...more recent posts
I mentioned ZZZ online before, but I think it's worth repeating. I've really been enjoying it. The guy who writes it is a total nut. Sort of a Popular Science on the web, except much better.
From slashdot: Microsoft has clarified their man Jim Allchin's rather insane comments that open source software threatens the "American way". They didn't mean that. They meant the Gnu Public License (GPL) threatens the American way. Maybe they are finally understanding. I can't wait to read Richard Stallmans comments.
This is doubly funny, becasue even on Slashdot (in the comments at least) Stallman is regularly attacked in just this way. "He's a communist!" "He wants to share everything!" "Did we mention he's a communist!" I just always thought these were little republican 13 year olds.
Yes, that's right Napster offered the music industry one billion dollars to allow their members unlimited swapping of works for five years. Slashdot. Cnet. FoxNews. I can't imagine they'll except that offer. Or any offer really.
Here's an unusually good space shuttle picture from this most recent launch.
New issue of Cryptogram. Good stuff on proposed hard-drive-embedded copy protection plans, a semantic attack by URL that I would probably have fallen for, and another good explanation on why he thinks electronic voting is a really bad idea.
Much better. I bought the O'Reilly Horse book ("Running Linux") yesterday, and that was just what I needed. I learned more about unix in one day of reading and poking around the command line than in my almost 2 years of just using a unix system (I mean remotely using somebody else's unix system.) Maybe it's not so hard.
I'm not getting much traction on the server project. Since I really know almost nothing, its hard to pick an approach route. I guess the point is that it doesn't really matter, just jump in, and eventually you'll figure out what the best way would have been to approach the problem. Or another way of saying this is: just pick one small thing and start there, then move on to another small thing, and eventually a bigger picture will emerge. I guess there has to be some wasted motion when you are trying to blindly find your way. But if that's the case, are those motions still wasted?
Actually this sort of thinking is the real problem. Stop writing and fire that beast up.
Those "Real Good Plumbers" have managed to break the heating system. The last 24+ hours have been cold. Like I need an excuse to stay in bed.
Alpine is a file-sharing network getting a lot of mentions.
Here's an interview with Wilfredo Sanchez, an interesting programmer who was, until last week, the lead open source developer on Apple's Darwin project, and who is now the "open source program manager" at knownow (a just out of stealth mode p2p/2-way-web sort of thingie.) Basically the interview is talking about open source development in general. W.S. has a nice middle of the road (to me) attitude that seems very reasonable (unlike some voices in the open source world.) It's not about the license, or the code per se, it's about the community of people that can form around such projects.
"The way I think about it, a community is a group of people with some interest in a given problem space and a vision for how to tackle it and what to do with the result. They tend to rally around some code, because code sets some nice boundaries for the scope of that problem space, but the code might be tossed out and re-written or otherwise modified and extended to reflect the vision of the group, which evolves the members discover new ideas, or the membership changes. The successful communities I know about have some common characteristics: They tend to have a core group of some manageable size, which is generally comprised of the most active developers, but also of other people who are known to understand the problem space well. The core group and the code are what provide continuity and direction, and they roughly represent the vision of the whole group."