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Wherein Matt Mower (aka rubymatt on FreeNode) rambles about technology, the love of a good MacTop, ruby coding, rails, topics, knowledge management and learning, and politics.
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Resident Evil 4
(GameCube)
80%
Morrowind
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GTA San Andreas
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With his safe pair of hands Lord Hutton would make a fine chairman of the governors of the BBC (he's even a Lord unlike that lefty Gavyn Davies!) And with his pedigree as Director of Communications and friend of President Tony who better than Alistair Campbell as the new DG. Job done!
To support my conclusions I offer the following evidence and witness statements:
Bush loses his aura of invincibility. In his State of the Union address, the president posed once again as the indomitable wartime leader -- but it didn't play as well this time. [Salon.com]
Sad.
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It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories often allow that conspiracies have occurred in the past, but refuse to contemplate their existence in the present. For some reason, you are bordering on the bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11, when it is established as fact that in 1962 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, tried to convince President Kennedy to authorise an attack on John Glenns rocket, or on a US navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba. Two years later, a similar strategy was deployed in the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, when US engagement in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on a US destroyer. Are such tactics confined to history? Paul ONeill, George Bushs former Treasury Secretary, has just revealed that the White House decided to get rid of Saddam eight months before 9/11.
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I thought this was well put. We have a wealth of evidence that suggest that our governments routinely lie to us and engage in activities which are in the best interests only of vested interests and yet, seemingly, people won't accept it and act upon it.
I saw the headline when I went to K-Collector this morning and then read most of the details at the Howard Dean topic. It made a very nice summary of the night and the various viewpoints.
Book Notice: Effective XML Elliotte Rusty Harold, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn NY
Addison-Wesley (Pearson Education) has published Elliotte Rusty Harold's new book, Effective XML. The author provides fifty (50) practical rules of thumb for improving XML strategies, based upon real-world examples.
Effective XML is thus a collection of guidelines and best practices for using XML. It focuses on using and developing XML applications, with a particular emphasis on aspects of XML that are often misunderstood or misapplied. Since XML has become a fundamental underpinning of new software systems, it becomes important to begin asking new questions, not just what XML is, but one uses it effectively. Which techniques work and which don't? Perhaps most importantly, which techniques appear to work at first but fail to scale as systems are further developed? XML can be used to produce robust, extensible, maintainable, comprehensible systems or it can be used to create masses of unmaintainable, illegible, fragile, closed code. [XML Cover Pages]
Books with titles like 'Effective XXX' have had a good history for me (Effective C++ and Effective Java spring to mind). This one looks interesting.
It's funny, for years I have been a strong supporter of renationalizing the railways in the UK. As I listen to the government talking about bringing management of the railways back in house and talk of the public subsidy required to to do the job I realse I don't believe it any more.
A subsidized railway is not free. It is paid for by our tax money. The goverment takes it from us, by force if necessary, and hands it over to companies over whom we have no control. More and more of it disappears into the sinkhole that is the British rail system every year. Yet have you heard even a single passenger trumpeting the improvements they have made?
The government and the industry say it will cost billions of pounds and take many years just to get back to the levels of service everyone was complaining about before the Hatfield rail crash. I don't believe they will do it. I believe it is good money poured after bad.
I think a significant aspect of the problem is that the Railway companies aren't as interested in the passengers as they are in pleading to government for more subsidy. In effect pleading for the government to rob us of more money, to hand over to them. Well I don't want to give it to them.
Let me repeat that: I do not want to give the government any more money for the railways!
I think that the state cash supply for the railways should be turned off and as soon as is practical. Let them turn instead to their customers for their revenues. Let them persuade customers to pay for their services on a fair basis. All that tax money should be immediately returned to the tax-payer in the form of a cut in the basic rate of income tax, VAT, or National Insurance. Whichever will benefit the most number of people.
To those who argue that prices would go up I say "I agree." If you want to use the railway then pay them. And you should have a little more money in your pocket to do so.
To those who argue that the poor may not be able to afford it I say "I agree." This could be a problem. But I think that there are solutions to be found. Maybe people could come together to create purchasing blocks to force a better price from rail companies? They're surely going to need their business.
And if, after all this, the railways can't survive. Then let them die and be replaced by something more fit to serve us.
But don't keep lining their pockets with my taxes. It's not fair.
