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Category Archives: misc.

new altlaw feature

06-May-08

Altlaw, the restoring-caselaw-to-the-public-domain-where-it-belongs project I’ve been involved with on and off since last year, just got a new feature; it now parses the cases that are cited and shows them as sidebar links. It hasn’t propagated to all cases yet, but you can see an example here. (I stumbled across this by looking up that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

tracks 1.5 released!

30-Mar-08

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Tracks, a web-based Getting Things Done-like tool. For quite a while I’ve been living out of the unreleased preview version, because of the load of new features in there, like the ability to hide actions that don’t need to be seen yet and the rough-but-functional mobile view.

You no [...]

twittering for a change

26-Mar-08

The idea of blogging for 2 1/2 days sounded brutal; so I decided I’d experiment with ‘blogging with constraints’, aka ‘resisting my urge to write paragraphs by forcing myself to only write 140 characters at a time.’ Only tool I have for that (unfortunately) is twitter, which is imperfect, but I’m giving it a go…

I miss/hate/etc. miami sometimes

20-Mar-08

This led the evening news on both local CBS and ABC affiliates, including interviews with workers at the local aquarium who were asked (seriously) if boaters should be “afraid” of repeat occurences. I remain speechless.

stiltsville by sam garza. License:

spring break link blogging

18-Mar-08

Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader:

shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!’ So true. Via.
I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since [...]