. By associating Al Franken’s name with
Fair and Balanced®, the Fox lawyers argued, it would “blur and tarnish”
the good reputation of the trademark. The suit went on to
state that Franken “appears to be shrill and unstable.” He was also
described in the lawsuit as “increasingly unfunny,” a charge Franken
responded to by saying that he had trademarked “funny” and was
considering a countersuit.

Later that week on his daily radio talk show,O’Reilly grew testier,
lashing out at Franken and his alleged theft. Despite O’Reilly’s bluster
and the earnest legal arguments of Fox’s lawyers—who drew
laughter from the courtroom when they advocated their indefensible position—U.S. District Judge Denny Chin dismissed the injunction
against the book. “There are hard cases and there are easy
cases,” Chin stated. “This is an easy case in my view and wholly
without merit, both factually and legally.” The O’Reilly-Franken
dustup was the prelude to an increasingly aggressive trademark
rampage. That year, the news channel threatened to sue a Web-site
outfit that was selling a satirical T-shirt that mimicked its logo with
the words “Faux News” and tweaked its motto: “We distort, you
comply.” It also targeted The Simpsons (which airs on its sister network)
for parodying the news channel’s right-wing slant. During
one episode, the cartoon imitated the Fox News ticker, running
crawling headlines such as “Oil slicks found to keep seals young,
supple” and “Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay.”
Fox News eventually backed down, opting not to file a lawsuit
against the show. “We called their bluff,” said Matt Groening, The
Simpsons’ creator, “because we didn’t think Rupert Murdoch would
pay for Fox to sue itself. So we got away with it.” It’s probably the
first time that media consolidation has actually enabled freedom of
expression®. Still, The Simpsons writers got a slap on the wrist by
the parent company when it imposed a rule that the cartoon could
no longer imitate news crawls. “It might confuse the viewers into
thinking it’s real news,” Groening drily noted. As for the Web site
that sold the “Faux News” T-shirt, Fox News dropped its threat after
the American Civil Liberties Union intervened on its behalf. The
ACLU sent Fox a “ ‘get stuffed’ letter,” as the site’s operator Richard
Luckett put it.1

“Blur and tarnish,” the choice of words used by Fox’s lawyers in
the Franken case, might sound absurd to the average person, but it’s
the language of trademark law. Unlike copyright law, which protects
creative works such as books and movies, and patent law,
which covers inventions and the like, trademark law is designed to prevent consumer confusion and unfair competition. In other words,
you can’t place the Coca-Cola logo on your own newly minted soft
drink or use the company’s trademarked advertising slogans to
trick people into buying your product. It also protects companies
from having their trademarks associated with something unsavory,
which is where the blurring and tarnishing comes in. The problem
—at least as far as freedom of expression® is concerned—is
when trademark holders go too far in trying to protect their property.
The Fox News v. Franken case is but one of many examples of
this kind of overkill.

By wielding intellectual-property laws like a weapon, overzealous
owners erode our freedoms in the following ways: (1) we, or
our employers, engage in self-censorship because we think we
might get sued, even if there’s no imminent threat; (2) we censor
ourselves after backing down from a lawsuit that is clearly frivolous;
(3) worst of all, our freedoms are curtailed because the law has expanded
to privatize an ever-growing number of things—from human
genes and business methods to scents and gestures. (Donald
Trump not only trademarked “You’re Fired,” but also his hand gesture
that accompanied the phrase on The Apprentice.)
In the first case, the makers of the anti–Fox News T-shirts didn’t
back down and instead brought in the ACLU, which forced Fox
News to call off its attack dogs. Victory for freedom of expression®.
In the second case, Penguin Books fought Fox’s lawsuit and easily
won because the law allows us to parody or criticize intellectual
properties. Franken’s publisher didn’t make him change the title or
cower from what was obviously a lawsuit that was “wholly without
merit.” Another victory for freedom of expression®. These two instances
remind us that we can fight back and win, especially because
many recent court decisions have upheld free-speech rights
in the age of intellectual property. The problem is that lots of individuals and companies either don’t know this or don’t want to take
a risk.

The third case is far more troubling, because in some important
respects the law does curtail our rights. The rise of the Internet has
served as a wonderfully effective boogeyman used by intellectualproperty
owners to legitimate the same one-dimensional arguments
they’ve been asserting for years. Those claims go something
like this: Anyone who does anything to any of their properties is a
“pirate” (such as VCR owners and music fans who made cassettetape
copies of works in the 1980s). Courts and Congress fortunately
rejected this line of reasoning twenty years ago, giving consumers
far more options—including the option not to be sued. However,
Internet-fueled fears have changed the legal and cultural landscape
in dramatic ways.

In 1998 Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) in response to the megabyte-sized specter that haunted
American business interests. Although well-intentioned, the DMCA
is a terrible law. It was written to protect digital property by making
it illegal to bypass “digital locks” such as copy-protection technologies
on CDs or simple passwords on software. It’s a bad law because
it has failed to prevent unauthorized duplication of copyrighted
goods—surfed the Internet lately?—and has only succeeded in curtailing
freedoms, criminalizing legitimate research, and arresting
the development of worthwhile software. (Sometimes it has led to
the arrest of software developers themselves.)

One of the DMCA’s unintended consequences is that companies
have tried to use it to squash competition on things such as garagedoor
openers and aftermarket ink cartridges. A few years ago,
for instance, Lexmark placed in its printers an “authentication
regime”—a fancy way of referring to a kind of password that lets
the ink cartridge and the printer “talk.” Then it invoked the DMCA to eliminate competition from less-expensive aftermarket ink cartridges
that “hacked” the digital lock on Lexmark’s printer. It took
many months and many more thousands of dollars to convince
courts that these competing products weren’t illicit materials. Only
in America, you might think, but draconian DMCA-like laws are
spreading around the globe like digital wildfire. In 2004 thirtythree-
year-old Isamu Kaneko, an assistant professor at the University
of Tokyo, was arrested because he developed file-sharing
software similar to the popular KaZaA application. The same year,
the Italian parliament passed a law imposing jail time of up to three
years for anyone caught sharing copyrighted material via the Internet.
These sanctions are another unfortunate outcome in the drive
to privatize every imaginable thing in the world, including genetic
material. The peculiar case of John Moore couldn’t have happened
without the expansion of patent law in the past quarter century.
When Moore’s spleen was removed to treat a rare form of leukemia,
his University of California doctor patented a cell line taken from
his organ, without Moore’s knowledge or permission. The longterm
market value of the patent has been estimated at roughly
$3 billion, and Moore’s doctor received $3 million in stocks from
Genetics Institute, the firm that marketed and developed a drug
based on the patent.2

When Moore found out about these shenanigans, he sued—and
lost. The California Supreme Court claimed that giving Moore any
rights would lead to the commodification of the human body—
an argument that ruffled the feathers of Judge J. Broussard, who
dissented from the Moore v. Regents of the University of California
decision. “Far from elevating these biological materials above the
marketplace,” Broussard wrote, “the majority’s holding simply bars
plaintiff, the source of the cells, from obtaining the benefit of the cells’ value, but permits the defendants, who allegedly obtained the
cells from plaintiff by improper means, to retain and exploit the full
economic value of their ill-gotten gains.”

Patents not only allow companies to have a monopoly control
over human and plant genes, but also business methods, such as
Amazon’s “one-click” procedure. U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411 gives
Amazon the right to extract money from any business that wants to
let customers purchase items on the Internet with only one click of
the mouse. The online retailer exercises the monopoly right that
this patent gives it, bullying small and large companies into purchasing
a license for this “technology.” For instance, Amazon won a
court order that prevented barnesandnoble.com from using this
feature for two holiday-shopping seasons before the two parties
reached a settlement. Today, every company from Apple’s iTunes to
the smallest of businesses that Amazon’s lawyers can shake down
are compelled to license the “one-click” feature. Otherwise, they’ll
be sued.

