Wed, 26 Sep 2007
Python police
Are the Python police going to come and arrest me? Have I committed the terrible crime of being unPythonic? (Or should that be un_pythonic?)
[/scribble/code] permanent link and comments
Tue, 25 Sep 2007
Steve Jobs is still a jerk
Q: What do you do when people pay you full retail price and make the products they've bought more useful for themselves?
A: Break your customers' property.
[/note/steve jobs] permanent link and comments
OSI vs. FSF summary
There is a prior post with a big long table. Here are some basic statistics from that table (as of Tuesday, September 25, 2007):
Summary: There are more "Free Software" licenses than "Open Source" licenses.
- Licenses approved by FSF alone: 51
- Licenses approved by OSI alone: 43
- Licenses approved by both: 16
Also, note that the program I whipped up for this is pretty terrible. Consider it the kind of software that academics would use but never publish for fear of embarrassment.
[/note/software] permanent link and comments
OSI vs. FSF
The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation are two organizations that have put their mark of approval on Free/Libre Open Source Software licenses. For those just joining us, those licenses are the permissions documents that make collaboration on software legal. The GNU General Public License and the "BSD License" (as if there's only one) are the two most famous ones.
I keep hearing about "the proliferation of Open Source licenses", and I also hear people claim their software is Open Source when there's no indication they're using a license that guarantees important freedoms to the software's users. I don't think I ever hear people claim their software is Free Software when it's not - at least, not when they use capital letters.
I also hear from people that Open Source software and Free Software are different things. My feelings on this are that people using the different terms are doing the same things, they just may be thinking different things when doing it. Both groups have an interest in continuing to do what they're doing, even if they think of it differently.
(If you can find me an easy-ish to parse page listing the feelings of other organizations on the topic, like Debian, then I'll try to add them to this next time 'round.)
I wrote a program (source) that scrapes the Open Source Initiative's list of licenses and the Free Software Foundation's list of licenses and comments about them and generate a table showing you which licenses have been approved by which one. I began coding in earnest on Software Freedom Day, and I'm publishing it and its results in belated celebration of that day. So here you all go:
[/note/software] permanent link and comments
Mon, 24 Sep 2007
Fast seek slash
My laptop feels slow. Having run no metrics, I'm going to guess a lot of the reason that apt-get takes more than a second or two to load its database is the seek time of the hard drive. It's some boring 5400 RPM sucker, and it has moving parts which have to move. Totally lame.
So I'll replace it with flash of some kind. Flash is expensive for lots of space, so it's probably wasteful of dollars to make it my /home partition. But if / were fast, then at least apt and application launching would be faster. And swap would be faster in a world where seeks are almost free, too.
Solid State Disk, or CF card
Here are the contenders in pre-packaged solid state land:
- Transcend's solid-state hard drives. Unfortunately no one on products.google.com seems to have these in stock.
- SanDisk SSD (formerly FFD) UATA 2.5”. Apparently these are an OEM-only part.
So it's off to CompactFlash cards then. Cards compatible with the CompactFlash 4.0 spec can do Ultra DMA mode 4, which I don't even remember how many megabytes a second but it should be fast. The cards themselves should be fast, too; no point putting a slow card on a fast bus. It looks like Transcend's 8GB TS8GCF266 is the best in price-performance, around $140.
What about the flash media dying tragically and abruptly?
It's true, flash media have a maximum number of writes they can take before tragedy. Hopefully things will be fine; Transcend's specifications seem to say has "1 000 000 times" endurance, which presumably means writes. And consumer-grade Flash cards do wear leveling, from what I hear.
If I plan to keep the 2.5" hard drive in this wonderful T43's hard drive bay, I can get the UltraBay Slim HDD adapater (Lenovo, IBM PN 62P4554) for around $50.
I'll try this, I think.
Won't you miss your CD-RW/DVD drive?
[/note/laptop] permanent link and comments
Sat, 22 Sep 2007
Circuit art
"She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."
