[Original Link] John Naughton’s article in the Times on Bill Gates’ knighthood.
Sir Bill
January 27th, 2004
Je blog, donc je suis
January 26th, 2004
C’est evident qu’il n’y a pas assez de blogs sur le web in Franglais. Recentement, c’est apparent que la phrase ‘Franglais’ est utilisé to refer to la variant de Francais spoken by certain des Quebequois. Mai pour beacoup de nous, c’est encapsulé primarily dans les livres humoureux de M. Miles Kington.
Maintenant, je croix, le jour est venu pour Franglais to make son vrai impact felt sur le multi-national medium de le web! Ecrivez votre blog en Franglais et reach encore de les gens online!
Les grands tenets of le online community doit etre translated au Franglais:
- “Sur le internet, personne connait que vous etes un chien!”
- “Libre software: ‘libre’ comme en ‘speech’, pas comme en ‘biere’!”
et il y a des autres sayings qui doit etre updated pour le nouveau monde de eFranglais:
- Plus ca change, plus c’est reflected in the RSS feed
- Voulez-vous Googler avec moi ce soir?
Looking back on the Mac
January 26th, 2004
[Original Link] Richard Dawkins on his first experience of the Apple Macintosh.
Downloading isn’t stealing
January 26th, 2004
[Original Link] From John Naughton’s weblog:
The NYT asked Aaron Schwartz to contribute a piece defending downloading. He wrote the piece, but apparently the Times chopped it (presumably the notion of someone arguing that downloading music was not unethical was a bit strong for that venerable organ). Anyway, Aaron’s unexpurgated piece is interesting. And it has some useful stats and references.
Scot Free
January 26th, 2004
Ever wonder where the phrase ‘getting off scot-free’ originated? What about ‘spick and span’?
These, and lots of other interesting linguistic origins can be found on Michael Quinion’s site.
Best of all, it has RSS feeds available…
LDAP
January 21st, 2004
One of the great tragedies of recent computing is that, in the midst of useful emerging standards for sharing information – vCalendar, RSS, WebDAV, IMAP etc, – we’ve ended up with LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) as the standard way to access shared address books.
Don’t get me wrong, LDAP is powerful and is a great deal better than the X.500 standard from which it’s derived, but it’s just too hard to set up and administer for any organisation that isn’t a large corporation. And while most email programs and address books can query an LDAP server, almost none of them provide any way to update it. That’s assumed to be a job for the system administrator.
We need a much simpler, ideally XML-based, standard for publishing and subscribing to address books within small organisations or distributed groups. It wouldn’t be difficult to do – in the simplest model, your address book program would just read a vCard file on a web server every so often, cache a local copy, and allow you to search the contents. It would also allow you to publish all or part of your contacts to the site. People are sensitive about contact info, so some security would be needed – standard HTTP options should be fine.
In the meantime, if you do manage to get an LDAP server set up, the best thing I’ve come across for updating it is phpLDAPadmin.
Leaving Las Vegas
January 14th, 2004
If there’s one word I would use to describe Las Vegas after my first visit, it’s ‘fake’. From the Venetian bridges to the voluptuous breasts, this is a town built primarily to pretend to be something it isn’t. That’s not to say that some of the fakes aren’t very well done – the half-size Eiffel tower at the Paris, the small section of the Grand Canal on the second floor of the Venetian, and, indeed, many of the breasts. (These, in contrast, tend to be larger than the real thing).
The hotels are vast, and include sufficient restaurants, shops, streets that you hardly need to leave them at all, which is, no doubt, the idea. Some of them, such as the Bellagio, would be quite superb if they weren’t spoiled by acres of garish and sometimes noisy slot machines, which deprive them of all dignity. Interestingly, most of these seemed not to be much used, which may mean they’ve gone out of fashion, but is probably an indication that during the week of the Consumer Electronics Show, most people aren’t primarily there to gamble. Or that the ridiculously high prices of hotel rooms that week are not appealing to those who only gamble at the slot-machine level.
Las Vegas is a place that everyone should visit once, if only to see how low we can fall, but that nobody should be made to visit twice. The thing that keeps the whole thing in proportion is the fact that from the main ‘strip’ you can sometimes get glimpses of the spectacular mountains in the distance, the beginning of some of the most dramatic and beautiful scenery on earth, which reminded me that in the overall scale of things, the city is a comparatively small blot on the landscape.
Zion National park, a few hours’ drive from Vegas
Convergence
January 5th, 2004
This comes to you via a wi-fi connection in Detroit airport, where I’m sitting in a lounge waiting for a flight to the CES show in Las Vegas. I’ve just had a long chat with a friend, but it wasn’t in person or on the phone. It was using the audio chat facilities in iChat – we were chatting by instant message and I suddenly thought, “This is ridiculous – why am I typing?” I’ve always been impressed with the sound quality of the built-in microphone on my elderly Powerbook – the only problem is that it’s close to one of the speakers so there tends to be an echo on the line back to the other end. But since I never travel without my iPod, I had some headphones with me, which I plugged in and everything was splendid. If anyone else in the lounge thought that the fellow in the armchair was having a strange conversation with his laptop, they didn’t show it….
Sir Tim
January 1st, 2004
[Original Link] Tim Berners-Lee is apparently to get a well-deserved knighthood.
How to spot Arial
December 25th, 2003
[Original Link] If you have some spare time over Christmas, you can impress your friends by learning how to distinguish that young upstart Arial from good-ol’ Helvetica.
How to win friends and influence people
December 13th, 2003
Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO, recently managed to turn his company into one of the most disliked in the high-tech world by saying to Linux users, in essence,
“You’ve infringed our copyright. We’re not going to show you how, but you have to pay us anyway”.
This would be completely idiotic if it weren’t the last struggles of a dying company sufficiently desperate to try anything. And the really tragic thing is what has happened to the SCO share price as a result of this tactic:
Perhaps realising that public relations disasters can still be be profitable, and that corporate image and customer satisfaction are much harder work than having a dodgy patent infringement claim, he has gone on in this open letter to spread evil rumours about how free software is anti-American:
“The 1976 Act grew out of Congressional recognition that the United States was rapidly lagging behind Japan and other countries in technology innovation….
Congress adopted the DMCA in recognition of the risk to the American economy that digital technology could easily be pirated and that without protection, American companies would unfairly lose technology advantages to companies in other countries through piracy, as had happened in the 1970’s…
However, there are a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress. In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the open source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents….
…do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support “free” … intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others? There really is no middle ground. It is no understatement to say that the future of the global economy is in the balance.
Well, Mr McBride – there is a middle ground. We’re not going to show you how, but you’ll have to believe it anyway.
Update: Larry Lessig responds
Quote of the day
December 9th, 2003
Very nice quote seen on somebody’s email signature:
“Never ask a man what computer he uses. If it’s a Mac, he’ll tell you.
If it’s not, why embarrass him?” – Tom Clancy
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