Clear Channel Communications, which controls more than one
hundred live venues and over thirteen hundred radio stations in the
United States, bought what is considered in the music industry to
be an important patent. It covers selling recordings of concerts immediately
after a performance, something that has recently become
popular with fans who want to take home live CDs. Other companies
had been providing this service, but Clear Channel intends
to enforce its patent to squeeze licensing fees from other small
businesses and bands and to eliminate competition in this area of
commerce. “It’s one more step toward massive control and consolidation
of Clear Channel’s corporate agenda,” says Mike Luba, the
manager of the jam band String Cheese Incident, which was prevented
by the corporate Goliath from using CD-burning equipment.
Pixies manager Ken Goes grumbled, “I’m not fond of doing
business with my arm twisted behind my back.”3

Another terrible law is the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act of 1998, which extended the length of copyright protection
by twenty more years. To put this into perspective, nothing new will
enter the public domain until 2019—that is, until Congress likely
extends copyright protection again for its corporate campaign
donors. Previously, copyright law was written in such a way that,
between 1790 and 1978, the average work passed into the public
domain after thirty-two years. Stanford University law professor
Lawrence Lessig notes that this honored a constitutional mandate
that copyright protections should last for “limited times,” something
today’s Congress interprets quite liberally. U.S. copyright protection
now stretches ninety-five years for corporate authors, and
for individual authors it lasts their entire lifetime, plus an additional
seventy years.

Copyright protectionists argue that extending a work’s copyright
ensures that there will be an owner to take care of it. But the opposite
is often true. “Long copyright terms actually work to prevent
a lot of stuff from being preserved,” argues film archivist Rick
Prelinger. “There’s a lot of material that’s orphaned,” he tells me.
“It’s still under copyright, but the copyright holders are gone, or we
don’t know who they are. The copyright could be obscure.” Many
archives won’t preserve a film if they don’t know who the owner is,
which means there are thousands of films, records, and other fragile
works that aren’t being protected because nobody knows their status.
“The interesting thing about film, what’s actually scary about
film,” Prelinger tells me, “is that the term of copyright is now longer
than the average lifespan of film as a medium. So you’ve got this
film in a cage and you can’t get to it until the copyright expires, and
the cage melts down. But in the meantime the film may disintegrate.
That’s a real issue.”

John Sorensen, a high school friend and an independent documentary
producer who has worked for A&E and PBS, shares Prelinger’s concerns. “From the perspective of a historian,” he says,
“after spending a lot of time looking at film and photo collections
from the early part of the century, one realizes that the things that
still exist, the images that are chosen to be preserved, are those images
that are perceived by corporate or government bodies to have
potential value. So the visual record that is kept is totally subject to
the laws of the marketplace.” Of the works produced between 1923
and 1942—which were affected by the Bono Act—only 2 percent
have any commercial value. This means we are allowing much of
our cultural history to be locked up and decay only to benefit the
very few, which is why some have sarcastically referred to this law as
the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. If not for the Bono Act, Steamboat
Willie, the first appearance of the rodent, would be in the public
domain.4

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY V. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION®

When companies try to use intellectual-property laws to censor
speech they don’t like, they are abusing the reason why these laws
exist in the first place. Copyright was designed to, as the U.S. Constitution
puts it, “promote the progress of science and useful arts,
by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive
right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Copyright exists
—and the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently repeated this—
as a means to promote the dissemination of creative expression, not
suppress it. The overzealous copyright bozos who try to use the law
as a censorious weapon mock the idea of democracy, and they step
on creativity. As culture increasingly becomes fenced off and privatized,
it becomes all the more important for us to be able to comment
on the images, ideas, and words that saturate us on a daily
basis—without worrying about an expensive, though meritless,lawsuit. The right to express one’s views is what makes these “copy
fights” first and foremost a free-speech issue. Unfortunately, many
intellectual-property owners and lawyers see copyright only as an
economic issue.

By using intellectual-property law as a thread that ties everything
together, I gather what may seem to be a wild array of subjects: hiphop
music and digital sampling; the patenting of seeds and human
genes; folk and blues music; education and book publishing; the
collage art of Rauschenberg and Warhol; filmmaking, electronic
voting, and the Internet. However, all of these topics are connected
to the larger trend of privatization—something that pits economic
values against the values of free speech, creativity, and shared resources.
The latter aren’t airy dreams. They’re the very reasons why
the framers of the Constitution established copyright and patent
law: so that society would benefit from a rich culture accessible
to all. Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were
thoughtful, and got it right.

They articulated a theory of intellectual-property law that rewarded
authors and inventors for their creativity, but they did not
intend the law to be so rigid that it would give creators (and their
heirs) complete control over their work. In the influential 1984 Betamax
case that legalized the VCR, Supreme Court Justice John Paul
Stevens reminded us of copyright’s Constitutional mandate. He
made clear that the monopoly power of copyright was designed
first and foremost to benefit society by stimulating new creative
works. Copyright’s purpose, he argued in the majority opinion, is
not to provide a special private benefit to an individual or corporation.
“Rather, the limited grant is a means by which an important
public purpose may be achieved,” wrote Stevens. “It is intended to
motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the provision of a special reward, and to allow the public access to the products
of their genius after the limited period of exclusive control has
expired. The copyright law, like the patent statutes, makes reward to
the owner a secondary consideration.”5 Despite Hollywood’s fears,
it turned out that the VCR generated more money for movie studios.
Box-office revenues have continued to rise since the 1980s—
even in the age of digital downloading—and video rentals and sales
now generate twice as much money as box-office receipts.
Since this 1984 decision, the hypnotic drumming of privatization
has grown louder and more persuasive. Some pundits believe it
makes sense to place as many things as possible under the control
of property owners, because it would be best for business. This is a
false assumption, and it is filled with many dangerous trapdoors.
The risk we face today is that the free exchange of ideas could be
halted by recent trends in intellectual property—with dire consequences
for creativity and the human spirit. This book documents a
Lord of the Rings–size battle between a more than two-hundredyear-
old tradition that encourages openness and the total monopoly
control that many copyright protectionists advocate. It’s also a
story about how activists aren’t letting the erosion of our freedoms
happen without one smackdown of a fight. The situation isn’t
hopeless, though there are plenty of areas where the conflict is getting
worse for freedom of expression®.We still have a way to go.

ONE LAST THING

To address an issue I’m sure will be raised: No, I wouldn’t mind
earning some extra income from this book’s sales, as I’ve accrued
massive student-loan debt over my decade of higher education.
However, I thoroughly approve if you copy this book for noncommercial
uses. The point of copyright law is to provide limited incentives to promote creativity and the spread of knowledge, not total
control in perpetuity. My copyright comrade at NYU, Siva Vaidhyanathan,
told me that some professors in India have photocopied
his book Copyrights and Copywrongs in its entirety. The cost of a
book is almost an entire month’s salary for some university workers
in that country, so Siva’s feathers aren’t ruffled over this kind of
“piracy”—though it makes him sad that in the era of globalization
such things as books aren’t affordable for certain people.

In this book, I don’t argue for the abolition of intellectualproperty
laws. Nor do I believe that those who think their intellectual
property is worth protecting are automatically “overzealous
copyright bozos.” But I do contend that we need to roll back the recent
restrictions that have been imposed on us in the digital age.
Today, copyright and trademark owners repeatedly invoke the Internet
as something that will surely devastate them. Jack Valenti, the
recently retired Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
CEO, has claimed that Hollywood would be brought to its knees by
the digital anarchy perpetrated by “twelve-year-olds.” Valenti has
argued, “If the value of what [movie studios] labored over and
brought forth to entertain the American public cannot be protected
by copyright, then the victim is going to be the American public.”
He went on to assert that if people were able to freely copy and
watch movies whenever they wanted, this would lead to a “lessened
supply of high quality, expensive high budget material where its investment
recoupment is now in serious doubt.”6

VALENTI SAID THIS over twenty years ago, and he was talking about
the VCR.

