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Monthly Archives: April 2008

duke polisci majors actually can do something useful with their lives

30-Apr-08

Go us.

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sometimes a number hits you like a baseball bat to the head

27-Apr-08

Televisions from days gone by by Neil Anderson. License:
Clay Shirky on how small wikipedia is, relative to the way we’ve spent our culture’s free time for the past fifty years:
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of [...]

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RHEL-izing Wikipedia

23-Apr-08

I’ve been waiting for this. (It isn’t the first time; see wikitravel, but it appears to be a higher-profile publisher.) It is obvious that to some people and institutions, stable and vetted is good. It is true in software, and in specific areas (textbooks, guidebooks, possibly encyclopedias) it is probably true in written books as [...]

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new headshot

16-Apr-08

I got interviewed last week for a linux.com piece. I also got LASIK over spring break, after 22 years of glasses. (It’s been a month without them and I’m still pretty psyched.) The result of the above two facts is a new headshot, in best chinposin style:

Next necessary step: new hackergotchi, possibly from this picture [...]

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second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade

11-Apr-08

This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and [...]

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I love the smell of a fascist state in the morning

09-Apr-08

Suspending the protection of the laws in favor of executive power: it makes the trains run on time gets fences built on time.
Brought to you by the people who decided we didn’t need that pesky fourth amendment anyway.
(Why yes, this did provoke me to finally renew my ACLU membership. Read more about what they are [...]

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good news/bad news, journal edition

07-Apr-08

Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next.
Bad news: Lots of work [...]

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couple quick quotes

07-Apr-08

“I think [defining BSD as 'free because it has no restrictions' and GPL as 'not free because it has restrictions'] confuses freedom with anarchy.” –James Vasile. As concise and correct a refutation of this position as I’ve seen.
Obama on patriotism:

I love this country not because it’s perfect, but because we’ve always been able to move [...]

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spring ‘08 new york diary

06-Apr-08

For a whole variety of reasons (birthdays, my brother’s extended visit, decision to leave NY post-graduation) Krissa and I have been making a serious effort to enjoy New York over the past few months. I’ll take the liberty of treating the blog as a personal diary (sorry casual readers), and put here a list of [...]

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post-April Fool’s note

02-Apr-08

For future reference: if you’re in an organization with a lawyer, this is how you do April Fool’s.

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