March, 2007

design / software — 8 Comments
29
Mar 07

book rec, sort of

Amazon emailed me to recommend “Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments.” It looks like a deep, serious study of options for moving beyond a desktop metaphor. Obviously I haven’t read it, nor do I plan to (Property Law calls) but it looks like it should be interesting to anyone who wants to seriously rethink the desktop.

(I shared Kathy’s palpable disappointment at GUADEC when so few people had read the books she cited in her talk; I think it behooves lots of GNOMErs to read something on usability and design other than websites and blogs before GNOME launches into the Next Great Rethink. Research like this that is actually targeted at The Desktop and not just individual applications is icing on the cake.)

law / licensing / misc. — 7 Comments
28
Mar 07

minor but semi-triumphant thought on gpl v3

More thoughts on gpl v3 later, but a quick thought from skimming through some of the online comments:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. — the second sentence of the license, emphasis mine

I don’t understand the word “most” on the preamble. Is it really true that most software has non-free licenses? When the preamble was originally written this made sense, for sure, but now it sounds unnecessarily pessimist. — a comment

I’m not quite as optimistic as the commenter (a majority is probably still proprietary), but man… the GPL has come a long way that he can say something like that and not be completely out of his mind.

Replacing ‘most’ with ‘many’, or even just ‘proprietary’, would be a wonderfully appropriate way to capture and celebrate the change that GPL v2 has wrought over the past 16 years.

misc. / personal — 9 Comments
27
Mar 07

this *was* a great day

Past tense:

  • first day of spring.
  • performed well in class when called on.
  • discovered yummy indian-ish food place.
  • discovered I can get school credit for work I’m already doing.
  • discovered I can avoid additional work, while still (hopefully) obtaining access to something I really want.
  • walked two miles down the river in shorts and sandals; took two miles worth of pictures.
  • people are happy.
  • babies are happy.
  • dogs are happy.
  • Luis was happy.

present tense:

Gallery has been a wonderful pal for a long time, but it is showing its age, so if anyone does have recommendations for a combination of local management software (ideally f-spot) and remote web display Free Software that work well together, please let me know- it may be time for me to put it down when all my URIs are broken anyway..


misc. — 2 Comments
25
Mar 07

JPG and 8020 publishing

IMG mag coverA month or so ago I happened to stumble across a mention of Derek Powazek, whose work in the late 90s at fray was the first time I had been exposed to the idea that the web could be not just interesting but beautiful- achingly, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful. I googled a bit to see what he was up to.

The answer is JPG, a magazine of ‘brave new photography.’ I subscribed almost immediately. And then promptly forgot about it. (I’m a busy guy :) On my way back from dinner tonight, I checked my mail, and my first two copies had arrived.

Wow. Imagine nearly National Geographic-level photography, but without all the nagging ‘text’. Just stunning, stunning stuff. You can do nice things online, but especially for photography, paper can’t be beat, and JPG takes full advantage of this. This will likely stay on the coffee table and not get recycled.

It also has some short but useful howto photography articles. Even the advertisements are beautiful and relevant. (I’m sure that’ll get worse with time, but here is hoping.) In short, something I’ll be very excited to get every other month.

Subscriptions are not just reasonable, they are practically cheap (especially compared to the newstand price). If you’re at all interested in photography, I really recommend subscribing.

Interestingly, the magazine is the first project of 8020 publishing,  a company whose goal is to create communities which build web/print hybrid magazines. Seems like they’d be interesting people to work with if you wanted to do the next Make, or maybe the next Linux Journal.