Style Properties

2005-02-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

Style Properties: "Style Properties

The following lists some of the custom style properties that Mozilla supports."

Penny Arcade!

2005-02-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

Penny Arcade!: "Child's Play"

ArgoUM 0.17.5

2005-02-15T17:09:00.000-08:00

argouml: View announcement: "Headline ArgoUML 0.17.5 released
Date Feb 14, 2005
Contributed by Linus Tolke
Body The development release 0.17.5 of ArgoUML is now released and available from the web site at the download page. Most important changes:

* Refactoring of the Model subsystem completed (including ModelFacade)."

Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets

2005-02-15T06:10:00.000-08:00

Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets: "Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets

Ah, the lure of all things Google...

I've been poking around in Google Maps and had some success I thought others might be able to build on. I've put this in a couple of places but thought I'd throw it here as well:
Part 1 : XML Handling

Okay, I've been playing around with sending requests to Gmaps via a Python proxy and manipulating the files returned on the fly.

As a result I've created a bookmarklet that loads the required XML file into the page: (Google Maps Load XML Data Example Bookmarklet)

javascript:(function() {window.parent._load('SomewhereSomewhere

Somewhere

', window.document)})();

If you save this book marklet and click on it when on any (?--certainly the home page) Gmaps page it should move you to a location in Vancouver, Canada.

By changing various values you can do some more experimenting... For example, I have successfully added another 'location' tag with an id 'B' and new coordinates. Also I changed the marker image to be a random png from the Google site--but discovered the image dimensions seem to be hard coded so it was distorted."

maxq.tigris.org

2005-02-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

maxq.tigris.org: "MaxQ records you using a web site. It turns the links you click on and any other input into a Python script that you can play back at any time. You might use it to:

* Check that your web site still works (regression test).
* Check that your web site is producing valid HTML (using JTidy).
* Automatically extract information from, or take some action on, someones else's web site."

EMMA: a free Java code coverage tool

2005-02-11T14:49:00.000-08:00

EMMA: a free Java code coverage tool: "Until recently, the world of Java development had been plagued by an absurd discrepancy: Java developers had excellent free IDEs, free compilers, free test frameworks but had to rely on code coverage tools that charged an arm and a leg in license fees. As a Java pro, I would like to use the same free coverage tool regardless of whether it is a massive commercial project at work or a small fun project at home. I've created EMMA to be that tool."

2005-01-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

Mandaella

Beust on Disposable email

2005-01-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

Otaku, Cedric's weblog: "Disposable email addresses

Given the amount of spam I receive every day, I am extremely reluctant giving away my email address to untrusted parties, especially when I'm pretty sure these people should only ever use that email address once (to send me an activation code, for example). Therefore, I was absolutely delighted when the first disposable email address service appeared (SpamGourmet) and especially when it was followed by two more (Mailinator and DodgeIt). Here is a quick review of these three services."

Slashdot | IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released

2005-01-14T09:28:00.000-08:00

Slashdot | IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released: "Posted by Zonk on Friday January 14, @10:51AM
from the white-papers-inc dept.
Elonka writes 'The Online Games SIG of the IGDA has released the latest in a series of White Papers on the online computer gaming industry. The 2004 Persistent Worlds White Paper (80-page, 457K pdf) had several contributors from across the industry, and gives general 'developer to developer' advice, covering everything from a quick overview of major products, to design considerations on multiplayer gameplay and dealing with online communities, to technical considerations, to some stats about the international marketplace, including the rapidly-growing Asian market. Editors included Daniel James of Three Rings Design, makers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game talk at the 2003 Game Developers Conference.'

"

IRL

2005-01-11T09:05:00.000-08:00

Wired News: Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick: "After a recent three-day binge of playing the Japanese cult hit video game Katamari Damacy, Los Angeles artist Kozy Kitchens discovered that walking away from the game was not as easy as putting down her joystick.

In the game, players push around what amounts to a giant tape ball, attempting to make the ball bigger by picking up any and all objects in its path. Kitchens found that her urge to keep picking things up was not so easy to shake.

'I was driving down Venice Boulevard,' recalled her husband, Dan Kitchens, 'and Kozy reached over and grabbed the steering wheel and for a moment was trying to yank it to the right.... (Then) she let go, but kept staring out her window, and then looked back at me kind of stunned and said, 'Sorry. I thought we could pick up that mailbox we just passed.''"

WNYC - Soundcheck: The Year 2004 in Jazz, Poetry & Spoken Word (January 05, 2005)

2005-01-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

WNYC - Soundcheck: The Year 2004 in Jazz, Poetry & Spoken Word (January 05, 2005): "The Year 2004 in Jazz, Poetry & Spoken Word
Wednesday, January 05, 2005

The jazz world experienced many highs and lows in 2004. The biggest news was the long-awaited opening of Jazz at Lincoln Center's new $128 million complex on Columbus Circle. The most ambitious and expensive jazz venue in history, it opened in October to rave reviews. But not all the best music happened in big halls or on big labels. Artists like trumpeter Don Byron and pianist Vijay Iyer were busy pushing the art form's boundaries. Joining us today with a look back at the year in jazz is Gene Santoro, critic and author of Highway 61 revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Roots, Rock and Country Music. Also on the show: Bob Holman, WNYC poet in residence and proprietor of the performance space Bowery Poetry Club. He joins us here to offer a roundup of the best in spoken word and poetry from this past year, from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, to late greats Allen Ginsburg and Lenny Bruce."

UPS Tracking With RSS

2005-01-07T01:19:00.000-08:00

UPS Tracking With RSS: "UPS Package Tracking With RSS

Note: This article was originally in the form of a post on my blog.
Overview

I always hated the fact that there was no good 'push' mechanism for getting UPS shipment tracking updates. I don't want to go to their website every hour to see where my package is. I want to be notified when it moves. Of course I immediately thought of RSS, but I couldn't find anyone who had turned the UPS data into a feed. I then decided to make it myself in ASP.NET using C#!

I threw together a working version. The url is in this format: http://www.young-technologies.com/utilities/packagetracking/rsstracking.aspx?Type=UPS&TrackingNumber=XXXXXXXXX where the XXXXXXX's are the UPS tracking number you want to track.

It doesn't use screen scraping, which can be unreliable. If I wrote it that way, I would have to change my interface every time UPS decided to change their website. I found out that UPS had an XML interface to get their tracking information directly. I wrote a .NET dll to make the request, and process the response into an object.

To turn the actual data into an RSS feed, I used a handy class called RSSMaster. They did a great job of making it easy to create an RSS feed from a data source."

API Documentation

2005-01-07T00:44:00.000-08:00

API Documentation: "The gdSuite API allows developers to access Google Desktop search results without directly processing the HTML coded results. We have tried to make this document as clear as possible, but we realise that in some places is gets confusing. That's why at the end of this document, there is an example section. If you have any questions feel free to post in the forums or email gdsuite_api@airbearsoftware.com. A changlog is located here."

I'd rather get Alzheimers...

2005-01-02T03:40:00.000-08:00

Boing Boing: Curry cures Alzheimer's?: "Curry cures Alzheimer's?
The pigment that makes curry yellow, curcumin, does a better job at treating Alzheimer's than the majority of drugs being tested. (Interestingly, India has one of the lowest Alzheimer rates in the world.)

The new UCLA-Veterans Affairs study involving genetically altered mice suggests that curcumin, the yellow pigment in curry spice, inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta amyloids in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and also breaks up existing plaques.

Link "

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

2004-12-30T22:34:00.000-08:00

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism || kuro5hin.org: "Wikipedia has started to hit the big time. Accordingly, several critical articles have come out, including 'The Faith-Based Encyclopedia' by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as 'When Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive'.

These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully. I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia. (I have since left the project.)

Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue. These problems could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem. If the project's managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary."

Doctorow v Anderson

2004-12-30T21:06:00.000-08:00

Must Read

Boing Boing: Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM: "Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM
Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, has responded to my blog-post in which I take issue with Wired's latest product-review magazine, which breathes hardly a mention of DRM even as it reviews devices that are all crapped up with studio-paranoia-generated restriction technology."

