I am … unhindered by talent

You might have noticed that for a while there I had my new del.icio.us links automagically appearing here every day as posts (at least on days where I created new links). This makes use of a spiffy tool that del.icio.us now provides to automagically generate posts from your recent links.

I really liked the idea of it, but the reality wasn’t quite as hot. The posts just didn’t fit with the “look and feel” of the rest of the blog, and because there were so many of them they ended up dominating both this and our family news page (http://ThomasMcPhee.com/), which is now a WordPress install that aggregates the posts from our three individual blogs using the FeedWordPress plugin.

Even more importantly, WeatherGirl didn’t like ‘em.

So they’re gone. I still really like del.icio.us, though. I’ve dropped 477 bookmarks there since I started using it last May, and have found it incredibly useful for saving and (more importantly) finding stuff on that crazy thing call the World Wide Web. I’ll try to put back the little thing in the side-bar that lists recent links and we’ll call it good.

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A few interesting bits on the intersection of tech and intellectual property have popped up on my radar in the last day or two:

• Courtesy of Alex Jarvis, this article on the MPAA being caught pirating a DVD. Their defense is apparently because it was important for their employees to be aware of the contents of the film in question. Somehow it doubt that would cut much ice in court if I argued that it was “important for my students” to have illegal copies of a book, CD, or DVD. Hmmmm…
• Courtesy of Pharyngula, Cory Doctorow visited the Nature offices to talk about the lots of stuff, with a focus on the use of the web in writing and promoting his books.
• The Doctorow piece has a pointer to an interesting Tim O’Reilly article entitled “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution” which, among other things, has the great line “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”. Not quite the same tune that the MPAA and RIAA typically sing.

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Arne Kildegaard and I are using Lawrence Lessig’s Free culture as one of the texts in our Open Source/Network Economics course this semester. Last time (two years ago), we used his Future of ideas, which worked out quite nicely, so I’m optimistic about Free culture. (It’s also cool because it’s freely available on-line under a Creative Commons license.)

In Free culture’s preface, Lessig quotes William Safire writing about his experience protesting in 2003 against proposed FCC changes to relax limits on media concentration:

Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power — political, corporate, media, cultural — should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy.

Whoo, yah! I don’t often feel like quoting Safire with enthusiasm, but I’m all with him this time.

So where the hell are the conservatives who ought to enthusiastically object to the many types of power concentration currently being supported with all too much enthusiasm in Washington? They only have themselves to blame if they fail to oppose this wretched hijacking of the Grand Old Party by fundamentalistic religious zealots who are all about concentration of power as long as it’s the “right” kind of power (i.e., concentration to them). This is at its core an undemocratic trend and should be vigorously opposed all across the political spectrum.

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• JUnit-addons
  A cool set of JUnit extensions with a nice set of utility methods and classes to check for correct implementation of methods such as equals and compareTo.
  (tags: java programming tdd test testing tools unittest junit)
• Scout: Find your photographs in Flickr’s Explore
  A cool tool that searches through the Flickr DBs and finds pictures by you (or any other user) that were in the top 500 interestingness on any given day. Two of mine have “hit the big time” so far.
  (tags: photo photography photos search tool web tools Flickr)

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• NeoOffice Home
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  (tags: apple editor java mac OSS osx presentation software office openSource openoffice UMM:IS3221)
• Writing Strategies
  An interesting study of different academic writing strategies. I definitely lean towards the oil painting strategy myself.
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• JPackage Project
  What looks like a very nice collection of Java tools packaged up for use with yum/rpm for RedHat systems.
  (tags: java linux rpm software opensource programming code development download fedora libraries OSS packages sysadmin tools yum)