Or, she's lucky that she made cool puns for Career Day.
[/note] permanent link and comments
Fri, 21 Sep 2007
Fascism 2007
Some notes on American Fascism:
- People say this: "This kid got to say his piece, and then started ranting, the police TRIED (leila take note here) to escort him out calmly but he resisted and continued ranting. This is the sort of behavior that can incite a riot" when a kid is being tasered for asking a question and being a brat.
- But what are we to do when mainstream pre-Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani is on the record as being a fascist?
- And what are we to do when mainstream political pundit Thomas Friedman is for meaningless wars based on lies?
Presumably, we should taser more people who are asking why they're being arrested (vid1, vid2) while a former presidential candidate just keeps talking as if nothing's wrong, and lock up more innocent people in jails where they can't ask why. It's the mainstream.
[/note/politics] permanent link and comments
Wed, 19 Sep 2007
On tacos
Employ whatever ruses you need to get some. The ends justify the means.
[/scribble] permanent link and comments
"It's our job"
Steve jobs thinks it's his job to make sure end-users don't make the iPhone more useful:
"People will try to break in [to hardware they own], and it's our job to stop them breaking in."
What a jerk. This from the man who tried to make his iPods not run with non-Apple software a few weeks ago. Why do my friends give him money?
[/note/steve jobs] permanent link and comments
Tue, 18 Sep 2007
QTopia first glance
I am making calls from and receiving calls to my Neo 1973. This is wonderful. I can do it thanks to the porting of QTopia to the FIC Neo 1973 platform! There was this press release as well as live, nude downloadable source and binaries as described in this mailing list thread.
Seth David Schoen brought up a good point: the press release mentions that they're Freeing their DRM implementation, too. That silenced my excitement until I could learn more.
Here's a meaningless (in a formal sense) personal testimonial from the developer who says he did most of the porting of QTopia to the Neo:
<paulproteus> ljp, I saw that the announcement said you guys were GPLing your DRM implementation. <paulproteus> Does the binary you gave out include that DRM software? <ljp> not DRM, but SXE <ljp> and the neo does not configured with SXE
SXE is an on-phone sandboxing system for untrusted software, and the Neo doesn't use it anyway. I feel safe enough that I can go to sleep, at least.
[/note/openmoko] permanent link and comments
Mon, 17 Sep 2007
after 5 / weekends
Tracy is busy so you will want to schedule 2-3 weeks in advance if you want a good time with her
[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Retort
You’ll find the “y” and “o” keys on your keyboard, not too far from the “u” key. It seems that sometimes you forget this. Please use them every time if you want people to take you seriously.
[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Fri, 14 Sep 2007
html2dom
xhtml2dom[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Eh bien?
"NOTE! I AM NOT REALLY A CRACKHEAD, THAT WAS JUST AN EXAMPLE."[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Thu, 13 Sep 2007
Red Hat 5
From the alpine-alpha list:
alpine 0.9999 on a Red Hat 5 clone hung completely today
I guess some people don't remember the real "Red Hat 5" but only know "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5". But I'm not old....
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Enlightened but confused
"Just went to hear RMS and came away enlightened but confused."[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Wed, 12 Sep 2007
Hey, we're clay!
Frosted Cheerios (via Gaurav)[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Tue, 11 Sep 2007
GNU Radio GSM immplementation
You need to find your local GSM tower by hand. Once you've found it, you need to edit the python script and enter the information by hand. It would be very nice if this information were automatically generated.
[Discuss-gnuradio] software implementation of GSM
[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Sun, 09 Sep 2007
GNU Free Documentation License comments
I once asked some questions.[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Cats and war
Two points:
- The grim future of Hello Kitty (via beloved Everything2)
- The grim present
[/scribble] permanent link and comments
Do something great for your country
Is the above about Canada, or Lonely Planet?
If it is about Lonely Planet, is it telling you to serve the United States by getting off This Island Earth?
