school « Luis Villa

school

class notetaking rant

So… if you’re given a wiki to take notes into to share with your classmates, and you’re typing notes, why would you not type notes into the wiki? Lots of typing and at least some visible notetaking last week, but nothing in the wiki. So… I’m back to being the class notetaker. Mumble. Yay for sharing! Grumble. (And I’m a lousy notetaker… the rest of the class deserves better.)

(Admittedly the text editor for twiki is pretty bad, but… urgh. It isn’t that hard.)

(And admittedly this would all be way better if we had actual collaborative editing, instead of having to ‘assign’ it to someone every week. But still….)

tech law journal blogging

Reference point: another student tech-law journal that is blogging, fairly successfully, it looks like. Maybe it is time to get all the tech-law journals that blog under one roof so we can swap notes… :)

law / school — No Comments
11
Feb 08

CLE opportunities past and future

Twice in the past few days I’ve been asked to sign up for Continuing Legal Education (CLE). Sadly, I have to ‘graduate’ first. Oops. Still… each was interesting:

The Friday CLE opportunity was at Columbia’s symposium on Fair Use. Mike Madison has a good summary of the symposium, as part of a broader post on Fair Use. The links to Rebecca Tushnet are particularly useful- she always has spectacularly detailed post-conference writeups that are great reads for people who weren’t there.

The upcoming CLE opportunity that I had to pass on is at the Open Source Business Conference- two days worth of CLE for those interested in open source licensing. This certainly isn’t the only way to learn about free/open licensing (SFLC‘s conference in the fall included a CLE option, and they also offer an extended stay program for practicing professionals who want to get very in-depth with the topic) but the lineup should be solid as usual- I definitely look forward to attending next year if I can.

forfacebook / law / school / software — 8 Comments
4
Feb 08

more software that rocks my world: Zotero

GTD Kitteh!

GTD Kitteh! by Karin Dalziel. License:

I’m doing a research project right now for a faculty member, and I’ve finally found the research software that I’ve wanted since my high school history teacher taught me to take great notes (good) on note cards (bad). The software is Zotero.

Zotero lets me take notes in a structured way, tying each note to a specific bibliography entry, and then tagging the notes, so that when writing, I can quickly look at all the notes on ‘background, or ‘history’, or ‘philosophy’, or whatever I’m writing on right now, regardless of what source they came from. The bibliography entries are pulled straight from the university’s library system, so I know they are accurate, and the whole thing is a browser plugin, so importing an item from the university library into Zotero is one click. And export into nicely formatted reports that I can hand over to my faculty member for his review is braindead easy too. (More structured data dumps are available too.) It looks to have about a bazillion more features, but these are the ones I’ve been craving for a decade or so now, and I’m so excited to actually find and use them that I’m just about bubbling over with joy.

Bad news for lawyers is that bluebook is too insanely complicated, so we can’t actually get good citation support from Zotero yet (though some may be in the pipeline). But for anyone else doing research (or for lawyers doing research for non-law-journal publication) that feature is probably a godsend too. And the UI is irritating to me in one or two places in ways that I can’t quite put my finger on yet- nothing big (and the intro videos are quite good at explaining how to use it) but somehow feels suboptimal for how I’m using it. Still… happyhappyjoyjoy.

Yes, I’m a research dork. So sue me. And in the meantime, if you’re doing serious research, go forth and play with Zotero.

(And it is both gratis and libre software. Win.)

