...more recent posts
On line privacy: the good and the bad.
And oh yeah, just in case you thought that Clinton "signing" the new e-signature bill was a good thing: it wasn't. The bill has nothing to do with the very feasible technology of digital signatures (using public key encryption) which could be used to verify the author or signer of various electronic documents (the Clinton admin. is still very against public key encryption.) All this bill does is increase the power of those "click here to agree to this license" licenses. This is purely for the benefit of big business, and definitely not in any way for your benefit (unless you are a big business of course.) Thanks again Bill.
This is one of the things I'm waiting for: the Mozilla editor. This will be a key piece in building the two-way web (start reading at The Web as groupware section for the shorter version.) In other words, Mozilla, and the Mozilla editor specifically, could be the thing that takes web authors (those writing directly to the web, like we do on this site, through little textarea input boxes) to the next step. Imagine that our little posting page was actually a full text/html/image editor. Nice. I've been playing around with M16 (latest milestone release in the Mozilla march to commercial release) and I can safely say that the editor is not ready. But it is really cool. And it's gotten a lot of people thinking. Enabling collaboration (reading and writing; consuming and authoring; the two-way web) is the mantra of web developers. And I would think everyone has their fingers crossed for Mozilla.
Today is the first day I feel sort of normal since I drank way too much with S. on her last night in town. Still haven't really gotten anything done since then, but it's been a good week in other ways. Lots of interior changes. Sort of like I redecorated my mind. Not exactly sure how that night ended. Hope S. is still talking to me when she gets back.
(My dillema of late: If you know what this means, then you probably heard the news already; if you don't know what I'm talking about then you definitely wouldn't care. Oh well. I'm so pleased about this I'm going to blog it anyway.) MySQL has been GPL'd
Sounds good Alex. 5:30. (I'll get our private page up again soon. Promise:)
A lot of these posts are done so that I can find these links again by searching my own site when I need them. Sort of a bookmark list, but with more meta data. Here's the PHP front end for Java XML stuff. (Yes, that means Cocoon too.) It will definitely make my life easier if I can access these things through PHP. (See? Now I can search for PHP, Java, XML, or Cocoon, and find the link each way.)
Here's a compelling history of copyright law. I should have known the Irish were behind this. Probably there is an opposing viewpoint (as this one seems pretty slanted toward my views.) Any pointers?
It's getting pretty exciting on the software front. Microsoft's new .NET strategy has really stoked the fires. Perhaps because it sounds just like what everybody except Microsoft has been saying for the past couple of years. Now that Microsoft has bought in, things are going to evolve fast. Tune in to scripting news for near constant reports from the trenches. Here's a typically insightful link. Lots of buzzwords, sure, but that may be the best explanation of what's happening I've heard lately. The key point, I think, is that we are trying to enable our data (content, documents, ect...) to be understood (read, processed) by software. Until now we've only been concerned with our data being accessible to people. Making the jump from human readable to machine readable is a big jump. It is like we are turning our minds inside out. The process of externalizing our minds is the process of completely specifiying how it is that we process information in our minds. Producing this complete specification is the same as producing software that can do the job. XML is not any sort of answer. It's the starting point. It's a specification for how we are going to describe this externalization of our thought. It's not the externalization itself. That will be something implemented using XML (not XML itself.) I think the real fun part is about to begin.
The BBC has a funny article on Russian crop circles. I like how the Russian government just talks matter of factly about the existence of UFO's. Vasily Belchenko, security council deputy secretary, said "An unknown object definitely landed there. It obviously used an unknown landing principle."