Duke / wikipedia — 2 Comments
25
Mar 07

duke prof defending wikipedia

Stumbled on this essay defending the use of Wikipedia in academia today, and was pleased and excited to see that it was written by a Duke prof, Cathy Davidson (blog). I knew Duke was doing the right thing in starting a center for interdisciplinary studies, and I’m excited to see that Prof. Davidson (current head of that project) is also interested in the future of educational technology. Great to see that the alma mater is hiring and recognizing people who are forward-thinking.

forfacebook / New York / personal — 4 Comments
24
Mar 07

St. Johns under the lights of Elton John

I don’t usually consider myself jealous of extreme wealth, but outside my window tonight is one of those times. Apparently Elton John is throwing his 60th birthday party at St. John the Divine, the cathedral across the street from my apartment. The paparazzi are out in force; I can hear the screaming fans when particularly famous people arrive. (My superintendent told me that he saw Angelina Jolie and Paul McCartney; all the people in the right side of the picture below are paparazzi.)

Paparazzi.

But that isn’t what made me jealous. What made me jealous is that he has put giant spotlights behind the cathedral, such that the guests inside can see the stained glass even though it is the middle of the night. That is something I may never get to see, so yeah, I’m a little jealous. I wandered out in the rain to see if I could get interesting pictures of the cathedral under the spotlights. Some came out pretty nicely, I think.

stained glass by spotlight from the outside

I’m not much for focusing on the wealth disparities in our country. But it is hard not to when on one side of the cathedral there are limos, and on the other side, right under Elton’s spotlights, there is barbed wire to keep out Harlem.

Barbed wire- wouldn't want Harlem to get inside.

More pictures here. The Columbia student paper blog notes that there is some irony in holding your birthday party in a cathedral when you’ve apparently said you would like to ban religion completely. :)

(Krissa is out of town, else I probably wouldn’t be posted in the middle of a saturday night ;)

law / personal — No Comments
24
Mar 07

advice for future law students

Chicago poster, by way of wikipediaIf you enjoy musicals, and are planning on going to law school, do yourself a favor and don’t watch Chicago the same week you cover murder, wife-beating, and murder defenses in Criminal Law. Nothing like correcting lyrics in your head to spoil your enjoyment of a good musical.

For example, “It was a murder But not a crime!” is a great lyric, but not correct, since murder is by definition unlawful. “It was a killing But not a crime!” would be more correct. (But of course it probably doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

Yes, law school has made me even more of a pedantic bastard. My apologies. My only excuse is that it apparently does this to everyone- you’ll be incapable of taking Crim Law and watching Chicago without having the exact same thought. Therefore, my advice, learned the hard way last night. ;)

misc. — 3 Comments
22
Mar 07

bad news for dave

Dave‘s not metal, he’s just a “gifted social outsider.“

misc. — 1 Comment
21
Mar 07

over/under on weeks until this appears in a Yochai Benkler talk: 2

Turns out Sudoku (new in GNOME 2.18!) is the output of a Japanese game company called Nikoli. Nikoli gives much of the credit for their creativity and prodigious output to their community of puzzle solver-readers, who suggest new games and refinements to old games to Nikoli. As icing on the community production cake, they plans not to trademark future games in the US in order to encourage their growth. Full NYT story here.

gnome / law — 1 Comment
20
Mar 07

GNOME retains SFLC

It is good to see that the GNOME Foundation has officially announced that we’re retaining the Software Freedom Law Center to help us with the Foundation’s legal issues. I’ve been tangentially involved, since it is trivially easy for me to swing by the SFLC offices, and I’m excited that we’ve got more smart, clueful people coming in to help with our difficult questions. My particular personal hope is that they can help us straighten out our trademark policy, but I’m sure their domain expertise will be useful in other areas as well.

I think it is worth noting that this is not a repudiation of our long-standing pro bono relationship with the excellent folks over at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati. We see SFLC’s expertise in free software law and free software community dynamics as a complement to WSGR’s skills, not a replacement. If anything, I hope that by giving us more incentive to focus attention on our legal issues, the relationship with SFLC will let us expand and deepen our relationship with WSGR. WSGR has done excellent work for us in the past and will continue doing work for us, and everyone involved in GNOME should be grateful and appreciative for the time and effort they’ve put in over the past several years.

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This work by Luis Villa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.