Envoy questioned over art attack. Sweden seeks answers from the Israeli ambassador after he vandalises a work of art depicting a suicide bomber. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]
Maybe someone can tell me why this is in bad taste? I don't see a call to Jihad but a piece questioning why an intelligent woman would see the culmination of her life being to blow up herself and passers-by. Isn't that a question worth asking? Further I don't understand why this work is anti-semitic. Maybe someone can explain that to me as well.
Microsoft lawyers threaten Mike Rowe (17). Losing the domain name plot [The Register]
I find it disturbing that by offering to sell a domain name you own you are considered to be acting in bad faith. After all, how much do you want to keep any domain you own? If someone offered Microsoft $100bn cash on the nail for Microsoft.com is Bill Gates acting in bad faith if he considers the offer? Or if he responds by asking for $200bn?
When did considering selling something you own become a bad thing? I must have missed that meeting.
Bits of bits. I keep thinking how like software we are. People using computers get fooled into thinking that the document they are looking at is real. That the software they are downloading has substance and is filling their computers with something tangible.... [The Obvious?]
Yes but those 1's and 0's are real aren't they? Aren't they?!?
Java is Mature.Java is a mature proven language for non-GUI applications. What it means is that it does what you expect it to and there is a large body of open source software you can leverage. Carlos E. Perez's enumeration of Open Source Web Crawlers Written in Java is a good example.
C# and .NET, on the other hand, has a long way to go still and there is no easy to extend IDE like Eclipse for developers to rally around. Working with .NET at this point is like working in a new town destined to grow, maybe like Chicago was around 1840. As for my involvement with .NET, I enjoy the rough life.
[Don Park's Daily Habit]
As someone who wrote his first C# application on Friday I could get to like the language. But it's not cross-platform and Visual Studio.NET 2003 is, compared to Intellij IDEA, a piece of junk. I guess if all I did were write apps for Windows boxes every day it would be fine. I don't yearn for that kind of simplicity though.
A quick clarification. I notice that some people read my previous post and thought the K-Collector link in that post was pointing at the demo site I referrred to.
In fact I has linking to the K-Collector page on the Evectors website. This is because the demo site is behind a login at the moment -- we want to make sure that people who use the demo site get the best possible experience. I realise now that this was not at all clear. My apologies for that.
If you want to see the demo please just drop me a line and i'll do the rest. At some point we intend to provide an unguided demo (maybe in the form of a series of Viewlets).
The latest White House script for reporters. Howard Dean is so angry! He has no credibility on foreign policy! He wants to take away your grenade launcher! [Salon.com]
UNACCEPTABLE QUESTIONS: # Anything about single-payer healthcare, rampant war profiteering by Bush corporate cronies in Iraq, Enron, WMD in Iraq, dead soldiers in Iraq, nonexistent nuclear program in Iraq, corporate malfeasance, funding for "No Child Left Behind," Afghanistan, quid pro quo anti-environmental legislation for "Pioneer Level" Corporate Donors, and the Bush ban on the government from making best deal with pharmaceutical companies for prescription drugs.
"A legal black hole". In an extraordinary Supreme Court filing, five military lawyers equate Bush's denial of legal rights to the Guantanamo Bay detainees to King George's oppression of the American colonists. [Salon.com]
This piece adequately sums up my fears about what is happening in the US legal system (and what may come our way too in the near future):
Amicus embraces the principles affirmed in Reid v. Covert: Slight encroachments create new boundaries from which legions of power can seek new territory to capture. It may be that it is the obnoxious thing in its mildest and least repulsive form; but illegitimate and unconstitutional practices get their first footing in that way, namely, by silent approaches and slight deviations from legal modes of procedure ... We should not break faith with this nation's tradition of keeping military power subservient to civilian authority, a tradition which we believe is firmly embodied in the Constitution. The country has remained true to that faith for almost one hundred seventy years. Perhaps no group in the Nation has been truer than military men themselves.And, further:
Unlike earlier wars, the struggle against terrorism is potentially never-ending. The Constitution cannot countenance an open-ended Presidential power, with no civilian review whatsoever, to try anyone the President deems subject to a military tribunal, whose rules and judges have been selected by the prosecuting authority itself.
Blood and Art. Why would an educated person, a lawyer, and a mother of two choose to strap explosives to her body and go and blow up herself and a lot of random innocent people?
Hanadi Jaradat did just that in October, killing 21 Israelis in Haifa.