Must See WWW

2004-12-24T16:32:00.000-08:00

EPIC 2014

Wikipedia in TR

2004-12-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

Larry Sanger’s Knowledge Free-for-All

William Gibson

2004-12-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

William Gibson

In the night of 12/24/07, though sensors woven through the very fabric of the house had thus far registered a complete absence of sentient bio-activity, I found myself abruptly summoned from a rare, genuine and expensively induced examples of that most priceless of states, sleep.

Even as I hurriedly dressed, I knew that dozens of telepresent armed-response drones would already be sweeping in from the District, skimming mere inches above the chill surface of the Potomac. Vicious tri-lobed aeroforms that they were, they resembled nothing more than the Martian war machines of George Pal’s 1953 epic, “The War of the Worlds”.

And while, from somewhere far above, now, came that sound, that persistent clatter, as though gunships disgorged whole platoons of iron-shod mercenaries, I could only wonder: who? Was it my estranged wife, The Lady Betty-Jayne Motel-6 Hyatt, Chief Eco-trustee of the Free Duchy of Wyoming? Or was it Cleatus “Mainframe” Sinyard himself, President of the United States and perpetual co-chairman of the Concerned Smart People’s Northern Hemisphere Co-prosperity Sphere?

“You’re mumbling again, big guy,” said Memory, shivering into hallucinatorily clear focus on the rumpled sheets, her thighs warm and golden against the Royal Stewart flannel. She adjusted the nosecones of her chrome bustier. “Also, you’re on the verge of a major fashion crime.”

I froze, the starched white tails of an Elmore of Shinjuku evening shirt half-tucked into the waistband of a favorite pair of lovingly-mended calfskin jodhpurs. She was right. Pearl buttons scattered like a flock of miniscule flying saucers as I tore myself out of the offending Elmore. I swiftly chose a classic Gap t-shirt and a Ralph Lauren overshirt in shotgun-distressed ochre corduroy. The Gap t’s double-knit liquid crystal began to cycle sluggishly in response to body-heat, displaying crudely animated loops of once-famous televangelists of the previous century, their pallid flanks streaked with the sweat of illicit sexual exertion. Now that literally everything was digital, History and Image were no more than Silly putty in the hands of anyone with a BFA and a backer in Singapore. But that was just the nature of Postmodernity, and, frankly, it suited me right down to the ground.

“Visitors upstairs, chief,” she reminded me pointlessly, causing me to regret not getting that last chip-upgrade. “Like on the roof.”

“How many?” And this was Samsung-Sears’s idea of an “expert” system?

“Seventeen, assuming we’re talking bipeds.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That Nintendo-Dow micropore sensor-skin you had ‘em stretch over the Realistislate? After those Columbian bush ninjas from the Slunk Cartel tried to get in through the toilet-ventilators? Well, that stuff’s registering, like, hooves. Tiny ones. Unless this is some kind of major Jersey Devil infestation, I make it eight quadrupeds – plus one definite biped.”

“It can’t be Sinyard then.” I holstered a 3mm Honda and pocketed half a dozen spare ampules of gel. “He’d never come alone.”

“So maybe that’s the good news, but I gotta tell you, this guy weighs in at close to one-forty kilos. And wears size eleven-and-a-half boots. As an expert system, I’d advise you to use the Mossad & Wesson bullpup, the one with the subsonic witness protection nozzles—“ She broke off, as if listening to something only she could hear. “Uh-oh,” she said, “I think he’s coming down the chimney…”

Enemy of the State - Enterprise Integration Patterns

2004-12-23T01:14:00.000-08:00

Enemy of the State - Enterprise Integration Patterns: "One of my favorite pastimes is to argue with people whether a solution is stateless, whether it should be stateless and what it means to be stateless in the first place. Ideally, the debate would involve alcoholic beverages and the other person would pick up the check. After 'loosely coupled', 'stateless' must be a close runner-up as the ultimate nirvana in buzzword-compliant architectures. It is also equally hotly debated. Today, I 'd like to share my view on state and lessness. If you disagree you are welcome to argue with me, but you are buying! :-)"

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs OpenCourseWare

2004-12-22T18:15:00.000-08:00

MIT OpenCourseWare | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Fall 2002 | Home

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures

2004-12-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures: "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman"

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

2004-12-22T14:39:00.000-08:00

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: "

"

Goodbye, Bill G. Hello, Don G.

2004-12-21T13:43:00.000-08:00

You know, a little bit of me is happy that the Slate-MS link is finally being severed, but I am afraid its too late.

Slate NEEDS to be changed... back to what it was 3 years ago.

With the departure of Michael Kinsley, Slate became... MSNified. Too often, stuff that would appear on the front of MSN seems to show up in Slate. Tales of Britney Spears' nuptual exploits are not what should be in the "Arts and Life" section of a grown-up magazine. Coverage of the Donald Trump perfume is not what should be in the "Business" section of a grown up magazine. Add to that bringing in idiotic hacks like Mickey Kaus to fill a magazine formerly written by people like Kinsley and Crowley is an insult.

And while we are de-Microsofting it, can we go back to a layout where "MSN" is a a small brand insert rather than a stench of front loaded graphics heavy clutter that permeates the entire site? I guess not. They only got halfway there with Newsweek. It's a shame since WaPo's site is one of the best newspaper sites out there. Why they don't realize there web crew is better than BillG's is beyond me.

Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One

2004-12-21T13:33:00.000-08:00

Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One: "Abstract

The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support."

Jonathan Schwartz is full of it

2004-12-21T01:53:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: "And then I asked about IBM. And apparently they'd just been with OSDL, who'd evangelized that with open source, there was no lock in. When I pointed out that OSDL was led by a 17-year IBM veteran who should know better, the CIO started laughing as if I was joking. So I suggested they read the OSDL website, and revisit some software basics. IBM told him they couldn't get locked in with linux. And I said, 'nice vision, but Red Hat has you locked already.' The CIO shrugged, 'nah, it's open source.' My response, 'Have you tried replacing what you're deploying?' He asked his lieutenant, who said 'we can't get vendors to qualify to any distribution other than Red Hat. We don't have a choice. He's right.' IBM, up to its old tricks again."

Horseshit. One, it's a lie. BEA, IBM and Oracle all support at least 2 Linux distributions (Usually RedHat and SuSE). Novell still ships most of their products as "everything but the metal" packages, but their "Linux" products are supported on every damned distro known to man. Even Sun's own Java Application Server 8 (formerly SunOne, iPlanet, Netscape) support RHEL and Sun's own Java Desktop System. Not to mention aside from Sun, everyone supports 2 Linux distros across 3 or more hardware platforms!

However, the second fact remains that a major point of Red Hat "lock in" is missed: if Red Hat closed their doors tomorrow, "Red Hat Linux" would continue nearly unphased. Whether it's After-Life support or Red Hat clones or the fact that migrating to another distro doesn't really mean anything -- certainly not like migrating to another *nix -- in terms of support from vendors.

2004-12-20T23:56:00.000-08:00

Mr T.

2004-12-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

Lego Gitmo.
Posted by Hello

Using the XML HTTP Request object

2004-12-20T21:08:00.000-08:00

Using the XML HTTP Request object

ONJava.com: Clustering and Load Balancing in Tomcat 5, Part 1

2004-12-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

ONJava.com: Clustering and Load Balancing in Tomcat 5, Part 1: "Clustering and Load Balancing in Tomcat 5, Part 1
by Srini Penchikala
03/31/2004

The latest version of the Tomcat servlet container provides clustering and load balancing capabilities that are essential for deploying scalable and robust web applications. The first part of this article provides an overview of installation, configuration, usage, and extension of clustering and load balancing features. The second will introduce a sample web application to demonstrate the steps involved in configuring Tomcat server instances to enable clustering, and will study session persistence using in-memory replication in the cluster environment."

