Posts from — October 2003

Eolas patent challenged by WWW Consortium. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a briefing document describing their challenge to the web-browser plug-ins and applets patent granted to Eolas Technologies: “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global standard-setting body for the Web, has presented… [InternetPolicy.net]

Estovers of common. The Secret History of the Magna Carta. This is a fascinating article on the Magna Carta and the lesser known Charter of the Forest, and the early establishment of the rights of commons. [MetaFilter]

How to make your software engineer cranky. There is one thing that I hate more than being micro-managed… and that's being micro-managed by someone who isn't my… [kasia in a nutshell]

got this one from Dave Barry's blog

You are The Oracle, from “The Matrix.”
Wise, kind, honest- is there anything slightly
negative about you? You are genuinely
supportive of others. Careful not to let people
take advantage of you, though.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Proof that I was at AoIR 4.0!. That's my bald head you see here (the really shiny one!): http://aoir.org/2003/pics/pages/audience10_jpeg.htm. There I am, attentively listening to Prof. Pierre… [Technology, Self, & Community]

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yup, hiding behind monica…. i should look over the tape and see if i have any more of marcelo

Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

so amongst other things, i've been trying to get CDSware working to replace the eprints.org software on the cddc eprints server, that no one uses, but eprints.org really didn't like working with apache 2, so i had to switch to something. the problem that i have isn't with cdsware, which is nifty by all accounts so far, it is with WML which seems to be particularly irritating it inability to recurse directory trees on my redhat 9 system, thus all the files that call other files in the tree need to have directories appended or they end Make with an error, big fun, but it is really a pain, and since around noon yesterday i have been in an overirritable mood….

so once again i tossed my irc client away, if you want to chat, i'm on ichat only until i decide to go back to irc, which will be a few months. why? because the channels that i've been hanging out on have several bots that i find quite irritating, and am tired dealing with them.

other than that, i've been working on job letters a bit, and i've come to see that i'm not prototypical for professor jobs.

When Microsoft Attacks. I am stunned. One of my favourite bloggers, Michael from eclecticism, has been fired from his job on the Microsoft campus for this post. Michael was a full-time temp working in the MS print shop. Now he's not. Technically, he… [Eat Your Vegetables]

the technological fetishization of academic theory and practice rides again! but it is neat anyway

ML is the base layer for a psychogeographical content management system that can :

1) be used to transform a mass of subjective data into an objective representation
2) be used as engine that, after being fed certain parameters, generates new psychogeographical drifts
3) be used to develop further a cartography that negates the territory
4) be datamined to show never before suspected patterns in the urban fabric Ê
5) be turned into a knowledge base on urban environments
6) be fired up into a new mythology for urban space
7) be used to take the fingerprint of a city
make searchable urban features & experiences by means of the semantic web