Artists Gunilla Skoeld Feiler from Sweden and Israeli born Dror Feiler created an artwork titled "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" for an exhibition in Stockholm, to make people ponder the incomprehensibility of this. On a pool of blood a little sailboat is floating, with a picture of a smiling Hanadi Jaradat as its sail. "When I saw her picture in the paper, I thought she looked like Snow White, that's why I gave that name to the piece" said Gunilla Feiler.
The Israeli ambassador didn't ponder the incomprehensibility of the scenario. He went amock and destroyed the piece the moment he saw it, and subsequently got kicked out of the museum. I suppose that illustrates well another angle of the problem. And it instantly made the art piece much more famous than it could have been otherwise. Anyway, he should probably find himself another line of work. [Ming the Mechanic]
It's depressing when people can get so twisted into their world view that even a piece of art can drive them into an unthinking frenzy.
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If you think about the power law as themes or ideas instead of people and you think about fitness as the level in which an idea resonates with people, the power law could be viewed as an amplifier for ideas and memes that are sufficiently interesting. Because fitness so influences a nodes ability to climb the power law, I think the notion that I described in the Emergent Democracy paper, where the tail of the curve is where the creativity happens and the power law is how an idea whose time has come goes main stream still makes sense. I think the key to making the system "fair" is to make sure the tail is inclusive as possible and to try to encourage technology and norms to value fitness over simply linking to those who are popular. As Ross shows in his three layers of creative, social and political, I think the power law is the final amplification part. In fact, the tail of the power law, the creative layer and the social layer where the initial deliberation occurs might where we should be focusing our energies.
[Joi Ito's Web]
Interesting thinking from Joi.
Some users are already testing the Windows Upstreaming app. The feedback I've had so far has been positive, all the glitches are UI related - the upstreaming works.
Andy Fragen points out that we should be able to do this stuff really easily on Mac OS X too using Folder Actions to talk to Radio Userland.
Being a complete OS X newbie I am struggling but it would be neat to complete the set. Here is Andy's comment:
For those asking about OS X, consider this. A Folder Action attached to the www folder that would, in turn, use the "Do Script" command from the Radio UserLand AppleScript dictionary to run. Do Script: Execute a script Do Script string -- The text of the Frontier script to be executed Result: anything Where string is say the text of builtins.radio.upstream.xmlStorageSystem.upstreamMultipleFiles ?? Jake, if you find this adding to the AppleScript dictionary the ability to Do Script Object Database location would be much better.
So far I haven't figured out how to add the Apple Script menu to Finder. I found the menu itself, but clicking & dragging it doesn't seem to do the right thing. BTW: Apple should be really proud of the job they did on the Help for this:
Installing Script MenuAfter you install Script Menu, you can use the included scripts or add your own scripts to the menu.
Thanks a bundle! So, for now, i'm playing with this in the Apple script editor. However, here too, I'm getting stuck. I've written a test script:
tell application "Radio Userland(TM)"
Do Script "Frontier.bringToFront()"
end tell
This asks me to identify the Radio application, which I do, and passes the syntax check. However when I run the script the Editor freezes and, eventually, times out. Radio is definitely running. Maybe there is some other step to allow apps to be scriptable?
Anyway if this can be made to work then it should be possible to do using the following Radio verbs:
We have recently launched a new K-Collector demo site. This is intended to show prospective customers how K-Collector might look (& be used) in their company. The W4 portal is interesting but too eclectic to really get an idea of how K-Collector is intended to work.
The site in question is for our imaginary company Wonder Widgets, Inc. who are purveyors of fine Java and .NET components. We had a bit of fun making up lots of posts ...it's how I imagine soap opera are written... we've already had one person leave the company!
So, if you've wondered what K-Collector is really all about, please drop me a line and I will organise a short (10-20 mins) demo for you. I'm happy to do this as I need the practice :-)
Getting some perspective on those WMD's
Upstreaming in Radio Userland is a great idea. It's very nice to be able to drop a file in the www folder and have Radio automatically upload it to your weblog.
The problem is that Radio has to check every file & folder in your www directory whenever it upstreams. If you have it set to do this often enough that upstreaming is responsive (30s is the slowest I can bear) then Radio ends up flaying your CPU alive. You can see this happen in the Task Manager with regular spikes showing Radio doing it's stuff.