Chris Justus - Server Side Guy: Google Suggest Dissected...

2004-12-20T19:45:00.000-08:00

Chris Justus - Server Side Guy: Google Suggest Dissected...

Capturing Mouse Position

2004-12-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

Capturing Mouse Position:

// Set Netscape up to run the "captureMousePosition" function whenever

// the mouse is moved. For Internet Explorer and Netscape 6, you can capture

// the movement a little easier.

if (document.layers) { // Netscape

  document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEMOVE);

  document.onmousemove = captureMousePosition;

} else if (document.all) { // Internet Explorer

  document.onmousemove = captureMousePosition;

} else if (document.getElementById) { // Netcsape 6

  document.onmousemove = captureMousePosition;

}

// Global variables

xMousePos = 0; // Horizontal position of the mouse on the screen

yMousePos = 0; // Vertical position of the mouse on the screen

xMousePosMax = 0; // Width of the page

yMousePosMax = 0; // Height of the page



function captureMousePosition(e) {

  if (document.layers) {

      // When the page scrolls in Netscape, the event's mouse position

      // reflects the absolute position on the screen. innerHight/Width

      // is the position from the top/left of the screen that the user is

      // looking at. pageX/YOffset is the amount that the user has

      // scrolled into the page. So the values will be in relation to

      // each other as the total offsets into the page, no matter if

      // the user has scrolled or not.

      xMousePos = e.pageX;

      yMousePos = e.pageY;

      xMousePosMax = window.innerWidth+window.pageXOffset;

      yMousePosMax = window.innerHeight+window.pageYOffset;

  } else if (document.all) {

      // When the page scrolls in IE, the event's mouse position

      // reflects the position from the top/left of the screen the

      // user is looking at. scrollLeft/Top is the amount the user

      // has scrolled into the page. clientWidth/Height is the height/

      // width of the current page the user is looking at. So, to be

      // consistent with Netscape (above), add the scroll offsets to

      // both so we end up with an absolute value on the page, no

      // matter if the user has scrolled or not.

      xMousePos = window.event.x+document.body.scrollLeft;

      yMousePos = window.event.y+document.body.scrollTop;

      xMousePosMax = document.body.clientWidth+document.body.scrollLeft;

      yMousePosMax = document.body.clientHeight+document.body.scrollTop;

  } else if (document.getElementById) {

      // Netscape 6 behaves the same as Netscape 4 in this regard

      xMousePos = e.pageX;

      yMousePos = e.pageY;

      xMousePosMax = window.innerWidth+window.pageXOffset;

      yMousePosMax = window.innerHeight+window.pageYOffset;

  }

}

Holt Uncensored :: A Candid Look at Books and the Book Industry : Publishing News : Booksellers : Bookstores : Reviews Interviews

2004-12-20T18:50:00.000-08:00

Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)

Like many editorial consultants, I've been concerned about the amount of time I've been spending on easy fixes that the author shouldn't have to pay for.

Sometimes the question of where to put a comma, how to use a verb or why not to repeat a word can be important, even strategic. But most of the time the author either missed that day's grammar lesson in elementary school or is too close to the manuscript to make corrections before I see it.

So the following is a list I'll be referring to people *before* they submit anything in writing to anybody (me, agent, publisher, your mom, your boss). From email messages and front-page news in the New York Times to published books and magazine articles, the 10 ouchies listed here crop up everywhere. They're so pernicious that even respected Internet columnists are not immune.

The list also could be called, "10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR," because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be.

So here we go:

1. REPEATS
Just about every writer unconsciously leans on a "crutch" word. Hillary Clinton's repeated word is "eager" (can you believe it? the committee that wrote "Living History" should be ashamed). Cosmopolitan magazine editor Kate White uses "quickly" over a dozen times in "A Body To Die For." Jack Kerouac's crutch word in "On the Road" is "sad," sometimes doubly so - "sad, sad." Ann Packer's in "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" is "weird."

Crutch words are usually unremarkable. That's why they slip under editorial radar - they're not even worth repeating, but there you have it, pop, pop, pop, up they come. Readers, however, notice them, get irked by them and are eventually distracted by them, and down goes your book, never to be opened again.

But even if the word is unusual, and even if you use it differently when you repeat it, don't: Set a higher standard for yourself even if readers won't notice. In Jennifer Egan's "Look at me," the core word - a good word, but because it's good, you get *one* per book - is "abraded." Here's the problem:

"Victoria's blue gaze abraded me with the texture of ground glass." page 202
"...(metal trucks abrading the concrete)..." page 217
"...he relished the abrasion of her skepticism..." page 256
"...since his abrasion with Z ..." page 272

The same goes for repeats of several words together - a phrase or sentence that may seem fresh at first, but, restated many times, draws attention from the author's strengths. Sheldon Siegel nearly bludgeons us in his otherwise witty and articulate courtroom thriller, "Final Verdict" with a sentence construction that's repeated throughout the book:

"His tone oozes self-righteousness when he says..." page 188
"His voice is barely audible when he says..." page 193
"His tone is unapologetic when he says..." page 199
"Rosie keeps her tone even when she says..." page 200
"His tone is even when he says..." page 205
"I switch to my lawyer voice when I say ..." page 211
"He sounds like Grace when he says..." page 211

What a tragedy. I'm not saying all forms of this sentence should be lopped off. Lawyers find their rhythm in the courtroom by phrasing questions in the same or similar way. It's just that you can't do it too often on the page. After the third or fourth or 16th time, readers exclaim silently, "Where was the editor who shoulda caught this?" or "What was the author thinking?"

So if you are the author, don't wait for the agent or house or even editorial consultant to catch this stuff *for* you. Attune your eye now. Vow to yourself, NO REPEATS.

And by the way, even deliberate repeats should always be questioned: "Here are the documents." says one character. "If these are the documents, I'll oppose you," says another. A repeat like that just keeps us on the surface. Figure out a different word; or rewrite the exchange. Repeats rarely allow you to probe deeper.

2. FLAT WRITING
"He wanted to know but couldn't understand what she had to say, so he waited until she was ready to tell him before asking what she meant."

Something is conveyed in this sentence, but who cares? The writing is so flat, it just dies on the page. You can't fix it with a few replacement words - you have to give it depth, texture, character. Here's another:

"Bob looked at the clock and wondered if he would have time to stop for gas before driving to school to pick up his son after band practice." True, this could be important - his wife might have hired a private investigator to document Bob's inability to pick up his son on time - and it could be that making the sentence bland invests it with more tension. (This is the editorial consultant giving you the benefit of the doubt.) Most of the time, though, a sentence like this acts as filler. It gets us from A to B, all right, but not if we go to the kitchen to make a sandwich and find something else to read when we sit down.

Flat writing is a sign that you've lost interest or are intimidated by your own narrative. It shows that you're veering toward mediocrity, that your brain is fatigued, that you've lost your inspiration. So use it as a lesson. When you see flat writing on the page, it's time to rethink, refuel and rewrite.

3. EMPTY ADVERBS
Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally - these and others are words that promise emphasis, but too often they do the reverse. They suck the meaning out of every sentence.

I defer to People Magazine for larding its articles with empty adverbs. A recent issue refers to an "incredibly popular, groundbreakingly racy sitcom." That's tough to say even when your lips aren't moving.

In "Still Life with Crows," Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child describe a mysterious row of corn in the middle of a field: "It was, in fact, the only row that actually opened onto the creek." Here are two attempts at emphasis ("in fact," "actually"), but they just junk up the sentence. Remove them both and the word "only" carries the burden of the sentence with efficiency and precision.

(When in doubt, try this mantra: Precise and spare; precise and spare; precise and spare.)

In dialogue, empty adverbs may sound appropriate, even authentic, but that's because they've crept into American conversation in a trendy way. If you're not watchful, they'll make your characters sound wordy, infantile and dated.

