Category — General

Hook's review of the fate of HB 842.. In the newest issue of Charlottesville weekly The Hook, Courteney Stuart writes about Del. Mitch Van Yahres' efforts to convince the state of Virginia to use open source software through the ill-fated HB 842 (”Back at it: Waldo brings Microsoft… [Waldo Jaquith]

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people are working at least. i wonder if it might be possible to see if there are any associated contributions from the lobbyists mentioned here? wouldn't it be interesting if people and corporations from another state gave money to influence virginia policy….

why isn't your research and writing novel? everyone knows that your work is, but why isn't it? what is its context, from what is it derived, and as such, why isn't it novel?

as a contextualist, i find it hard to say my work is novel, because all of is it is derivative, even my new ideas i view as caused by the relation of other ideas in my head and i usually very quickly see that they are derivative and not necessarily novel. to say that i've necessarily done some great and new for me is to ignore history to some extent. so why is your work novel?

Organisations as people, clusters, networks. Ton Zijlstra neatly summarises in words and diagrams How We Might View Organisations as individuals and networks… not just people slotted into structures. “Organisations are clusters of relationships between people. | The individual and the network are the relevant economic… [Designing for Civil Society]

bugger…. i was just using this sort of argument today.

Chkrootkit Portsentry Howto. 17 Mar 2004: Falko Timme has written a detailed tutorial on how to install chkrootkit and portsentry/logcheck on Unix systems in order to check a system for rootkits and be alerted in case of system attacks. [RootPrompt -- Nothing but Unix]

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handy

Atom@IETF.org. Sam Ruby is charging ahead with the idea of taking Atom to the IETF, and I generally approve. Sun thinks it would be a good idea for me to put some cycles into syndication technology, so I told Sam that and he came back in about fifteen seconds saying ‰¥þWanna co-chair?‰¥?… [ongoing]

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this is a good direction to go with this….

if you are going to interview for a job as an assistant professor, have at least two things with you:

a. your dissertation, if its not with you, don't agree to an interview
b. at least three papers that define your work

that is my suggestion:) I've run into both issues in the last few weeks, and the way you feel if you don't have such things ready and available is that your colleagues don't seem to trust you as to your view of the future, and well a feeling of distrust is not pleasant. so…. who knows.

time to drive to dc, wee…. i hope i've not forgotten anything. i don't think that i have. though i certainly probably have. 5.5 hours from around 9:00am is when i should be there, but it is rainy and there are bad drivers in this world.

This Saturday, March 20. Global day of action

Bring the troops home now!
End colonial occupation from Iraq to Palestine and everywhere!
Money for jobs, education, healthcare and housing – Not war!
Stop the attacks on civil rights and civil liberties

A quick scan of the national ANSWER website shows demonstrations will be taking place this Saturday in over 35 countries and 175 cities!

Here in L.A., we've distributed thousands of flyers, hundreds of posters, have dozens of endorsing organizations, and report backs indicate this could be a sizable demo.

If you live in LA, check the ANSWER LA website for logistics. Speakers include Ron Kovic and Fernando Suarez, as well as Radical Teen Cheer. There will be an opening rally at the assembly point, as well as after the march, with speakers and music by 6-7 bands.

[Politics in the Zeros]

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ok, while i think the global day of action is important, i just want to say that in certain places we have a responsibility to the people that we occupy that we don't abandon the creation of a law-based state and let bandit kings take over. everything else is cool, but really, if we pull out of iraq and afganistan we are creating a disaster area. it is irresponsible.

tonight has been hectic, between packing, cleaning, writing, thinking, and all that, one server is acting up, i had to drive into the office twice to fix it, once because i thought i had a brilliant fix, that broke it worse, and second once i realized i'd broke it worse. well, when i come back from this trip to dc, i'm replacing that server, its old, i have the replacement and that will be that.

Deans can count. Erik Duval, on measuring the quality of academic communications:

What we really ought to try and measure includes more subtle things,
like

• how useful was this publication for others?
• how much effect did it actually have on the field?
• etc.

Well, maybe not all researchers have that preference, but the people
who administer academia sure do. William Arms, in his article Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web, quoted the saying “Our dean can't read, but he sure can count”…

[Seb's Open Research]

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i doubt anyone really wants to measure relevancy…. why? people have, and the curve isn't pretty at all… it is conic section, where a few things are the canon and then it slopes steeply away in short order, most papers never are cited again. only some books are frequently used, in short, there is alot of irrelevance, and in part this is how it should be when there are specializations in which there are less than 20 practitioners worldwide.