To combat this I have written a companion app WindowsUpstreaming.exe which detects changes to the file system and tells Radio to upstream. It's started when Radio starts and lives in the system tray.
Now I can turn off Radio's regular upstreaming and say goodbye to CPU spikes. Better yet I get instantaneous upstreaming because it's using the built in OS mechanism.
If anyone would like to help test the app, please leave a comment with contact details.
Rewards and punishments teach selfish manipulation: "Whats in it for me?" "Can I avoid being caught?" In Beyond Discipline (p. 22), Alfie Kohn quotes eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant:
"If you punish a child for being naughty and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and discovers that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself."[Ming the Mechanic]
Another great find by Fleming
Not wild enough. Although Generics already introduce more flexibility when referring to type there are times when you "want to leave the type parameter unbound". [java.net java.net Daily Update]
Is List a subclass of Collection - all this and more!
Interesting article about the US national debt. Interesting because it explains some of the economics of, and differences between, private and public debt which I did not previously understand.
Can anyone point me at a page which will teach me how to use Visual Studio .NET 2003 and C# to make a simple SOAP call?
Feedster's top 100 list.Feedster is keeping a separate list of "top 100 feeds." Weird, I'm #4 on that one too. I'm very honored that so many people subscribe to me.
[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]
I'm somewhat shocked at how few subscribers any of these blogs have. I'm assuming this must be from a limited subset of data.
I was getting tired of the look of my weblog so I decided, on a whim, to change it. I'm using a customised version of one of Bryan Bell's older themes Movable Radio: Blue.
I like the clean lines of this design, and with a little fiddling have got most of my customisations in without breaking them. I actually think many things work better in this design and I like the fact that I have somewhere to put my blogroll.
ETECH is coming up..... O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference....OReillys Emerging Technology Conference
Posted Jan 15, 2004, 6:54 PM ET by Judith Meskill
OReillys Emerging Technology Conference taking place at the Westin Horton Plaza, San Diego, CA, Feb. 9-12, 2004 will have a Social Software track. This promises to be an excellent event with a broad spectrum of notable speakers that includes (but is certainly not limited to): Helen Greiner - iRobot Corp., Cory Doctorow - EFF, Lili Cheng - Microsoft Research, Gilman Louie - In-Q-Tel, David Sifry - Technorati, Joichi Ito - Neoteny, Elizabeth Lawley - Rochester Institute of Technology, and, of course, Tim OReilly - OReilly & Associates. [The Social Software Weblog]
This is the key event of the year. We're gonna party like is USED to be 1999.
I'll be there - sponsored by Laszlo Systems and I'll be giving a :05 minute talk on FOAF and the PeopleAggregator.
But clearly the most exciting event will be the field trip to TJ and the House of Mole. Something not to be missed.
[Marc's Voice]
Anyone out there want to sponsor three Europeans with a kick-ass new RSS based collaborative knowledge organisation tool to go to ET'04?
"The yellow light is flashing". Matt Drudge says Wesley Clark's statements to Congress in September 2002 made the case for war in Iraq, but the transcript proves otherwise. [Salon.com]
I went to the congress site and read some of the transcript, statements made by Richard Perle and also the Wesley Clark. I think what I read is very interesting. Clark not only doesn't make the justification for Bush's Persian distraction II, he argues cogently against it. Here is the relevant part of the transcript:
But, the problem of Iraq is only one element of the broader security challenges facing our country. We have an unfinished worldwide war against al Qaeda, a war that has to be won in conjunction with friends and allies, and that ultimately will be won as much by persuasion as by the use of force. We have got to turn off the al Qaeda recruiting machine. Now some 3,000 deaths on September 11 testified to the real danger from al Qaeda. And, I think everyone acknowledges that al Qaeda has not yet been defeated. As far as I know, I haven't seen any substantial evidence linking Saddam's regime to the al Qaeda network, though such evidence may emerge. But nevertheless, winning the war against al Qaeda and taking actions against the weapons program in Iraq, those are two different problems that may require two different sets of solutions. In other words, to put it back in the military parlance, Iraqthey are an operational-level problem. We have got other operational-level problems in the Middle East, like the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Al Qaeda and the foundation of radical extremist fundamentalist Islam, that is the strategic problem. We have got to make sure that in addressing the operational problem, we are effective in going after the larger strategic problem.