In Julia Glass's "Three Junes," a character named Stavros is a forthright and matter-of-fact guy who talks to his lover without pretense or affectation. But when he mentions an offbeat tourist souvenir, he says, "It's absolutely wild. I love it." Now he sounds fey, spoiled, superficial.. (Granted, "wild" nearly does him in; but "absolutely" is the killer.)

The word "actually" seems to emerge most frequently, I find. Ann Packer's narrator recalls running in the rain with her boyfriend, "his hand clasping mine as if he could actually make me go fast." Delete "actually" and the sentence is more powerful without it.

The same holds true when the protagonist named Miles hears some information in "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo. "Actually, Miles had no doubt of it," we're told. Well, if he had no doubt, remove "actually" - it's cleaner, clearer that way. "Actually" mushes up sentence after sentence; it gets in the way every time. I now think it should *never* be used.

Another problem with empty adverbs: You can't just stick them at the beginning of a sentence to introduce a general idea or wishful thinking, as in "Hopefully, the clock will run out." Adverbs have to modify a verb or other adverb, and in this sentence, "run out" ain't it.

Look at this hilarious clunker from "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown: "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino."

Ack, "almost inconceivably" - that's like being a little bit infertile! Hopefully, that "enormous albino" will ironically go back to actually flogging himself while incredibly saying his prayers continually.

4. PHONY DIALOGUE
Be careful of using dialogue to advance the plot. Readers can tell when characters talk about things they already know, or when the speakers appear to be having a conversation for our benefit. You never want one character to imply or say to the other, "Tell me again, Bruce: What are we doing next?"

Avoid words that are fashionable in conversation. Ann Packer's characters are so trendy the reader recoils. " 'What's up with that?' I said. 'Is this a thing [love affair]?' " "We both smiled. " 'What is it with him?' I said. 'I mean, really.' " Her book is only a few years old, and already it's dated.

Dialogue offers glimpses into character the author can't provide through description. Hidden wit, thoughtful observations, a shy revelation, a charming aside all come out in dialogue, so the characters *show* us what the author can't *tell* us. But if dialogue helps the author distinguish each character, it also nails the culprit who's promoting a hidden agenda by speaking out of character.

An unfortunate pattern within the dialogue in "Three Junes," by the way, is that all the male characters begin to sound like the author's version of Noel Coward - fey, acerbic, witty, superior, puckish, diffident. Pretty soon the credibility of the entire novel is shot. You owe it to each character's unique nature to make every one of them an original.

Now don't tell me that because Julia Glass won the National Book Award, you can get away with lack of credibility in dialogue. Setting your own high standards and sticking to them - being proud of *having* them - is the mark of a pro. Be one, write like one, and don't cheat.

5. NO-GOOD SUFFIXES
Don't take a perfectly good word and give it a new backside so it functions as something else. The New York Times does this all the time. Instead of saying, "as a director, she is meticulous," the reviewer will write, "as a director, she is known for her meticulousness." Until she is known for her obtuseness.

The "ness" words cause the eye to stumble, come back, reread: Mindlessness, characterlessness, courageousness, statuesqueness, preciousness - you get the idea. You might as well pour marbles into your readers' mouths. Not all "ness" words are bad - goodness, no - but they are all suspect.

The "ize" words are no better - finalize, conceptualize, fantasize, categorize. The "ize" hooks itself onto words as a short-cut but stays there like a parasite. Cops now say to each other about witnesses they've interrogated, "Did you statementize him?" Some shortcut. Not all "ize" words are bad, either, but they do have the ring of the vulgate to them - "he was brutalized by his father," "she finalized her report." Just try to use them rarely.

Adding "ly" to "ing" words has a little history to it. Remember the old Tom Swifties? "I hate that incision," the surgeon said cuttingly. "I got first prize!" the boy said winningly. But the point to a good Tom Swiftie is to make a punchline out of the last adverb. If you do that in your book, the reader is unnecessarily distracted. Serious writing suffers from such antics.

Some "ingly" words do have their place. I can accept "swimmingly," "annoyingly," "surprisingly" as descriptive if overlong "ingly" words. But not "startlingly," "harrowingly" or "angeringly," "careeningly" - all hell to pronounce, even in silence, like the "groundbreakingly" used by People magazine above. Try to use all "ingly" words (can't help it) sparingly.

6. THE 'TO BE' WORDS:
Once your eye is attuned to the frequent use of the "to be" words - "am," "is," "are," "was," "were," "be," "being," "been" and others - you'll be appalled at how quickly they flatten prose and slow your pace to a crawl.

The "to be" words represent the existence of things - "I am here. You are there." Think of Hamlet's query, "to be, or not to be." To exist is not to act, so the "to be" words pretty much just there sit on the page. "I am the maid." "It was cold." "You were away."

I blame mystery writers for turning the "to be" words into a trend: Look how much burden is placed on the word "was" in this sentence: "Around the corner, behind the stove, under the linoleum, was the gun." All the suspense of finding the gun dissipates. The "to be" word is not fair to the gun, which gets lost in a sea of prepositions.

Sometimes, "to be" words do earn a place in writing: "In a frenzy by now, he pushed the stove away from the wall and ripped up the linoleum. Cold metal glinted from under the floorboards. He peered closer. Sure enough, it was the gun." Okay, I'm lousy at this, but you get the point: Don't squander the "to be" words - save them for special moments.

Not so long ago, "it was" *defined* emphasis. Even now, if you want to say, "It was Margaret who found the gun," meaning nobody else but Margaret, fine. But watch out - "it was" can be habitual: "It was Jack who joined the Million Man March. It was Bob who said he would go, too. But it was Bill who went with them." Flat, flat, flat.

Try also to reserve the use of "there was" or "there is" for special occasions. If used too often, this crutch also bogs down sentence after sentence. "He couldn't believe there was furniture in the room. There was an open dresser drawer. There was a sock on the bed. There was a stack of laundry in the corner. There was a handkerchief on the floor...." By this time, we're dozing off, and you haven't even gotten to the kitchen

One finds the dreaded "there was/is" in jacket copy all the time. "Smith's book offers a range of lively characters: There is Jim, the puzzle-loving dad. There is Winky, the mom who sits on the 9th Court of Appeals. There is Barbie, brain surgeon to the stars...."

Attune your eye to the "to be" words and you'll see them everywhere. When in doubt, replace them with active, vivid, engaging verbs. Muscle up that prose.

7. LISTS
"She was entranced by the roses, hyacinths, impatiens, mums, carnations, pansies, irises, peonies, hollyhocks, daylillies, morning glories, larkspur..." Well, she may be entranced, but our eyes are glazing over.

If you're going to describe a number of items, jack up the visuals. Lay out the the scene as the eye sees it, with emphasis and emotion in unlikely places. When you list the items as though we're checking them off with a clipboard, the internal eye will shut.

It doesn't matter what you list - nouns, adjectives, verbs - the result is always static. "He drove, he sighed, he swallowed, he yawned in impatience." So do we. Dunk the whole thing. Rethink and rewrite. If you've got many ingredients and we aren't transported, you've got a list.

8. SHOW, DON'T TELL
If you say, "she was stunning and powerful," you're *telling* us. But if you say, "I was stunned by her elegant carriage as she strode past the jury - shoulders erect, elbows back, her eyes wide and watchful," you're *showing* us. The moment we can visualize the picture you're trying to paint, you're showing us, not telling us what we *should* see..

Handsome, attractive, momentous, embarrassing, fabulous, powerful, hilarious, stupid, fascinating are all words that "tell" us in an arbitrary way what to think. They don't reveal, don't open up, don't describe in specifics what is unique to the person or event described. Often they begin with cliches.

Here is Gail Sheehy's depiction of a former "surfer girl" from the New Jersey shore in "Middletown, America":

"This was a tall blond tomboy who grew up with all guy friends. A natural beauty who still had age on her side, being thirty; she didn't give a thought to taming her flyaway hair or painting makeup on her smooth Swedish skin."

