Oh My God!

everyone must go read tales of the plush cthulhu right now.

free culture

i heard lawrence lessig speak at usenix this year, and it was really really cool.

unfortunately, he didn't have any copies of his talk available, so i couldn't show it to people who weren't there.

it seems that he's made this one available on the web, so you should check it out (and so should i when i get the chance).

Random Update

it's been a few days...

let's see, what's been happening.

work is hectic. training is almost over, but that means that they are just now hitting our part of the project, which means they've got all sorts of questions for me. on one hand, this is good because it means i get a good chance to see what these new people are like. on the other hand, it can be /so tiresome/ answering the same question over and over and over...

anyway, it's almost over, and i will be glad when it is.

yesterday we found out that out of the new class we got JATKINS, which is cool cause he's smart and he'll be working with me on some stuff. kan got DRUBIN, which is also cool because it means he'll be working with us as well.

tomorrow is the 6 flags trip, and i am so ready to just ride roller coasters all day, but first, more training...

Getting Out and Doing Stuff

went to see 24 hour party people with tray yesterday.

it was amusing. i'm not a huge music person, but i definately enjoyed its little tour of the manchester music scene from 1970 to 1990. neat stuff.

spent the rest of the day wandering around the museum of natural history, which had it's good points and it's bad points. a lot of it was neat, but a lot also looked like they hadn't done anything new with it for like a decade, which is disappointing.

i think museums would be a lot more fun if they had designated times when children were not allowed in them. the whole thing would be more enjoyable if there wasn't this constant background noise of whining kids.

Fun With Ruby

so seeing louis's aggregator made me want to play with it, but my scheme is pretty weak, so i started hacking on my own in ruby.

it's coming along. it grabs rss files, parses them and extracts the useful information, then outputs them as html. i need to make the formatting better and provide a way to cache downloaded output so that it doesn't try to download a new version each time it's called, but it's making progress, and it gives me an excuse to play with ruby, which is always fun.

CamelBones

i really wish i had time to play with some of this stuff.

as much as perl has annoyed me in the past, it seems that there are still cool things being done with it, and i should take the time to become more fluent with it.

of course that will come after i port Config::Auto to ruby ;-)

Maybe Perl Isn't So Bad After All...

this rocks.

i just sent in a patch implementing the ini parsing part, since version 0.2 from CPAN doesn't seem to have it (although it tries to call it if given an ini file... perhaps he meant to write it and forgot).

well, maybe 'patch' is a generous term, since it was literally a single line of code... but i even wrote tests for it! ;-)

it almost makes me wish i worked with perl more, so i would have an excuse to use it.

Meta, and My Open Source Convictions

gary comments on the fact that the MT people spoke at OSCON last week.

i'll concede that since the convention is supposed to be concerned with open source software, and as such, MT probably should not have been represented, since it is most certainly not open source.

his comments about people using MT instead of some open source blogging tool made me think though. i'm certainly one of the people he's talking about, as i use MT to maintain this site, and if i was using some other blogging tool i might be inclined to contribute code to it.

on one hand, maybe this does 'make the world a worse place', or at least 'not a better place', in some abstract sense, but on the other, i'm not sure that i care.

it's like something louis told me once... he said that he felt he had 'done his part for king and country', and as such didn't feel guilty going out and using some closed source product if it made his life easier.

while i don't pretend to be as accomplished an open source hacker as he is, i still feel that i have made (and continue to make) my own contributions, and quite honestly, when you get right down to it, i'm not all that interested in hacking on a blogging tool. for the moment, MT does all that i desire of it, and perhaps someday, if something else better comes along, i might switch to it. that something might be open source, might be 'source available' like MT, or it might even (doubtful as it seems) be closed source.

when it comes to computers, i use what gets the job done, and while i'd prefer (for mostly technical reasons) that it be something i can hack on freely, that just isn't the sole motivating factor, and i'm ok with that.

Random

this is just completely random. i actually know the girl they're talking about in this article (well, vaguelly, we both interviewed at trilogy at the same time during my senior year of college). well, i assume it's the same girl, since there can't be a whole lot of people named 'camberley crick' out there.

it's interesting to consider how the implications of having a lot of information about yourself on the web have changed over the past few years, now that so many people can so easily access it via something like google. i'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but it's certainly something to be aware of.

damn, i hadn't thought about that name in a long time. it's not often you run into a girl who will keep score in hexadecimal while playing darts ;-)

Finally!

so it looks like justin is working on a replacement for libtool, since he found using the original to be /way/ too slow on his mac. the new version is written in c, blindingly fast, and with any luck will really take off, as this whole 'run a shell script a bazillion times for each build' thing really has to stop.