I think his key points are:
The Corporation. Several people have mentioned the new documentary "The Corporation". It was screened at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival. It is premiering in a few theatres in Candada around now. Read the review, it is very cool.A lot of documentaries get a rise out of their audience. Some even invoke social change, or at the least some serious reflection upon our place in the world. But I can safely say I've never seen an audience so moved, en masse, to explore actual social activism on a grand scale as the audience who watched this three hour masterwork. The first standing ovation I've seen delivered at the Vancouver Film Festival was not only deserved, but also very long, and what followed the screening overshadowed even that outpouring of emotion.I can't wait to see it, and I hope it somehow manages to get wide distribution, even in the U.S. I have no doubt it will play in the theatres here in France. Even Noam Chomsky shows in regular theatres here.
The Corporation could never have been made in the USA. It took a Canadian team to put this work together, and it'll take far more than legal threats and intimidation to kill it. An almost three hour look at the past, present and future of corporations as a business entity, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes and giving the thing a miss if you only had a loose synopsis to go on.
But where this documentary matters is in the details - the nasty, disgusting, gory details of what the corporation has done to this world, what it's doing today, and what we can expect it to do tomorrow if we don't get our freaking act together.
The extreme right 'love it or leave it' crowd are no doubt already starting to yell "Lefty propaganda," but this isn't an Anti-Bush attack on all things capitalist. This isn't hippy rhetoric or new age spin or a call to the communes. It isn't hoity toity technospeak or boring talking-head PBS filler. What The Corporation is, is a healthy dose of well-researched, deeply explored, stunning information that can not possibly leave you, as an audience member, in any condition but stunned, dismayed, and outraged.
Maybe you know it all already. If you're like me, you read the papers, you know who's buying who and that the unstoppable bulldozer of globalization is hurting a lot of people. If you're like me, you're disgusted that TV news has become a wrestling match to decide which party has the best 'spin', and you might have even learned enough about global politics to be sick to death of what you're seeing in the world today.
But The Corporation will teach you things you never dreamed of. it will change you. It will ruin your day, but give you reason to get up in the morning - determined to make change.
And for the record, I think corporations should be banned ASAP. Not business, not free enterprise, not groups of people doing things together, but the corporation as an artificial legal person. [Ming the Mechanic]
I'm with Fleming on this. Corporations should not have the legal status of people. They especially shouldn't have the protections without the responsibilities. If a corporations conscience is it's shareholders then, as we have learned, we are all in big trouble.
After watching a number of long mass market pics over the last few years I have made a pact with myself not to go watch over long films (i.e. longer than about 1hr40m). I broke it to go see LOTR III and heartily regreted it. So few films are worth the discomfort and fewer yet justify 3 hours of my time. But I think i'd go see this.
Marsarific Google!.I love how Google changes their logo, and I just noticed that today's has the Spirit rover and Martians!! I saved a copy of the image here in case it's gone by the time you go look. So good.
Update: reader Chris T. writes to point out Google's holiday logo museum, which I wasn't aware of. The rover logo isn't in there yet, but I imagine it will be added.
[megnut]
So simple, just 6 letters, and yet they do such neat things with them. I especially like how they did the 50 years of DNA logo although my favourite is Einsteins birthday.
Dear god someone on the Mozilla team PLEASE move the Close Other Tabs command away from the Close Tab command on the Mozilla context menu. I cannot count the number of times I hit the wrong one and it's driving me nuts!!
National Debt. More on the U.S. national debt, from Al Martin Raw, the article "Scoreboard 2003". Seems to be in the member area, but somebody sent me an e-mail copy.The total national debt of the United States on a fully realized basis, inclusive of federal, state, county and local debt stood at a record $20.613 trillion (83.73% of said debt having been created from 1981-92 and from 2001 to present.) The total public and private indebtedness of the United States ended the year 2003 at $39.384 trillion. The total public and private assets of the United States ended the year 2003 at $26.134 trillion. Thus, the United States by the end of 2003 has a negative net worth of approximately $13 trillion. The total debt service of the United States ended the year 2003 at 309.4% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). These are numbers never before seen. This is a higher debt to gross domestic product ratio than any other country on earth, which still services its debt.Doesn't sound good. I'd like to see some other sources on that, of course. The periods he's mentioning, 81-92 and 2001 to the present, where 83.73% of the debt were generated is when Reagan and the two Bushes have been presidents. [Ming the Mechanic]
Caveat Lector: Uninformed commentary follows...
