June, 2008

misc. — 8 Comments
23
Jun 08

san francisco, etc.

I have to say it is pretty easy to fall in love with this place, especially on days like yesterday when it is clear and not too hot but not too cold- spent most of the day in a park relaxing at the birthday party of a friend of a friend.

dolores park

dolores park by Beth Rankin. License:

There were people in the park collecting petition signatures for (1) prostitution legalization and (2) naming the sewage treatment plant after George Bush. (Big Sort indeed.)

I am still having problems getting used to the transportation thing- I’m just not used to getting in a car to go places when I’m in a city. When I’m home in Miami, or in North Carolina, cars come naturally- but somehow it seems different and wrong here. And that is even before you have to deal with parking. I think an old beater for train<->office commute + zipcar for in the city might be the best compromise, not sure.

Work itself remains equal parts interesting and educational; difficult to say more about it than that at the moment- still too much to take in and make sense of, especially in a public forum like this one. Suffice to say that I really like the people at the firm, and much of the work is interesting and stimulating. Both of these things would have surprised me two years ago. :)

Oh, and singing ‘Creep‘ in Rock Band is quite a bit of fun, it turns out. No real danger of me buying an xbox, but if you need a singer for your next Rock Band party, I’m available…

misc. — 4 Comments
18
Jun 08

things I would not have believed if you told me ten years ago

things I would not have believed if you told me ten years ago: that the most influential TV show for my demographic would be a Comedy Central news show parodying a Fox News anchor; that my old boss would be on this show; and that while doing it he’d quintuple the downloads of Netscape.

misc. — 3 Comments
18
Jun 08

continued experiments in microblogging

Assuming friendly wireless, power, etc., I’ll be microblogging (not at twitter) today’s Creative Commons Technology Summit. We’ll see how that goes.

forfacebook / law / school — 5 Comments
14
Jun 08

journaling in internet time?

Given that virtually all journal articles are published on SSRN, and read and discussed, before they hit actual journals, could journals seek to substantially shorten the amount of time between submission and publication, so that authors feel that journals are active contributors while the article is ‘hot’, rather than feeling that they are the finishing polishers of an already-cooling project? In particular, is journal work ‘parallelizable’? In other words, if you put four times as many people on it, would it get done four times as fast? Columbia Law Review publishes on the order of 40 pieces a year, and takes around 12 weeks off for summer break. So it averages out to a piece a week, but it is lumped together into eight issues. Could they be publishing one piece a week, and turning pieces around in 1-2 weeks, instead of every 5 weeks or so, turning them around in longer than that? I think that might be a bit ambitious- some parts of the publishing process do not get faster the more people you put on them- but it might not be. I’m curious if any journal is trying this model.

Speed

Speed by José Juan Figueroa. License:

I also have some thoughts on journaling at internet attention span (which pre-date, but are similar to, Berkman’s Publius Project) but they aren’t quite ready for prime time yet. (Caveat: they aren’t really my thoughts; something a friend shared with me instead, but I love them.)

gnome — 9 Comments
11
Jun 08

decadence

I’d contribute to the decadence discussion, except I think I’ve already said what needed to be said three years ago and a year and a half ago and again.

I will, though, point to this (and other posts that month) and then urge people to look at this if they want to talk about new features.

misc. — No Comments
9
Jun 08

in case you’ve been trying to get in touch with me

I’ve driven 700 miles since Thursday and have a pretty great tan (or maybe bad sunburn- we’ll see) to show for it. No computer, though, so pretty out of touch with the world. Hope to be back on track by Wednesday.

(Relatedly: I am not on IM during the workday, but my laptop is connected to the network at home. So it looks like I’m online but it is almost completely certain that I will not read them. Try email instead; unlikely I’ll read it during the day but it is at least hypothetically possible.)

law / software / work — 22 Comments
6
Jun 08

observation on my office and the dominance of Word

blogger discussing how his lawyer used the Open Document Format instead of .doc:

The type of documents they produce in that [law] office, as in many other offices if not most I’m sure, is just pure text with a little formatting. They really have no reason to keep buying licenses for MS Office for this.

Now, disclaimer: this guy’s law firm is different than my firm. He says it is basically three lawyers plus some assistants; the firm I’m at this summer is around 1,000 lawyers with significant offices in the US, Europe, and Asia.1

So there is a bit of apples and oranges here, but… for better or for worse, what we do isn’t just ‘pure text with a little formatting’. That means we’re pretty deeply tied to Word. First, the tools around what we do are pretty sophisticated. The modern law firm has a suite of tools for document management. Among other things, these tools save all files to a central server automatically, provide revision control, automatically scrub documents to remove comments (albeit not always well), etc. These tools are not standalone- they integrate into Office.2 Second, it isn’t just ‘a little formatting’. Courts can be very picky- they’re perfectly happy to reject your documents if the margin or spacing is wrong. So, again, the tools are very important. Finally, time is quite literally money for lawyers- every moment usually counts. I don’t want to waste time thinking about formatting, and the client doesn’t want to pay me to waste that time either.

This isn’t to say you couldn’t replace Word. Obviously, some firms have done it, and many more will do so- not just for ODF, but also for markup languages or hosted software where no one ever sees a “file” in the old fashioned sense. But the switch isn’t nearly as easy as it might seem at first glance- lawyers often do fairly complicated things with text and are loathe to switch tools, often with good reason. So don’t expect that an overnight change is in the offing any more than you might expect all the vi users to switch to emacs tomorrow :)

  1. Larger firms are a global trend- people tend to like them because you can get many services and specialties under one roof. [↩]
  2. If anyone knows of a way to tie OpenOffice/ODF to an RCS automagically, I’m all ears. [↩]
forfacebook / personal — 1 Comment
4
Jun 08

attending FLOSS Foundations Conference pre-OSCON

Yet again I can’t attend OSCON, but for the first time, I’m going to at least be on the right coast, so I’ll be attending the FLOSS Foundations pre-OSCON meeting during the weekend before. I’m psyched to meet more people who I’ve shared a mailing list with for a long time, and to see old friends too.

forfacebook / law / school / software — 10 Comments
4
Jun 08

integrity in software and law school, strike 58104

I’ve always been sort of morbidly fascinated by ExamSoft and SofTest, the combination of software products that, in theory, keep us from cheating during law school exams. There are a whole lot of things wrong with it (buggy, elevates books over computers, etc.), but probably the most irritating to me has always been the assumption that somehow using it meant that there was no cheating. This is silly- like all software not open to public inspection, I always assumed it would be easy to break if I wanted to.1 Turns out I was right- it is pretty darn trivial to break into. Go read the link, and ponder- we’re all under an honor code, and we’re entering into a profession that depends deeply on trusting our word. So why force us to use software that punishes those of us who are honest (by making our experience buggy and frustrating) while not stopping those who are dishonest? If we’ve got a real dishonesty problem in law school (which I agree may be the case) lousy software seems unlikely to fix it…

  1. To be clear, I have not broken into it and have no plans to. I’m just interested in security and the use of software architecture to replace real morality/honesty. [↩]
This work by Luis Villa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.