April « 2006 « Luis Villa

April, 2006

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30
Apr 06

weekend link bouquet

Random-ass links from a weekend spent mostly being totally unproductive:

Does anyone really wander around thinking ‘you know, I really wish nytimes.com looked more like a newspaper’? That MS and NYT have apparently been working on just this ‘feature’ makes me think that something is deeply, deeply broken. The only good thing about this as far as I can see is that it makes Open Office chasing the Office UI look positively brilliant.
If you follow the NFL, but missed the NFL draft somehow, there is only one article you need to read. It tells you everything you need to know about the only thing about this draft that anyone will remember in 20 years, and coincidentally, it is the shortest and funniest draft article I’ve seen.
Apparently there is still hope for the Malone UI.
This is probably the most interesting piece I’ve seen about the conference I attended on Friday- extrapolating from the discussions at the conference to ponder what legal scholarship will look like in 20-30 years. Lots of fields would probably do well to navel-gaze similarly at least once in a while. [This is the best overall wrapup, and not just because it cites me ;)

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28
Apr 06

another rss->email tool

I posted a while back on the ‘subscribe to feed as email’ problem. Saw today another solution- squeet. Looks pretty nice, though if you trust your own server/code, the wordpress plugin will probably do most of what you need.

More on how leading and innovating (and occasionally provoking)

Paul Cooper elaborates on my posts on OpenOffice, highlighting that the place that free software can attack (and not just follow) is software that crosses the boundary of the single device. We’re currently pretty lousy at that. Interesting post.

Tangentially, at work, we’re playing with Second Life. So far we’re doing a lot of things that look a lot like the real world- a replica of the courtroom building I’m sitting in right now, for example. This is all well and good, and I think it’ll make for some interesting experimentation. But IMHO we won’t really meet our goal (‘to explore cyberspace…‘) unless we experiment with stuff that just isn’t possible in the real world- stuff that is not just different, but sometimes provocative. So I decided to spice it up a bit. Instead of a normal human being, I look like this:

So far the best response is ‘wow’, but I’m waiting for something better. :)

work — No Comments
28
Apr 06

bloggership

I’m at the bloggership conference here at work, where the panelists are discussing the relationship of blogging to traditional scholarship (specifically in the legal realm.) Really interesting stuff. Tim Armstrong (as usual) writes about it very well, and Michael Froomkin has a list of other people who are blogging it. If you’re curious, it is being streamed here. In the category of ‘things that may interest only me’, the class of 1956 is having their reunion on campus right now, and many of them have showed up here. Fascinating (and great) to me that they’d find this interesting.
In other news about institutions reacting to change, NCSU’s pirate president had a lousy year.

software — No Comments
27
Apr 06

I know I rag on OpenOffice a lot, but…

I know I rag on OpenOffice a lot, but no other open source software I know of has an ad on Japanese TV. Featuring the birth of a horse in the middle of a convenience store. No, I’m not kidding. Japanese translations probably welcome :)

gnome / software / work — 6 Comments
26
Apr 06

“New Features aren’t Innovation” and ekiga/gaim/evo

Great post by Dare Obasanjo (MS employee) titled ‘New Features Are Not Innovation’ that everyone in software should read.

Along those lines, on the one hand, I’m thrilled to see that ekiga is working on improving their UI, but on the other hand, what I really want to do is lock ekiga, gaim, and evo in a room at GUADEC and not let them out until I have one data store for people and one UI to get at them. It isn’t rocket science, it just requires people reaching out beyond their communities and giving Linux users something that no other platform really has yet, which I think would represent actual simplification and innovation, in ways the various proprietary OS silos just can’t do. It seems sort of sad that orph might get closer, faster, to that with gimmie than the actual clients have. :/

[Edit later: I realize I said 'data store', but that was unclear- what I meant is that to the user it should appear as if there is one data store- i.e., the totally false and historical breakages between communication apps should be broken down. The data can be stored in 10,000 different places, or on one shared set of punch cards, for all I care, as long as when I get an IM from Jeff I can instantly and sanely decide to respond via IM, email, or VOIP, and when I decide 'I want to talk to Jeff', I open a Jeff object, and then pick an appropriate method, instead of then having to pick through several databases and tools to figure out the best method.]

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25
Apr 06

but, but…

calum: of course it is easier to sit on your hands and not piss off existing customers, but sometimes you have to piss off existing customers to get a broader audience. If OOo is happy with serving the 3% of the population who like Office’s functionality but not Office’s licensing, then OOo shouldn’t change a thing; if OOo wants to go after the 50% who dislike Office’s functionality, and who could later realize how much bettter the licensing is, then they need to change tack. GNOME, Mozilla, and Apple all made this leap of faith at some point, and I think all are doing substantially better because of it.

gnome / software — No Comments
22
Apr 06

guerilla disruption

Steven O’Grady is, as usual, right on in his discussion of disruptive software development strategy. Money quote:

As Sun Tzu says, “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended,” and yet we see on a regular basis firms committing the technology equivalent of Pickett’s Charge. Examples? How about most every competitor to Microsoft Office, with the notable exception of solutions like SubEthaEdit or Writely. Just about every package that comes along to unseat Microsoft Office over the years has been just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing, so why switch? Price? That’s usually not enough.

OOo and GNOME Office (or anyone else in our space trying to think about how to get ahead) would do well to read this, print it, and put it on the wall.

personal / software — No Comments
20
Apr 06

overheard over breakfast

This conference is all off the record, but I figure this nugget can’t hurt to put on the record:

We figure if we ever have a Nobel prize winner here, it’ll be for literature. The ed man page is better than any portugese poetry.

Also, last night:

I’m at $BIG_COMPANY; I’m serving a 3 year sentence for entrepreneurial hubris.

personal — No Comments
17
Apr 06

IBM Saga, sort of continued

[If you're already sick of my IBM ranting, you should probably ignore this post.]

So it turns out that my IBM problem was not, in fact, the fan. Probably something in the motherboard related to the fan. Why do I know that? Because after all this, at about 4:15 today, the IBM guy came and dutifully dissassembled and reassembled my laptop and made it Work Again. Yay! He then looked at the third of three boxes he’d come with (one for the new MB, one for the fan, and one for the keyboard bezel) and said ‘hrm, I wonder what this one is.’ Turns out the delivery people had handed him three boxes, and walked off, and the third was… a part for a Dell. So some Dell support guy somewhere in Boston has my new fan, while the IBM guy has the Dell guy’s connector doohickey. I do not have my new fan- the dude installed only the new motherboard and new bezel before then figuring out what had happened with the third box. The laptop seems to be fine anyway for now, and the fan is noticeably quieter than it has been in months, so something is improved. In the short term, I’m thrilled; in the long term, well, as soon as I get back, I’ll be calling IBM service again- the repair guy broke my home key.

I do have to give IBM credit- they seem to have pulled a lot of strings to get something to happen before my flight. In particular, Kay at the help desk has been spectacular, patient, and eventually effective. She gets a big thumbs up. Everyone else involved… well, hey, it works, and I’ll have it on my plane. So yeah, thumbs up to all of you too ;)

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.