Here I *think* I know what Sheehy means, but I'm not sure. Don't let the reader make such assumptions. You're the author; it's your charge to show us what you mean with authentic detail. Don't pretend the job is accomplished by cliches such as "smooth Swedish skin," "flyaway hair," "tall blond tomboy," "the surfer girl" - how smooth? how tall? how blond?

Or try this from Faye Kellerman in "Street Dreams": "[Louise's] features were regular, and once she had been pretty. Now she was handsome in her black skirt, suit, and crisp, white blouse."

Well, that's it for Louise, poor thing. Can you see the character in front of you? A previous sentence tells us that Louise has "blunt-cut hair" framing an "oval face," which helps, but not much - millions of women have a face like that. What makes Louise distinctive? Again, we may think we know what Kellerman means by "pretty" and "handsome" (good luck), but the inexcusable word here is "regular," as in "her features were regular." What *are* "regular" features?

The difference between telling and showing usually boils down to the physical senses. Visual, aural aromatic words take us out of our skin and place us in the scene you've created. In conventional narrative it's fine to use a "to be" word to talk us into the distinctive word, such as "wandered" in this brief, easily imagined sentence by John Steinbeck in "East of Eden." "His eyes were very blue, and when he was tired, one of them wandered outward a little." We don't care if he is "handsome" or "regular."

Granted, context is everything, as writing experts say, and certainly that's true of the sweltering West African heat in Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter": "Her face had the ivory tinge of atabrine; her hair which had once been the color of bottled honey was dark and stringy with sweat." Except for "atabrine" (a medicine for malaria), the words aren't all that distinctive, but they quietly do the job - they don't tell us; they show us.

Commercial novels sometimes abound with the most revealing examples of this problem. The boss in Linda Lael Miller's "Don't Look Now" is "drop-dead gorgeous"; a former boyfriend is "seriously fine to look at: 35, half Irish and half Hispanic, his hair almost black, his eyes brown." A friend, Betsy, is "a gorgeous, leggy blonde, thin as a model." Careful of that word "gorgeous" - used too many times, it might lose its meaning.

9. AWKWARD PHRASING
"Mrs. Fletcher's face pinkened slightly." Whoa. This is an author trying too hard. "I sat down and ran a finger up the bottom of his foot, and he startled so dramatically .... " Egad, "he startled"? You mean "he started"?

Awkward phrasing makes the reader stop in the midst of reading and ponder the meaning of a word or phrase. This you never want as an author. A rule of thumb - always give your work a little percolatin' time before you come back to it. Never write right up to deadline. Return to it with fresh eyes. You'll spot those overworked tangles of prose and know exactly how to fix them.

10. COMMAS
Compound sentences, most modifying clauses and many phrases *require* commas. You may find it necessary to break the rules from time to time, but you can't delete commas just because you don't like the pause they bring to a sentence or just because you want to add tension.

"Bob ran up the stairs and looking down he realized his shoelace was untied but he couldn't stop because they were after him so he decided to get to the roof where he'd retie it." This is what happens when an author believes that omitting commas can make the narrative sound breathless and racy. Instead it sounds the reverse - it's heavy and garbled.

The Graham Greene quote above is dying for commas, which I'll insert here: "Her face had the ivory tinge of atabrine; her hair, which had once been the color of bottled honey, was dark and stringy with sweat." This makes the sentence accessible to the reader, an image one needs to slow down and absorb.

Entire books have been written about punctuation. Get one. "The Chicago Manual of Style" shows why punctuation is necessary in specific instances. If you don't know what the rules are for, your writing will show it.

The point to the List above is that even the best writers make these mistakes, but you can't afford to. The way manuscripts are thrown into the Rejection pile on the basis of early mistakes is a crime. Don't be a victim.

High availability Tomcat

2004-12-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

High availability Tomcat: "Connect Tomcat servers to Apache and to each other to keep your site running

Summary
If you run only one instance of Tomcat, you lose requests/sessions whenever you upgrade or restart your site. In this article, author Graham King presents simple steps for connecting a pair (or more) of Tomcats to Apache using the JK2/AJP (Apache JServ Protocol) connector and to each other using Tomcat 5's clustering capabilities. Any of the Tomcat servers can be stopped or started without affecting users. With an Apache/Tomcat cluster in place, you can easily adjust your configuration for a range of load-balancing and failover scenarios. (2,000 words; December 20, 2004)"

Neat client bit for javascript

2004-12-20T18:35:00.000-08:00

dwr: DWR (Direct Web Remoting) is an XML-RPCish system that lets you invoke java methods on a server from JavaScript clients.

Ninja Please

2004-12-20T17:33:00.000-08:00

Backupninja, handy backup stuff for nixy backups.

Chicken Head Hacking

2004-12-20T14:00:00.000-08:00

Found this looking around for stuff.

Chicken Head

2004-12-20T10:56:00.000-08:00

Ellsworth and the C=64 joystick getting play in the times.

The New York Times > Technology > A Toy With a Story

December 20, 2004
A Toy With a Story
By JOHN MARKOFF

YAMHILL, Ore. - There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.

Ms. Ellsworth has squeezed the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old Commodore 64 home computer onto a single chip, which she has tucked neatly into a joystick that connects by a cable to a TV set. Called the Commodore 64 - the same as the computer system - her device can run 30 video games, mostly sports, racing and puzzles games from the early 1980's, all without the hassle of changing game cartridges.

She has also included five hidden games and other features - not found on the original Commodore computer - that only a fellow hobbyist would be likely to appreciate. For instance, someone who wanted to turn the device into an improved version of the original machine could modify it to add a keyboard, monitor and disk drive.

Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New York, for $30, the Commodore 64 joystick has been a hot item on QVC this Christmas season, selling 70,000 units in one day when it was introduced on the shopping channel last month; since then it has been sold through QVC's Web site. Frank Landi, president of Mammoth, said he expected the joystick would be distributed next year by bigger toy and electronics retailers like Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears and Toys "R" Us. "To me, any toy that sells 70,000 in a day on QVC is a good indication of the kind of reception we can expect," he said.

Ms. Ellworth's first venture into toy making has not yet brought her great wealth - she said she is paid on a consulting basis at a rate that is competitive for her industry - "but I'm having fun," she said, and she continues with other projects in circuit design as a consultant.

Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following among small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as broad respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers who created the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)

More significant, perhaps, is that in an era of immensely complicated computer systems, huge factories and design teams that stretch across continents, Ms. Ellsworth is demonstrating that the spirit that once led from Silicon Valley garages to companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer can still thrive.

"She's a pure example of following your interests and someone who won't accept that you can't do it," said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the first portable PC and an original member of the Homebrew Computer Club. "She is someone who can do it and do it brilliantly."

Ms. Ellsworth said that chip design was an opportunity to search for elegance in simplicity. She takes her greatest pleasure in examining a complex computer circuit and reducing it in cost and size by cleverly reusing basic electronic building blocks.

It is a skill that is as much art as science, but one that Ms. Ellsworth has perfected, painstakingly refining her talent by plunging deeply into the minutiae of computer circuit design.

Recently she interrupted a conversation with a visitor in her home to hunt in between the scattered circuit boards and components in her living room for a 1971 volume, "MOS Integrated Circuits," which she frequently consults. The book concerns an earlier chip technology based on fewer transistors than are used today. "I look for older texts," she said. "A real good designer needs to know how the old stuff works."

Several years ago Ms. Ellsworth cornered Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, at a festival for vintage Apple computers and badgered him for the secrets of his Apple II floppy disk controller.

"I was very impressed with her knowledge of all this stuff, and her interest too," recalled Mr. Wozniak, whose fascination with hobbyist computers three decades ago helped create the personal computer industry.

She attributes her passion for design simplicity to her youth in Dallas, Ore., 35 miles south of Yamhill, where she was raised by her father, Jim Ellsworth, a mechanic who owned the local Mobil station.

She became a computer hobbyist early, begging her father at age 7 to let her use a Commodore 64 computer originally purchased for her brother, and then learning to program it by reading the manuals that came with the machine.

