These sound like a fascinating set of third-year projects. I’d be ragingly jealous if I didn’t have at least some opportunity to participate in AltLaw (which has a ton of overlap with one of the projects proposed there); as it is I’m only mildly jealous :)
[Tangentially: AltLaw now has a news blog so you can get updates on things like new cases that have been added to the database.]
Good: I spent the morning in line for Shakespeare in the Park. Great to enjoy a little bit of what the city has to offer.
I somehow seem to end up in lines a lot.
Impromptu Shakespearean puppet show by awesome line monitor/vendor dude.
Bad(?): my light enjoyment reading while waiting in line was “The Antitrust Enterprise: Principle and Execution”. This is optional reading for my Antitrust class. Yes, I’m that big a dork.
Is this the n900, or Yet Another Nokia Product Line?
[Relatedly: the more I play with other people's iphones, the more every n800 dialog which is optimized for a stylus instead of fingers irritates me. Ditto for their easy, all-in-one data access and my flaky/unreliable data access. The n800 is so close to being a great device and yet so, so far. :/ ]
Tim Wu, a prof here at Columbia (he’s famous! he’s on youtube!)12, has announced the existence of AltLaw. The core idea is that instead of ranting endlessly about lexis and westlaw3, someone could actually do something about it, taking advantage of the public domain status of most court decisions to collect a database of cases, parse them into something reliable formatting-wise, and slap a search engine with actual brains on top of it.
AltLaw still has a long, long way to go- in particular, it covers only cases from federal courts and the past ten years, and it does very little to act on the copious metadata available in court cases. But it is getting there, and as it will eventually be open in all the significant senses (source code as well as data), the hope is that it will pick up speed as time goes by and more people start to contribute parsers and data.
I’m generously credited as a contributor on the about page, but realistically, I’ve just been cheerleading so far. I’m thrilled to have had the good luck to be even that involved, and hope to find other ways to contribute eventually. Stuart Sierra and Paul Ohm (sorry, no youtube yet) have really done the bulk of the heavy lifting- congrats to both of them for getting it this far, and on the positive reaction it is getting.
Lots of folks have asked me questions about the on-campus interviews I’m currently doing. There are really only a few things normal human beings need to know about this process:
I think that’s it… been interesting, that is for sure, and frankly much more fun than I expected- I’ve met some interesting people, and it is almost a shame that I have to pick one and only one.
[I should note that going through this process doesn't mean I had a bad time at Red Hat- I had a great time there, and I really look forward to working with some of the folks there in the future. But it just isn't the right place for the next step of my career, so here I am doing lots and lots of interviews. Will write more about the summer soon.]
My sister Deblois‘s new album ‘velveteen’ is out; just finished listening to it a second time and I like it quite a bit, though I think on the whole I might prefer Leviathan (her first album). We’ll see- it has plenty of time to grow on me :) I think cdbaby’s description of the first album still applies to the second: “Acoustic blues tinted folk with sultry honey vocals.”
She’ll also be playing in Atlanta tomorrow and this weekend- her shows are really stripped-down acoustic stuff, which I love, and lots of fun. (I have a couple of pictures from one show here.)
Velveteen CDs are already out of stock at cdbaby, but apparently you can buy the whole album as mp3, or listen to bits of them on the same link.
Obviously interviews have kept me unable to think about the open services stuff over the past several days, but I’m still keeping an eye on my feed reader as time allows. Came across “Brad’s thoughts on the social graph” today- some interesting discussion on the identity/network problem, and how to solve it. This doesn’t seem immediately relevant to the open services problem, but I do think that in order to meaningfully have the freedoms to leave and fork in an service-based world you will have to ‘take your friends with you’, and it looks like that is what Brad is working on. So… I will keep an eye on that :)
He also pointed at movemydata.org, which might be interesting for the open-desktop.org people to look at. (And their ‘it is a cause‘ page is pretty good on the explanation side.)
[ed. later: see also the large discussion Brad's post has provoked.]
Jason Haislmaier has an amusing anecdote about source code escrow providers. Yet another business free software is robbing blind.
Am going through paper from the summer (trying to clean things out before the year starts) and found a small brochure from Stoney Lamar, who served me beer in Saluda, NC, at the highly recommended Purple Onion. Stoney seemed like a nice guy, and the handful of pieces he had pictures of looked really appealing to me. Unfortunately, (1) it turns out he has no website – at least none that I can find – so the best I can do to explain it/memorialize it is this google image search for “stoney lamar” and (2) turns out from that search that his stuff is expensive. I look forward to purchasing some of it… just not now :)
I also met Erin Jones and did buy one of her pieces- sadly, just a mug. No web site to give her link love, but she did have some nice pieces. If you’re ever puttering around Greenville, SC and need some pottery, look her up :)
I’m enjoying being back in my own bed and back on my own couch. If only I hadn’t brought a brutal head cold with me back from North Carolina.
Next up: 31 interviews in 5 days, with or without the head cold.
