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Saturday, 21 September 2002 |
RC Battleship Combat [Slashdot]
I first saw a video of these things about ten years ago. It's insanely fun to watch. Don't know if I could bear to see my hard work sunk to the bottom tho ...
6:47:55 PM 
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Kit. I recently discovered Kit. I haven't had a chance to try out all the features, just the aggregator enhancements. And I can say that if you're just using Radio's built-in news aggregator, you're missing out. [not quite random]
Must get around to trying kit.
11:55:15 AM
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IIRC there is a remedy available to people who have been hit with spurious threats of legal actions available under American Law. Snoop, it may just be worth your time going to see a cut price lawyer for fifteen minutes, because you may well have an open and shut case against Erin where he will wind up owing you money. Thought for what it is worth.
3:07:55 AM
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WebloggerSucks.com is available.... And so, by chance, is MiniWeblogger.com which I'm thinking about registering and putting up a website up where anyone who wants to can register for a MiniBlog account.
Erin, suck MY dick. Do your lawyers speak Spanish? You don't have a trademark, you don't have a copyright, and you don't have a business plan. Please go back into the hole you crawled out of.
-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]
ROFLMAO
2:35:36 AM
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Cisco sees Dell as a rival. The networking giant names Dell as a competitor for the first time in its annual report. Plus it certifies its financial results and details them as if it expensed stock options. [CNET News.com] [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]
I seriously think Cisco is missing the real compeditor in their midst. Cisco is a premium product seller, with a lot of gunk left over from a protracted M&A based growth tangent. They also have a large support requirement with their 24/7, follow the sun, always available TAC. Can cisco survive when networking becomes productized?
2:31:21 AM
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The overall question is: Who needs OR bridges, when you have kool stuff like Relational Databases and SQL? Is this nothing more then a dirty hack and does it put useless complexity to your projects? [Gerhard Froehlich]
O/R bridges and all the gunk has two costs. One, the learning time for you. Two, the increased restrictions on your coding style. But, in theory, the aforementioned investments should be payed back on large projects. I think Mike, with JIRA, would be well placed to answer the question on whether a persistence framework pays back on a largish project.
2:20:00 AM
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Normal(ish) looking. So, Mizzy and I being the broke ass bitches that we are, gave in and dyed our hair "normal" colors. She went a deep redbrown. I haven't seen it in the sunlight yet, but in normal incadesent light it looks...well, normal. but it was supposed to be a bit artificially red.
Me? I went black again. It came out pretty good.
The Loreal Preference line of hair color comes with this absolutely increeeedible conditioner that you can't buy anywhere... WHY CAN'T I BUY THIS?!?!
We did it because the job market is so damn tight and we need the money so badly and don't want to risk a potential job because of hair color. Mine was fire engine red (i loved that), well, until it faded to a bright orange, which I would die back whenever I actually had to look nice for something. [weblog.masukomi.org]
It is sad watching the colour and the freedom of the .boom die away.
2:17:02 AM
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Don't ask :-). Everything caused by ignorant, incompetent, money greedy, power greedy, closed-minded, dull, selfish, arrogant, intrigant, politcal people. [Gerhard Froehlich]
You just made my day Gerhard. :)
2:15:55 AM
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Logitech hot to jot with new digital pen:. "About the size of a standard ballpoint, the Io captures and stores a digital version of a person's handwritten notes. These can then be downloaded, still in handwritten form, to a computer." Interesting. Seems like an improvement on the CrossPad idea, an idea I always like, although I didn't like the actual product that well. [evhead]
I'd love this device just for the ability to easily enter diagrams in a quick way. No, Visio is not a quick way to do a diagram. It blows goats.
2:14:40 AM
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Separating Concerns with Knit. Aspect Weaving as Component Knitting: Separating Concerns with Knit.
Eric Eide, Alastair Reid, Matthew Flatt, and Jay Lepreau. Workshop on Advanced Separation of Concerns in Software Engineering at ICSE 2001, May 2001. Position paper.
Component composition with Knit thus acts like aspect weaving: component interfaces determine the “join points” for weaving, while components (some of which may be automatically generated) implement aspects. Knit is not limited to the construction of low-level software, and to the degree that a set of components exposes fine-grained relationships, Knit provides the benefits of aspect-oriented programming within its component model.
Among the recent discussions of AOP, this seems apporpriate.
The basic notion used in this paper is that of a unit. A unit is a component or model definition, defining imports, exports, and dependencies.
The main claim of the paper is that units are a proper foundation for developing the cross-cutting facets of a system in a modular fashion. The interfaces between between units are the AOP join points. [Lambda the Ultimate]
I can't get enough of AOP. I love playing with it, but I fear that the code I leave behind is going to be unintelligeble to another programmer. I feel that we are going to need some very powerful IDE's and visualizations to be able to allow people to understand other people's AOP code.
