October, 2008

personal — 9 Comments
31
Oct 08

I may have to become a deletionist, and other ‘me’ news

This is a little ridiculous. Flattering, but ridiculous. :) (Seriously, a good example of the rationale behind the deletionist position- some articles just don’t get enough ‘eyes’ to fix their errors. I think I’m still an inclusionist, on balance, but I can see the rationale.)

In other ‘me’ news, the guys at Deep Fried Bytes have posted a podcast I did with them a few weeks ago. We rambled all over the place, and had a fun enough time doing it that it ended up being two podcast episodes; second part not posted yet. Beware: I say nice things about Office 2007; if that disturbs you, might not want to listen. (I also dump all over OpenOffice, but that is mostly old news.)

I’ve also posted a slightly edited version of my slides from my visit to Duke. ODF only until OOo 3.0′s export mechanisms get better, I’m afraid.1 I did promise to answer more questions on the blog, but real life has intervened. I will try to get to it soon, though.

  1. For the record: notes are necessary to comprehend these slides. The PDF export with notes enabled is unreadable (the slides become black text on black background); the SWF export, while cool, contains no notes; and the HTML export is just plain not working as far as I can tell. [↩]
misc. — 2 Comments
19
Oct 08

hello CPS 82!

(planet readers, please ignore….)

Duke / forfacebook / school — 3 Comments
17
Oct 08

Durham, higher education, and me

I’ll be in Durham this weekend; I’m not sure how much time I have free, but drop me a note if you’d like to grab a meal or beverage of choice.

The formal reason I’ll be in Durham is to give a guest appearance at CompSci 82, Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet. I have been involved in academia previously (TAing a couple times, lecturing at the Sloan School of Business at MIT, and moderating a panel at Harvard Law School) but I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone has been quizzed on the content of my blog. I am terrified at what this indicates for the future of our civilization. :)

Before anyone asks, I don’t know whether guests are welcome to sit in, and I also don’t actually know the time and location of the class. But if I figure those out, I’ll post here.

(Informally, I have tickets to blue/white and the football game and extensive eating plans. But really, the class appearance was scheduled first.)

misc. — 2 Comments
17
Oct 08

freedom to tinker on hacking self-drivingcars

Not quite as Deep and Serious as my other pieces over there, this is a fun one on whether or not you should be able to legally hack the Self Driving Car Of The Future. Turns out it is a slightly more complicated question than it seems on the surface, and one we’ve got very poor tools to deal with.

forfacebook / personal — 5 Comments
16
Oct 08

why yes

that is my little sister. Thanks for asking.

openservice — 2 Comments
14
Oct 08

FTK: clouds, hype, and freedom

I’ve written another post (really micro-essay) at Freedom To Tinker. This one is about ‘the cloud’, partially in response to Richard’s mini-interview, but really mostly in response to my continued frustration at the terribly meaningless phrase ‘the cloud’, and how it tends to confuse and obfuscate discussion of  critical issues. Go forth and read!

misc. — 2 Comments
13
Oct 08

quick Boston Summit report

Because of schoolwork and showing my sister around schools, I ended up not attending any sessions at the summit. But it was still great to see everyone- I got a sense of a lot of positive interest and momentum coming out of the hackfest, and of course it is always great to hang out with old friends, even if they now have babies attached ;) Big thanks should go out to J5 and Zana for helping get the thing organized- it did seem fairly smooth, with a nice location at the b-school and (finally) actual reserved tables at flattop’s ;)

New York / personal / school / work — 2 Comments
13
Oct 08

what I have been up to

Lots of people I saw in Boston were asking ‘what have you been up to’ instead of the usual ‘sounds like things are good from your blog’ :) I guess I’ve been a little quiet here about me, personally. So some updates:

  • School is generally good; the first two years ended up being very successful (low honors first year; high honors last year.) This year I planned to throttle back to have more time for outside projects, so I am taking fewer credits than ever. Unfortunately, I seem to have chosen those credits poorly so I am doing more work than ever. Hence, not much time for outside projects :/
  • Will spend the summer studying for the bar; location TBD (since Columbia throws me out of housing a few days after graduation.) Yes, the bar is hard. Not that hard- Columbia alums pass the California bar at a 90+% rate. But obviously no one wants to be in that 6-8% so of course everyone studies like crazy. That will be me.
  • Have accepted a job at Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe starting early fall ’09 in their Silicon Valley office. I look forward to it- excellent firm, excellent people, probably will not implode in the next year. :) Current plan is to work about 50-50 on startups and technology licensing, but obviously the economy may dictate a different balance. Silver lining of the economy may be more time for pro bono projects, of which I obviously have a long list I’d like to work on.
  • Am not getting married at GUADEC. ;) Probably a low-key family-only affair followed by big, fun parties in Miami and Boston (or New York?)
  • Krissa and I are trying to enjoy NY as much as possible before leaving, which includes lots of live performances (Jazz at Lincoln Center, ‘In The Heights’, Deblois, Nutcracker), lots of eating (Caracas Arepas, dinner at a not-so-expensive place with Steve Martin and a guy who looked a lot like Paul Simon at the next table), and lots of family visits and East Coast travel (I’m in week two of a six week stretch with family or travel every weekend- all four-plus parents, Summit, and a lecture at Duke.)
  • Krissa is good- loving her job still; enjoying NY; looking forward to going home to California. Currently in Turkey biking with her mom, else she’d have been in Boston and in Durham next weekend.

So yeah, life is good. Crazy, but good. Not sure I’d have it any other way.

Apologies to everyone who I said I’d see this morning at Summit; unfortunately I had to change my train to a pretty early train and overslept, so pretty much ran from hotel to train. Next year…

forfacebook / politics / software / wikipedia — 2 Comments
8
Oct 08

quick IP-tech-politics post (mostly candidate agnostic)

A long post on (very liberal) firedoglake about Obama’s local-level organizing techniques. Very long piece but worth reading regardless of your political orientation, as it seems likely to define how campaigning will be done in the future, and doesn’t delve (much) into the politics behind the candidates/movements themselves.

Key take-away: the campaign is trusting volunteers to take roles that would never have given to volunteers in the past, and using new communications technology (and training) to help coordinate them. Result: vastly increased reach and increased levels of participation and ownership. Parallels to self-organizing (potentially fragile?) open peer production communities will be self-evident to anyone who has participated in one of those. Money quote: “Movements aren’t built on individual people—they are built on relationships.”

forfacebook / misc. / personal / politics / school — 1 Comment
3
Oct 08

posting at Freedom To Tinker for a few weeks

I was recently invited to guest-post at Freedom to Tinker, formerly Ed Felten’s group blog and now officially hosted by Ed’s Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Ed’s been a hero for ages (dating back to at least his voting machine work, if not to his Microsoft work) and so the invite was very flattering. I’ll be there through mid-November, and cross-posting headlines and snippets here.

My first post at FTK is on a topic that got interesting to me after I saw Clay Shirky speak at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference: Political Information Overload and the New Filtering. In a nutshell, I look at some of the new filtering mechanisms that are (or aren’t) helping us deal with the deluge of political information- information that was always being created, but is only now being distributed so widely that it feels overwhelming. Sadly, I’ve got no great insight, but I think it is an area that deserves more thought and design instead of the ad hoc evolution that is creating it right now.

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