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• A Glass Box [Ryan Scadlock's web site]
  Ryan’s got his philosophy senior defense paper here, and I need to read that before his defense, 26 Jan 2006.
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For various and strange reasons I had to go poking around in the e-mail filter settings for my U of M e-mail account. In the process I discovered that 1,500 (!) messages have been blocked in the last two weeks alone. Add to that the 53 that Thunderbird decided were spam and autofiltered, the 155 that I threw away either because I wasn’t interested or I’d dealt with them, and the 250 still in my inbox (over half still unread), not to mention the probably several dozen I filed off to other mailboxes, and that’s a lot of e-mail headed my way in a 14 day period. (scribble, scribble, scribble,…carry the 1…scribble, scribble, scribble…) Yeah, that’s pushing 500 e-mails in two weeks (not counting the 1,500 I never saw because the U’s filters kindly kept them out of my life), or about 36 a day. And that’s over a very quiet period because we weren’t in classes and many people were away from their computers. It’s probably quite a bit closer to 100 a day during the semester with (sadly) a correspondingly higher rate of unprocessed mail.

Ugh. And the semester starts up again tomorrow.

Don’t get me wrong - I love teaching, but this e-mail thing is really a downer, both for all the time it takes and for the psychic energy it sucks up in the form of guilt over mail unprocessed.

Ugh.

Shame I can’t instead be like John Peel and have a shed full of CDs and tapes and random demos that I haven’t had a chance to listen to!

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Since I shared some recent shots from Flickr by others that I was particularly fond of, I thought I’d also share some of my own work that people on Flickr liked in 2005. The mosaic above is 20 of my most favorited (on Flickr) images that were taken in 2005. I have a ton with only one favorite leading to a tie for the last five slots, so I got to choose. It was painful, but I coped :-).

Several of these were from our trip to the UK last summer, while almost all the rest were taken at or within a few miles of our house.

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• Why collaborate with Open Source tools. Get Real: Stowe Boyd’s Soapbox
  An interesting article based on the chief WordPress developer.
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• Once More unto the Breach: Irony, OpenOffice, Open Source, Shared Source, and Microsoft Office (and Standards!)
  A very interesting piece on open source and open standards.
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• adaptive path » making a better cms
  A nice article on the failings of a certain type of open source project, but many of his ideas generalize more than I’d like.
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• OpenSourceCMS - Home
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I’m up to my ears in a conference submission deadline that’s bearing down upon us and the fact that classes resume on Tuesday and some pressing committee work, so posting ought to be thin for a bit. In the meantime you may amuse yourself with collection of the last 36 images (by other people) that I’ve “faved” over on Flickr. (Just to be clear, none of this is my work. It’s just stuff I like.)

I’ve never done this before, but I happened to look at my favorites page and was particularly happy with the mixture of colors and textures in this group and just felt the urge. This is an excellent example of why I love Flickr (even when I really should be doing other things :->).

The top right image doesn’t thumbnail well because it’s a really wide panorama, but is still a very cool shot. There are several others that suffer in the “squaring” for the mosaic, but such is life. Below are links to the individual images; I’d definitely encourage you to check at least a few of them out in their larger glory.

1. Till Summer, 2. P1010003, 3. gimme shelter, 4. mistake, 5. oxidized…, 6. Climbing a hill 6, 7. SUNSET SUPPER, 8. heavy cloud, but no rain, 9. ¿Volverá?, 10. Untitled, 11. Untitled, 12. Night Watch, 13. Geese in mist, 14. I’m shocked, Dad…., 15. Bridge (redone), 16. Boston Fogged Out, 17. BETWEEN THE RAILINGS, 18. thanks, pete., 19. VILLAGE FABRICS, 20. spinal tap II, 21. stainless II, 22. WARM WINTER DAY, 23. green doors., 24. Heróis do fogo / Fire heroes, 25. Happy New Year Flickees, 26. WINTER FOG ON THE CHARLES, 27. The Family, 28. Personality, 29. Over Africa, 30. Stigma*, 31. Surprise*, 32. Aesthetical*, 33. Onset of a Sunset, 34. As the storm drifts away…., 35. lithography, 36. sun moon lake II

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