Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Syntax does/doesn’t matter

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

Syntax doesn't matter: any good programmer works with multiple languages over their lifetime, most of these languages expressing basically the same ideas in mostly arbitrarily different ways; any serious student of programming will come to the same conclusion once they learn their third or fourth language. I've seen this in another ...

Panopticon

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

I have a big idea, and rather than present it with argument--a complicated task, given the myriad angles of potential attack--I'll simply present it as future-fiction. In the year 2007... "The Panopticon" (casually called just "Panopticon") is a website run by a non-profit organization, much in the spirit of Creative Commons, archive.org, ...

Frustration

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

My provider, SiteGround, seems to have had a bit of a catastrophe over the weekend. My databases stayed in tact just fine, but it seems my account directory got scrapped. It seems they restored from a quite old backup because the wiki remained in tact except for some modifications I ...

Is Google Reader the best syndication aggregator?

Monday, October 30th, 2006

I've come very late to using webfeeds, having only started a few months ago, but I've bought in to syndication to the point of removing all the sites I syndicate from my bookmarks. No more aimlessly wandering through my bookmarks to see if my regular blogs have updates. My first foray ...

Screencasting with Google video and Youtube

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

With the H.264 codec, you get fantastic video compression for screen capture because it's smart enough to recongnize an essentially unchanging screen. The image quality is near perfect with an under 1k bit rate for an umoving image. So it's quite annoying that both Google Video and Youtube (and in fact ...

Net neutrality: the electricity analogy

Saturday, October 21st, 2006

The oblique threats to violate network neutrality coming from the telecom industry essentially come down to one thing: no one wants to be a commodity provider because there's never an opportunity for turning a commodity into a golden goose. With a commodity, the seller pretty much gets back just what ...

New header image

Saturday, October 21st, 2006

Too much?

RMS is not a linguist

Friday, October 20th, 2006

Tomorrow I'll post an argument about whether or not the claims RMS (Richard "Not Milhous" Stallman) makes regarding freedom have justification, but today I want to talk about some things on which RMS is clearly wrong, and they all relate to terminology: "open source" is a perfectly good term for ethical ...