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

I just finished Anarchist in the Library, by Siva Vaidhyanathan. I probably wasn’t the right target for this book- too many of the arguments and discussions were pretty old hat to me.  It did cover a much broader range than the average info-policy book, but it didn’t seem to tie them all that coherently together, unfortunately. That said, the book did attempt to provide an interesting analytical framework- to grotesquely over-simplify, the balance between anarchy and oligarchy. It is a reasonable way of looking at the world- certainly it offers the possibility of tying together into a single narrative such things as the NSA’s Total Information Awareness, slashdot trolls, and Big Entertainment’s DRM. As a result, overall, I’m glad I read the book- this might be a useful mental tool. But if you read the other usual suspects in info-policy, don’t buy the book- just find a copy and read the intro and the final chapter. The rest will fall into place without reading the intervening chapters. :)

Put in a nice five mile walk today, going through a couple of studios in the Somerville Open Studios and enjoying the gorgeous weather. We also got to support Lizzie, both by showing up and by picking up a beautiful print of hers. Look forward to framing and hanging it, and maybe selling it for a huge fortune later when she is famous ;)

Lizzie!

Anyway, open studios was a blast- thoroughly recommend that Cambridge folks go enjoy it next year. More pictures (including snaps of some other things we picked up) here.

Have started telling people in real life that I’m going to New York- universal reaction around here seems to be ‘Oh, that sucks you’re leaving us… wait! Now I have an excuse to visit New York!’ :) Congrats and other such also eventually trickle out. :) Glad to hear we’ll have a lot of visitors.

Oh, and sometimes work is a little weird- I figured I had to document that-

This morning I confirmed I’m definitely going to Columbia in the fall. This is a little weird for me- as everyone on earth knows, I am pretty sick of Cambridge and Boston winters, and I’m not a huge fan of some things about Harvard Law (Doonesbury was hilarious about Harvard yesterday). But I have a ton of friends here, favorite parks, favorite restaurants, favorite walks, etc., and I’m absolutely a huge fan of Berkman, Berkman’s attitude, and the network of people, events and opportunities available to me here. So Harvard was very appealing despite it all, and I’ll leave Cambridge with very mixed feelings. I plan to stay in touch and be around as much as I can, but it isn’t easy from several hundred miles away, even in this day and age, and even as much as I believe Acela is the most civilized form of transport on this continent.

It has been a long day, so I’m afraid I’m not very coherent. Besides the mild disappointment, it really finally hit me today that I’m walking away from everything I’ve done the past five years to start over from ~scratch in a big, exciting, and a little scary place, and a totally different field, without much of a safety net. The plan is not to stray too far, of course- when I come out on the other side, I still want to be involved in protecting and nurturing the revolutions the internet is enabling. That might not be free software; it might be wikibooks, or other things that Jimbo thinks will be free, or whatever cool software secondlife/there.com/opencroquet become in 3-4 years time. Whatever it is, there will be brilliant people working in it, and I’ll do what hopefully I think I can do best- clearing the way for them to invent and implement our future, just this time with some better tools. But it’ll be different, and new. And I think it’ll be fun and rewarding- but the risks and rewards are staring me in the face today like they haven’t in the past, so I’ve been a little pensive today.

Anyway, this isn’t happening, like, tomorrow; my current plan is to stay at Berkman until right before GUADEC, maybe travel a bit with Krissa, and then come back home, pack, and get my ass to New York. I’m sure a good-bye bbq or three, and some good-bye drinking, will be scheduled before then. But in the meantime… I’ll probably be a little more pensive than usual for a few days.

I’m getting more and more excited to be at Columbia in the fall- Tim Wu posts a great reason why on Lessig’s blog. Do I want to live there permanently? Almost definitely not. But to live there for a few years, will, I think, be a huge blast.

If you liked my Chilhuly pictures, Shelley Powers has a bunch of excellent Chihuly pictures from the currently ongoing show at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. [If you're actually in Missouri, go see them!]

As some of you know, I’ve been in the Lego Mindstorms NXT beta group. Sadly, I’ve had ~zero time to actually participate, so I can’t say much about the product firsthand, but most people in the group seem quite positive about the whole thing- both the product and the beta experience. Today we’ve been (semi?)released from our NDA, so information is starting to sprout up around the web. If you want to find out more about the product, the place to start is Jim Kelly’s NXT blog, which has good content and links to what other people are posting. He also has a flickr set if you want to see the hardware itself. Presumably the excellent lugnet robotics group is the way to go for ongoing discussion, though not much is happening there yet.
On the free software front, there is still not really Linux support, nor a free OS on the hardware, unfortunately. The hardware is substantially more powerful than the old stuff, so getting a new OS running will be hard. The good news is that the beta group had a long discussion about what goals Lego should have in licensing the existing OS, and what licenses Lego might use- and it looks like they may well do the sane thing and open source the OS. Definitely psyched about that- if it is true. [Nutshell of why this is the only sane thing: Lego is (as far as we know) a hardware vendor; they benefit from anything that increases sales and reduces support costs. They don't benefit from proprietary advantage in the software space- more operating systems means more demand for the hardware, not less revenue in the software space.]

Anyway, I’m psyched to see what people do with this- should be fun and a big step in the continued push for personal robotics to become widespread.

[Update: it looks like the firmware for the NXT will be opened, but not the client-side SDK. I don't fully understand why the distinction, but for Linux users the firmware is the important part anyway- the rest can be puzzled out from there.]