If these figures are anywhere near true then we should all be worried. Worse still American spending is going to be painfully hard to decrease with President Bush continuing to borrowing to fund his pet projects like The Global War on Terror.
In case you're wavering, wondering if you will enjoy it, I can't recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything enough. It's both absorbing and amusing, heck I've even learned something about phsyics and geology too!
Here's one example of a passage that tickled me:
Kelvin died in 1907. That year also saw the death of Dmitri Mendeleyev. Like Kelvin, his productive work was far behind him, but his declining years were notably less serene. As he aged Mendeleyev became increasingly eccentric - he refused to acknowledge the existence of radiation or the electron or anything else much that was new - and difficult. His final decades were spent mostly storming out of labs and lecture halls all across Europe. In 1955, element 101 was named mendelevium in his honour. "Appropriately," notes Paul Strathern, "it is an unstable element."
Announcing Lucy Simone Canter.
Sisters meet for first time.
Lucy is my fifth child. Kevin Werbach is enjoying his second (see below.) Thomas Madsen-Mygdal also just had (or is about to have) a child as well.
The joy of parenthood, v. 2.0. Ah yes, now I rember what sleep deprivation is like!
[Marc's Voice]
[Werblog]
Congratulations to Marc!
Radio hackers hurl drive by abuse at Burger King customers. 'No Whoppers for you, fatty' [The Register]
This Modern World. Reference sources of terror: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing! [Salon.com]
It's been a while since I've posted a This Modern World. This one tickled me.
<%softShadow( "http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2004/01/12/tomo/story.jpg", width:550, height:521 )%>
Reproduced with the kind permission of Tom Tomorrow.
The Best Open Source Lisp.Bill Clementson asks an interesting question: “What is the best open source lisp?” His answer: “PLT Scheme”.
In a way, this is in line with my opinion, which is that there is currently no open source lisp that is even “good”, in comparison to the commercial versions. There are a couple open source lisps that are making a lot of progress and seem to be strongly positioned for future greatness, but they're not there yet.
[lemonodor]
I was starting to get into Lisp last year but couldn't devote enough time to it. I was also a little put off by the cost of Lisp implementations. PLT Scheme and it's IDE DrScheme look useful.
Bush 'plotted Iraq war from start'. A top US official says President Bush was planning to oust Saddam Hussein within days of taking office. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]
As if that was ever in doubt!
I also found Mr. O'Neill's description of Bush's leadership style quite plausible:
Mr O'Neill gives an unflattering account of Mr Bush's leadership style, saying that at cabinet meetings the president was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people.
Is this the visionary leadership you want guiding America into the next decade?
HP declares war on sharing culture. CES The open everything is dead [The Register]
HP stands up for it's pals in the media industry and tells us we are all thieves who won't be trusted.
In a sense I almost look forward to the day when all digital content is locked up behind it's DRM firewalls and user-hostile operating systems. It might galvanise me to read more books, go to the theatre, and so on. I'll also have more cash because I won't be buying all this expensive content.
So, DRM could actually improve my life.
Today we've released a new feature for K-Collector which we think makes related topics more useful.
Now when browsing a topic the related topics are rendered as checkboxes. When the checkbox corresponding to a specific post is checked, the posts on the current page associated with that topic are highlighted. This makes it very easy to spot posts referencing a specific combination of topics.
For example: want to see what people have said about Howard Dean and Meetup? On the page for Howard Dean check the topic MeetUp and then quickly scroll down to find just those posts. It's a really quick way of finding something in the view.
All feedback welcome.
Ross Mayfield on Wikis [Weblogsky]
Ross's point:
By giving users the power to create, link and form groups it serves the domain of business practice, the unstructured collaboration that leverages informal networks.is well made.
750,000 mobiles dumped this Xmas. Oh, oh, oh [The Register]
This is ridiculous. It's also criminal that the mobile phone manufacturers don't get wise and print a label on every phone which gives details - even if just a phone number - about responsible disposal of handsets.
the season of giving. I've already plugged EFF as a worthy target of support. Here's another easy and very worthy group: the folks at Wikipedia. As you (should) know, Wikipedia has built an extraordinary free content encyclopedia. They're now in real financial need. Please help if you can. [Lessig Blog]Some good long term causes.