2:12:18 AM
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Roller vs. WebloggerZilla.
I do not need a registered trademark to sue you. Ask your attorney. I take it by your attitude here you are ready for a fight. You will hear from my attorney next. -Erin
That is the latest. What a sweet guy. [Blogging Roller]
Ok, seeing as though I am currently studying a bit of IP law (Admittedly Australian IP Law) for a subject at Uni what is said in the letter is interesting. The person sending you a letter is claiming that "weblogger" is copyrighted. Errr no. A copyright is a right over a work, eg a literary work granted to the author of the work. A single word does not make a literary work. Or an artistic work for that matter.
In Oz you get copyright over a literary work once you have put pen to paper and written it out. No on but the author then has the ability to copy said literary work without a transfer of ownership, or a license from the author. So copyright has nothing to do with this. In America you need to put that silly copyright mark and a date. But the effect is the same.
There is no such thing as a copyrighted term under Australian Law. The guy would lose his hat under Australian law, and my understanding is that a whole bunch of energy has been spent making sure the definitions of what "Copyright" is basically universal. So, I would be reasonably assured that there is no such thing as a "copyrighted term" in America either.
Now what I think they are trying to enforce is trademark. If they have registered "weblog" as a trade mark with the appropriate body, and if they have defended their trade mark, they would have a hope. But weblogger has been used in general publications (NYT amongst others) in relation to the act of running a weblog, thus I would argue that they have done a piss poor job of defending their trade mark. In the legal parlance I believe it is known as "dilution of trademark".
But, as the guy says, he doesn't have a trademark either. I think he is just sore that he is being commiditized by open source software.
1:49:12 AM
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IBM Hard Drive Failures. Stop buying IBM drives. [blog cognosco v 0.1]
So, after telling Terry not to buy IBM drives, he goes and asks if it is actually worth bothering to get warranty on these throw away items. I dunno. I must admit on the train home I was pondering the sanity of a 4x320gig server box running in RAID0+1 (stripe across mirrored drive pairs). But the scary thing is, how does one backup two thirds of a terrabyte? DVD-R aint even close. And tapes? I dont think so. Erk.
1:10:07 AM
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Offshore Usability.
What I don't understand is people who think it's OK to move the developers ten time zones away from their managers and expect good results. Those same people would scream bloody murder if you told them that you were going to send the whole management team to Bangalore or Beijing. [Joel on Software]
Interesting [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla]
My company is betting it's entire future on this working out. I'll be keeping my resume up to date. [Steve's Radio Weblog]
Best 'o' luck with the job hunting. :/
12:54:13 AM
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BCEL. A tool to build classes on the fly and output them as bytecode. Complex stuff. Luckily it comes with BCELifier. This tool can take an existing .class file and generate the BCEL java source code to build that class. Very cool.
What this means is that if (like me) you find BCEL itself a mite tricky, you can write your class in the normal way, compile it, BCELify it and end up with the source code you need to feed BCEL with to get the same result. Groovy. This reminds me of my dim past, recording VBA macros in Excel to find out how to do something, then hacking the generated code into what I wanted. [Pushing the envelope]
I'm really not sure how I feel about this. We are really re-treading the boards that lisp trod with it's macro system many moons ago. I suppose the complexity of our solutions is the result of refusing to swallow the lisp/scheme mantra of code and data being one.
12:39:58 AM
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Games or Movies?. More on the subject of whether some ideas would be more successful as games than as films. [itymbi ...]
Alex Moffat is thinking that people should consider funding a game development house instead of funding a movie. Well, I'd have to say that both investments face horendous risks due to the distribution of returns comparing the top ranking game/movie vs the also rans. The game market has a much higher concentration in the top games compared to movies however.
12:25:44 AM
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Learnin' on kuro5hin.
Introduction to Geometric Algebra (part two). This article continues to introduce the reader to the basics of geometric algebra. Some problems will be provided for the reader to work on their own in order to reinforce the lessons described here. While a few of the solutions to these problems will be provided, readers are encouraged to solve them all and post their answers as comments. [...] If the reader works to comprehend the content and also works the problems, they will come away with a basic understanding of what a geometric algebra is and how they work. Specific goals include the following. The reader will know how to perform basic operations like reflection, rotation, and reversion. The reader will begin to work with objects expressed in a representation-free manner. [kuro5hin.org]
Here's part one. Many readers are expressing intense interest in this material. They're interacting with one another. Can you believe it? they're spontaneously doing math, and liking it! [Seb's Open Research] [Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow]
Back when I was first watching kuro5hin grow, I never imagined I'd see active discusions on what amounts to pure mathematics. It really is stupifying to think that people are spending their time interacting, understanding, and bonding, over math. And there isn't a single add for coke to be seen. I think hollywood has a very real problem here...
12:21:51 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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