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Sat, 31 Jan 2009

Hope Watch begins

I attended Obama's inauguration ceremony in DC a bit over a week ago. It was inspirational and rendered me to tears.

I'm awestuck in the same way to read (a few days late) from Larry Lessig that "Rick Boucher is taking over the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (renamed Telecommunications Subcommittee)".

In 1998, Congress passsed a bill that made circumventing any copy protection scheme illegal; since then, even if you just want to play a DVD on a system where an officially-sanctioned DVD decoder has not been written, you are breaking the law. Rick Boucher introduced a bill to the House named the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) that reverses the most egregious of the pains that anti-circumvention law brought. He introduced it first in 2003 and again in 2005. I read these actions as, "I'm going to introduce this bill that is overwhelmingly reasonable. You all can watch as this corrupt institution drops it on the floor."

I know that Rick Boucher being the chair of this committee does not mean that a re-introduced DMCRA will immediately become law. But I believe in gestures, and this one feels like a personal message from this new Democratic Party under President Obama to me that the issues I believe are important have a chance of being addressed.

So here we start Hope Watch. Somehow, here in reality, actions by Congress touch me with hope that we might make this country and world a dramatically better place. If something else touches me, I'll try to make a note.

What an overwhelming feeling that is.

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Fri, 30 Jan 2009

Sense of humor

Even if you don’t appreciate my vaguely demented sense of humor (yes, yes, I’m only kidding about auctioning off Obama’s email), protecting your--our-- First Amendment rights is no joke.

-- California First Amendment Coalition, Jan 30 2009.

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Common sense

"I've always been a big proponent of using common sense, but it seems like this no longer applies."

-- Chad on Foundation-l.

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Tue, 27 Jan 2009

Wikipedia on one page

"I am working on a project to host wiktionary on one web page and wikipedia on another."

-- Stephen Dunn.


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Nineteenth Century Smileys

Rebekah sent me a link to a New York Times blog post investigating a possible smiley from 1862.

The evidence that it is a smiley rests primarily on the fact that every single typesetted character, including the ";)" about which one wonders, had to be typset by hand. Would someone really make a mistake like this?


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Mon, 12 Jan 2009

Baypiggies, January 8: Scrape the web

I gave a presentation at the Thursday, January 8, Baypiggies meeting that was something of a preview of my scraping Tutorial that's coming up at PyCon 2009. (Baypiggies is the Bay Area Python Interest Group.)

If you want to take a look at what I presented, here is what I have. Note that you can grab all of these in bulk by doing: 

$ svn checkout http://svn.asheesh.org/svn/public/20082009/scraping-preso/

The presentation itself:

The curry examples:

The actually-working example, Cepstral's weather reading-aloud tool:

Code snippets that might be useful:

Patches welcome! These were quickly half-baked on a truck ride provided by Jim Stockford. (-: I'll be revisiting them later as I prepare more for my PyCon talk.

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Thu, 08 Jan 2009

"How to have a great time," by Kat Walsh

A sweet girl named Kat Walsh wrote me an email after I wrote about Debconf. Perhaps unbeknowst to her, she sent it on my birthday. Only a week before she emailed me, I had seen Kat at the Free Culture conference in Berkeley. That, too, was a great time; I helped organize it a little, but the bulk of the work was done by others. (My contribution was some tech and a lot of housing arrangements.)

Anyway, here is what she wrote. It happens that while she wrote it about herself, I find it completely applies to me. What a nice birthday present!

I liked seeing your debconf post. I've been trying to figure out where that joyous feeling comes from, how to get it, because I'm afraid of not knowing where to find it. So here's what I think is in common with thetimes where I've had a great time:

1. Feeling welcome/valued.

I've been to conferences where it felt like people were sticking to their cliques and I was an outsider and I didn't enjoy them at all. I've also been to conferences where I didn't know anyone when I got there and I left with new friends.

(And I should be better about my responsibility to bring others in this way when I do know people! But I see why people stick to cliques: it's both hard to venture outside the circle you're comfortable and hard to risk not spending time with the people you know you like to potentially have a bad time with someone new. Maybe that's only me.)

2. Feeling like I've accomplished something -- either alone or part of a group.

Giving a talk will usually do it. Being part of a project. Getting a suggestion and acting on it. Solving a problem. Even something as simple as introducing two people who need to know each other. But if something like this doesn't happen it feels like a bit of a fun waste of time.

3. Being around people who are better than me and full of joy themselves.

It's easier to be what I most want myself to be when I am around people who are already closer to it! People who are kinder, smarter, more productive, more inspired, more generous, more driven make me rise closer to that, like myself better, and have a better time.

4. Continuous activity

Every moment being filled well -- either the gathering itself or outside activities. Or a needed rest! But no long stretches of time where I'm wishing I were doing something better or thinking I could have better spent the time at home.

Kat is the kind of person who still, after decades of being around other human beings, still takes thoughts like this seriously:

it's both hard to venture outside the circle you're comfortable and hard to risk not spending time with the people you know you like to potentially have a bad time with someone new. Maybe that's only me.

No, Kat, it's all of us!

Anyway, conference organizers can succeed overwhemlingly when they provide for "4. Continuous activity" well. I think the rest has to be up to the participants.

A serious analysis of these criteria would reveal that they're pretty much true of all of life.


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Trisk

I now know why Albert Lee uses the nickname Trisk. I have learned his secret identity.

Steve Jobs died in a car wreck in 1988. The current "Steve Jobs" is San Jose session musician, Roland Trisk. Trisk, who often doubled for Steve Jobs before his death in sales meetings and conferences, had plastic surgery in order closely resemble Jobs. There are hints everywhere-in the enclosure of the Mac LCII, the first NeXT CUBE, even Pixar's first full-length film, Toy Story. Wake up people! The truth is out there!

Thank you, Gizzmonic on Slashdot.

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