In a tiny rural town without access even to a surplus electronics store, her best sources of parts were the neighborhood ham radio operators. She learned to make the most of her scarce resources.

"It goes back to necessity," she said. "It went back to not having enough parts to design with when I was a kid."

Her first business foray came during high school when she began designing and selling the dirt-track race cars that she had been driving with her farther. Using his service station as a workshop, she was soon making so much money selling her custom race cars that she dropped out of high school.

It was fun for several years, she said, but eventually she decided that she needed to get away from the race car scene. A friend had an early Intel 486-based PC and thought they could make money assembling and selling computers. She decided he was right: "I looked at the margins and it seemed like a great way to make money."

They went into business together in 1995, but soon had a falling out and split up. For a short time Ms. Ellsworth considered leaving the computer business. Instead, she opened a store near that of her former partner, then drove him out of business. Ultimately her store became a chain of five Computers Made Easy shops in small towns.

"My business model was to find areas that were far enough away from the big cities where the larger stores were," she said. "I could generate a lot of loyalty and charge a bit more. It worked out well for quite a while."

Eventually, the collapsing price of the PC made it impossible to survive, she said, and in 2000 she sold off her stores.

"When the machines got down to $75 margins, then even putting a technician on the phone to answer a question meant you were almost losing money," she said.

Free from her business obligations, she decided to return to her first love - hobbyist electronics. She was eager to study computer hardware design, but soon found that there weren't many options for a high school dropout.

She moved to Walla Walla, Wash., and began attending Walla Walla College, a Seventh Day Adventist school that offered a circuit design program. Her attempt at a formal education lasted less than a year, however. She was a cultural mismatch for the school, where she said questioning the professors' answers was frowned upon.

"I felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing," she said.

On her own again, Ms. Ellsworth decided to pursue her passion, designing computer circuits that mimicked the behavior of her first Commodore. She turned to a series of mentors and availed herself of free software design tools offered by chip companies.

Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its basic software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but ultimately more than nine other popular home computers of the early 1980's, including the Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair.

Two years ago she showed it off at the Hackers' Conference, an annual meeting of some of the nation's best computer designers. To her surprise, she received a rousing ovation - and a series of job offers.

One person who took notice was Andrew Singer, a computer scientist who is chief executive of Rapport Inc., a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif.

Mr. Singer contracted with Ms. Ellsworth as a consultant and has since found that she has abilities that engineers with advanced degrees often do not.

"It's possible to get a credential and not have passion," he said. He compared Ms. Ellsworth to Mr. Wozniak and to Burrell Smith, the hardware designer of the original Macintosh. Neither had formal training when they made their most significant contributions at Apple.

Ms. Ellsworth was also discovered by Mammoth toys, which hired her to design the Commodore-emulating chip for the joystick. She began the project late last June and finished, including a frantic last-minute trip to a Chinese manufacturing factory, in early September - a design sprint fueled by Mountain Dew and 20-hour days.

"It worked out tremendously well for our company," said Mr. Landi, president of Mammoth. "It has entirely changed the way we design electronic toys." He said that he has signed Ms. Ellsworth up for a series of design projects, although he would not divulge the financial details.

Old-fashioned video games like the ones on Ms. Ellsworth's product have become less common recently because kids have grown jaded and expect a "wow" factor, like intense graphics or realistic images that older computers could not produce, said Shyam Nagrani, principle consumer electronics analyst for iSupply, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif. He added, however, "The parents are likely to pick this up and say, 'Why not? The kids may like it.'"

When the C64, as the joystick is called informally, appeared on QVC last month, Ms. Ellsworth watched with obvious pride.

"It was one of one of the best projects I've ever done in my life," she said. "It was a tribute back to the computer that started it all for me."

XUL Apps > ContextMenu Extensions - outsider reflex

2004-12-20T00:45:00.000-08:00

XUL Apps > ContextMenu Extensions is pretty damned sweet. This is basically the only Firefox extention you will ever need. It basically gives you the ability to take JavaScript and stick it into your browser anywhere you want. It handles all the XUL you never wanted to learn so you can write that one stupid little utility you want.

Collateral

2004-12-20T00:23:00.000-08:00

Collateral is out of DVD and just damned good. Aside from being a generally good movie, and yet another example of Jamie Foxx impressing me, the soundtrack is just amazing. I went an looked it up on Amazon about half way through the movie I was already so impressed.

One of the user comments mentioned the "Miami Vice" soundtrack, and I have to say, that is a pretty keen observation. Michael Mann has finally come up with the goods again. Speaking of which, I noticed there is a Vice movie slated for 2006 on IMDB. Not sure about that one.

Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Tim Bray at JavaPolis

2004-12-20T00:17:00.000-08:00

Cedric echoes my opinion on Python...

Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Tim Bray at JavaPolis:
The presentation is overall interesting but not very innovative. Tim compares the number of lines and characters used to solve a simple problem and draws a number of conclusions. The one I disagree the most with is his assertion that Python is more object-oriented than Java. "Almost irritatingly so", he says, arguing that sometimes, Python is "too" object-oriented for his taste.

I am still scratching my head at this, and it's hard for me to understand how you can tell that Python is very object oriented when:

* You need to pass "self" as a parameter to all your methods... Does this remind you anything? Right, that's how we "simulated" object-orientation in C, by passing the address of the current object in first parameter. If anything, this shows that Python is not object-oriented, and this flaw is a simple illustration of Python's old age (it was not object-oriented when it was created, more than fifteen years ago).

* You can't pass messages to, say, strings, as you can in Java, Ruby or Groovy ("foo".size()). Writing code in Python usually ends up being a mix of imperative and object-oriented calls that doesn't always follow any logic.

Python is a fine language but overall, I am quite surprised by the amount of misconceptions that people have about it, and Tim is certainly not the first one falling under Python's spell. I chatted with Tim after his talk and he admitted not being a very proficient Python programmer... Mmmh.

Test picture

2004-12-19T21:03:00.000-08:00

Bashee side

2004-12-19T21:02:00.000-08:00

Foo!
Posted by Hello

2002-01-31T21:13:00.000-08:00

Dude, your gettin a Dell. Edit

2002-01-31T20:55:00.000-08:00

I finally got the pictures from the Holland trip back in septemer put up. You can check them out at this spot.

The Edsyndicate project is coming along nicely. We are currently working on prioritizing things that need to be done vs nice to haves. Expect to see KdotN moved over to the new system soon. Im also working on getting the mp3 radio streams back on SO STOP ASKING!! (ok, kidding)

2002-01-25T15:08:00.000-08:00

Im back... Well after the blogger hack and the server change, I finally got this thing back up... I will be adding abit later

Test

2001-12-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

Looks like the Bush administration has sent Lynne Cheney out to put the fear of God and W into those Liberal academic types. Patriotism is still the last refuge of a scoundrel.

"We learn from history that when a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries," the report declares. It names more than 40 academics out of line with American public opinion on the war on terrorism.

Sounds alot like, "I hold in my hands the names of 40 people..." -- May whatever god you believe in spare us from ourselves.

2001-12-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

Its the Prime Number shitting bear!

2001-12-16T15:10:00.000-08:00

Ok, so Im not sure how much this is bad taste vs funny as hell, but here is the WTC Gingerbread house... You have been warned.

2001-12-09T22:27:00.000-08:00

Ok, I downloaded an older version of the SHOUTcast DSP, cause the one I was using kept dropping back to a 24kbit stream, which sounded like ass. The one I have now should be running at 56 kbit stereo now.

2001-12-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

Looking for Nudist fun for the whole family? Check out Serendipity Park. Georgia's #1 nude family experience!

2001-12-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

This represents something in the war on terror more powerful that chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons ( or nookwooler, if your the president ). Stupid people with too much time...

2001-12-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

Ok, I added a ton of stuff to the KdotN radio playlist today... Its up to about 17 hours, including 4 complete DJ sets, and the complete Stanton Warriors CD, cause it rocks. later...