forfacebook / law / misc. / politics / school / software — 8 Comments
2
Feb 08

a vast flood of random web/legal curiosities

Hello ABA Journal readers. Welcome to my blog! You may want to look at the copyright license this blog is under, and my explanation of Why I Blog. You may also want to subscribe only to the law feed, since much of what I write about is technology or personal. Law feed posts are guaranteed to have at least some legal content :)
I’m very curious how Dell is shipping DVD playing Linux boxes, legally-speaking. Anyone have any pointers?
Tim: the law says nothing about sports bars, but I seem to recall (can’t find it right now) that it has regulations on number of screens in a location and size of the location, which would cover sports bars pretty well.
Mostly, I think my curriculum this semester is completely, gobstoppingly awesome, and something I could probably get only at Columbia. But I am slightly jealous of this. Also possibly this.
‘purpose driven voluntary sector.‘ Wordy, but I like it.
The QA version of Yin and Yang. No one in FLOSS does this well yet, but I do believe that with the right (fairly small) investment it could be done. I offered to build it for Canonical, they turned me down, and I’m very glad they did, given that I ended up in a much better position. Still, would have been interesting to try.
Best post on the weird cease and desist copyright ruling.
HP’s new FLOSS stuff is interesting, especially the ‘FOSSBazaar’ where policies and whitepapers on implementation are exchanged. Is there the critical mass to really make it a functional community? I don’t know, but it will be very interesting to see.
There are now recordings available of the ‘Computing in the Cloud’ workshop I attended one day of last month. I’m not sure there was a whole lot new said there, but probably very interesting for those catching up on the issue.
Great Eben Moglen quote on why free software and capitalism can be very cozy buddies, from a good (though poorly formatted) LinuxWorld interview:
- “The primary desire that businesses have is for control over their own destinies, for avoidance of autonomy bottlenecks which put the fate of their business into the hands of someone else. The difficulty that they experience — that they call vendor lock-in, or noninteroperability — is a difficulty which is really a businessman’s equivalent of [Free Software Foundation President Richard] Stallman’s frustration at unfreedom. They are essentially the same recognition: In a world of complex, interdependent technology, if I don’t control my technology, it will control me. Stallman’s understanding of that proposition and Goldman Sachs’ understanding [for example] needn’t be as far apart as one might think. The desire to maintain autonomy — the desire to avoid control of destiny by outside parties — is as fierce in both cases as it can get.”
Seven stunning facts about Microsoft’s profits. Not-so-stunning fact number eight. :) Some people still don’t get it, though; they don’t seem to realize that part of the reason for the modern explosion in innovation on the web and elsewhere is in large part because Microsoft has felt legally constrained in the kinds of threats they can now make against competitors. Do you really think Office for Mac would exist now if not for the DOJ case? And if Office for Mac didn’t exist, do you really think OSX would be a viable competitor? If the answer to either of those is ‘yes’, you’re on some very good drugs and I’d like to know where you got them. :)
thoughtfix: Creating a new category of device is all well and good, but I’m still waiting to hear anyone say ‘you know what I’d like? a device with all the functionality of an iPhone, but without a permanent internet connection.’ That is, for most people, what this ‘new category’ is- tablet (check) with lots of internet-enabled features (check) with an internet connection (check) that isn’t always on and I can’t call my friends on (FAIL.) It is certainly true that the N810 has slightly more functionality, since it isn’t crippled by the cell carriers (e.g., the iChat that isn’t really iChat on the iPhone) and since it has an open SDK. But for most people the core functionality they want is phone, email, and web, and iPhone does those much better than N810 because of its always on cell connection. So again… yes, maybe N* is a new category. But it isn’t a category anyone actually wants, sadly- the subtly increased functionality does not make up for the substantially reduced convenience for all but a very small, very unusual group of consumers. (Even when WiMax covers major cities, it’ll still be unreliable in other places- and iPhones will be good for that and the current generation of N-tablets will be bad.)
[Politics warning]: Danah Boyd finds Davos to be… pro-Obama? Weird. Good, but weird. Andrew Sullivan summarizes why gay people should be squarely in the Obama camp- he actually has the guts to tell churches things they don’t like to hear. And also links to Obama’s consistent position on the war, and how that impacts electability. Less Obama-specific: “On why it matters when candidates treat voters like fools.“

forfacebook / law / New York / school — 1 Comment
29
Jan 08

summer internships at SFLC

Passing on an announce for other tech-interested proto-lawyers:

The Software Freedom Law Center is currently seeking legal interns to join the staff this summer. Applicants should have a demonstrated interest in software freedom and should be conversant in legal and technical concepts related to free and open source software, but no specific prior course of study or technical proficiency is required. First- and second-year applicants will be considered. Internships are unpaid.

To apply, please send a resume and cover letter, in a free and open format, to
SFLC’s Executive Secretary, Ian Sullivan (sullivan@softwarefreedom.org).

(HT: Aaron Williamson)

law / school — No Comments
24
Jan 08

the best kind of draining…

… is a class that drowns you in both history and state of the art for an hour and a half, and then spends half an hour challenging you to think about what comes next. And all of it (implicitly and explicitly) screaming at you that This Really, Really Matters. I left exhausted, and if every class were like this, I don’t think I would make it through law school in one piece, but… man, I’m really glad at least one of my classes is this way.

(Beyond ‘Computers, Privacy and the Constitution’, I’ve really got a great schedule this semester- Telecoms is interesting and not too heavy on the case law, which makes for a nice break; E-commerce is almost certainly the most applied course I’ve taken yet; and Corporations looks like it’ll be fairly interesting for a class that is really more ‘learning fundamentals’ than anything else.))

law / school / software / wikipedia — 3 Comments
19
Jan 08

my classes, wikified

Two of my classes this semester have class wikis:

That would be two more than I’ve ever had before.

There are a few different spins you could put on this development. Along the student-faculty axis, it is putting more control in the hands of students. This is probably consistent with the institutional mission of actual student development, but we’ll see whether or not most students are actually willing to participate. (One of these professors will include wiki participation in the grade, the other has not indicate any such weighting.) In the institutional-’enterprise’ sense, it is taking some control out of the hands of university IT (who run our mostly competent but not exactly interactive current course website) and putting it in the hands of technically skilled professors (or at least those who have technically skilled support staff), which is consistent with larger trends in the software industry. And in the open source-proprietary sense, both of these are based on open source software, despite neither admin is exactly thrilled with the available options- contrast with the closed system used for the current course management tools elsewhere in the school.

Not completely a tangent: is there any good term for ‘a wiki user who is grumpy when other users don’t wikify things?’ Because I’m going to be that guy. :)

forfacebook / school — 5 Comments
19
Dec 07

happyhappyjoyjoy

Jump for Joy, by bingbin, used under a CC-BY license

That is about how I’m feeling right at the moment. Last exam done. Not going to be my finest semester (job search was unexpectedly distracting, and frankly I got a bit cocky about copyright and patent, which I paid for come end of semester) but not bad, all things considered. Now to clean up the pigsty that is my apartment and do some Christmas shopping… joy.

forfacebook / law / school — 1 Comment
12
Dec 07

so close yet so far

so close: past exams from your patent prof have asked that you do analysis on a case which is pending before the courts, so you decide to search patent blogs for interesting cases which are before the courts. And lo and behold, one of the cases you saw on the patent blogs was on the exam.

so far: you took one look at the particular case, read the first paragraph and first sentence of the second paragraph, decided ‘that patent application is so completely insane, it couldn’t possibly be in the exam‘, and never looked at it again.

Oops.

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.