Terminally Incoherent

Holy poopsicle! This class will be allot of work. I just scanned over this weeks homework, and its slightly on a nutty side. And this is day one. The syllabus said she will require ~6 hours of out of class work. When am I going to write thesis? Crap! I officially don’t have any life from now on

Note to everyone who is taking this class with me. Do yourself a favor, and learn vi. Pico is halfway retarded on a good day. I also suggest compiling vim on freddie. It has few nice advantages, such as better incremental search (with highlighting), auto completion and etc. If you are a total newb, this is what you do:

1. First grab the source code from vim.org. Best way to do this is by using wget:

wget ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/vim-6.4.tar.bz2

2. This is a bz2 package so you will need to do this in two steps. The tar on freddie is archaic so it does not handle gz or bz2 files at all

bunzip2 -d vim-6.4.tar.bz2
tar -xf vim-6.4.tar

3. Now, remember that you do not have root privs on freddie, so you need to install the app locally. To do that specify the prefix attribute when running the configure file.

./configure --prefiz=/home/students/username/
make
make install

Note that username here is your pegasus username. That’s it. Just make sure that you add ~/bin/ to your path and you should be able to use vim normally. It worked for me

Another note - if you are using linux, gnu has a fortran compiler you can use. On debian based systems just do:

apt-get install gfortran-4.0

This should be sufficient to do assignment 1 without ever logging into freddie

Some links for the homework assignment:

• Dijkstras “Goto Statement Considered Harmfull” article from ACM vol. 11 num 3.
• Abstract of the Nassi-Shneiderman diagram paper. Some more info here.
• Wikipedia info on Fifth Generation Project. Is it the right project?

Sigh… I’m seriously thinking about designating Sunday as my official Thesis day and hide from everyone to actually get some work done. I kinda want to walk in May so I can’t afford to procrastinate anymore.

Ever wondered how would world be like if RIAA and MPAA had their way? Tarmle has posted a scary dystopian vision of the future, in which the world is controlled by the big content providers.

Since the ISPs were made responsible for the content they deliver their filtering has become neurotic. Anti-terror, piracy, plagiarism and libel filters search every request and response for signs of illegal activity, always erring on the side of caution. Wikipedia’s index has been decimated. Popular blogs like Boing Boing now have more lawyers involved than contributors (the one’s that have survived that is). Even if you managed to get something illegal through the filters your operating system’s regularly updated self-check mechanisms would eventually root it out, or report you to the authorities, usually both.

Next time some jackass wants to legislate the internet think about this little paragraph. The day when ISP’s become responsible for the content they host, is the last day freedom of speech exists online.

And let’s not forget the looming shadow of tcpa, palladium, trusted computing or whatever they want to call it this week. And the analog hole bill… And plethora of other things I don’t even want to mention here.

I’m seriously thinking about showing this text to my 109 class. Someone has to tell these poor souls abut this stuff. This seems like a great way to start the discussion of DRM, copyright issues.

Ed Felten has posted a great entry on the proposed analog hole legislation at Freedom to Tinker. Apparently the specs for the VEIL technology that is to be used for watermarking content is doubleplus super trade secret:

[T]he company helpfully explained that I could get the spec, if I first signed their license agreement. The agreement requires me (a) to pay them $10,000, and (b) to promise not to talk to anybody about what is in the spec. In other words, I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it.

Amazing, isn’t it? VEIL is on the fast track to become a national standard and yet private citizens are not allowed to know anything about it’s inner workings. I don’t know about you, but if something is to be legally mandated and enforced by the state, I want to know all about it.

VEIL might need to be implemented in every single electronic device on the market - thus in one way or another it will affect the day to day life of every single American. If we can’t have an open public debate on the inner workings of VEIL then it should not be legally enforced.

It is more than likely that VEIL is a piece of garbage which will only inconvenience the honest, law abiding consumer, and it has zero chances of stopping any kind of large scale sharing or exchange of content. Perhaps any kind of expert analysis of the spec would reveal gaping holes. Koplar Interactive Systems International can expect to make insane amounts of money on VEIL licensing if the analog hole bill passes. This it is in their best interest to keep low a profile.

So the good news is that the analog hole provisions may turn out to be trivial to break and circumvent. So illegal file sharing and bootlegging will go on as usual. The sad part is that the bill will screw electronics companies, increase hardware prices, and impede innovation.

The biggest winner will be KISI. The second biggest winner will be MPAA and RIAA - they will finally put a tap on that pesky Fair. Who is going to lose the most here? You and me - the consumers. Once again, the average Joe gets fucked while the rich assholes are getting richer

If you publish an online comic, please for the love of God use RSS. Please note that some of your readers do not have time to visit your site every day waiting for updates. Most of your readers probably don’t even remember when you usually update your site. RSS is the perfect medium for publishing your artwork because it allows your fans to read your work at their leisure.

Let me paint you a picture here. I currently read the following comics on a regular basis: user friendly, vg cats, phd, mac hall, dillbert, penny arcade, pvp, extra life and dork tower. I also like to get my news from digg, boinboing, slashdot, arstechnica and reddit. I also read dozen of blogs belonging to some of my friends, or people that write interesting stuff. If I would go to each of these sites every morning, I would never get any work done.

I use RSS aggregators to slurp the content for me while I’m busy doing other stuff, and when I have some free time I check up on my feeds. I instantly know which sites have updated, who has a new comic out, and who has been blogging like a madman. If my agreagator can’t catch you I usually don’t bother reading you. Sure, every once in a while when I’m bored I might pop over and check your work out but I will not be a regular. I just don’t have time for this.

If you live off your site and you think that RSS will rob you of precious “clicks” - be my guest and put ads in your feed. I don’t mind. Hell, just put links to the comic in the feed - so that I still need to visit your site to view them. Just please - publish the feed so that I know when you update.

No, I really don’t want to receive your bullshit newsletter, or email notification. My email is barraged by spam already and I do not need another thing wasting my bandwidth and storage. Do it the way nature intended it and publish the freakin RSS. I can guarantee you that you will see a spike in daily hits when you do this.

I’m planning to write a small screen scraper in perl that will generate RSS feeds for some of the comics that I like but which do not use feeds. I will probably release the code here. I’ll don’t think I will publish the links to the custom feeds because of bandwidth issues - unless I can host them somewhere that will not get me in trouble.

This is a drastic measure but hey - if you don’t want me to do that, just publish the damn feed!

This is priceless! My reaction to this cartoon was: ROFLCOPTER!

Shamelessly stolen from the good folks at User Friendly.