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What do the Gun Owners of America and Moveon.org have in common? The same thing that unites Craigslist founder Craig Newmark with Google exec Vint Cerf. They’re all coming out in favor of Network Neutrality.
I’m all for competitive market solutions when they’re appropriate. Sometimes we all benefit more from some cooperation however, and the Internet is one example of these. The Internet thrives on having content be as universally accessible as possible. Private contractors build our highways, but allowing contractors to monetize or restrict the traffic flow simply because they built the roads would give them almost complete control over commerce and travel.
I hope you see the analogy that I just drew with a bold literary sharpie (trust me, you can’t miss it.) Inform yourself about Network Neutrality and why getting rid of it could be bad for business.
It’s official: Dapper Drake will be a supported Ubuntu distro for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.
For those addicted to 6 month release cycles, they will still be there, but Ubuntu has put together such a solid product with Dapper (officially known as Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) that they’re going to leave it in place longer than normal. Therefore, if you’re in need of a stable unchanging system for the life of your machine, Dapper looks like that kind of animal. Debian anyone?
Because this stable base is in place, the next planned release will be called The Edgy Eft, and Edgy should be exactly that. Shuttleworth and the development team are planning to take some risks and investigate some stuff that’s been sitting at the bottom of the roadmap.
Okay. CS Weenie, if you’re reading this: I tried lisp in more than just a trivial application and you’re right.
I find Closures more fun (and useful) than I feel comfortable admitting around my friends. Stacks and trees are trivially easy. Calling functions (like this) took some getting used to, and occasionally I’d find myself slipping back to my C roots but overall I’d have to concur that there are programs that can only be written in Lisp.
I haven’t had much of a chance to play with the really meaty code-as-data stuff or macros yet.
I haven’t forgotten my Church-Turing: Lisp is just as powerful as any other language at the machine level, but the Lisp solution to a problem always seems a bit more elegant (not to mention shorter.)
Oh, and Nyquist is based on lisp. Bonus points are awarded for advanced synthesizer languages.
For those who don’t know, I’m kind of in love with SkyPoint as an example of how affordable* downtown high-rises can market themselves, especially to the young professional sort.
Pre-wired surround sound, wireless and fiber everywhere, full health club, great location. It’s a formula for success and it’s working for them. If the REIT is for sale, I want some.
Good news for me, they’re building two more right next door. Bad news for me, Novare isn’t for sale. No cashing in on this one.
*Note that affordable means less than a half-million. Contrast with the 6 million for a piece of the Trump Tower down the street.
That’s right, Easter Eggs. Those little pieces of unnecessary software written into other programs, for which the end-user is free to hunt.
Emphasizing the bloat in OpenOffice, we have the following egg. Open up OpenOffice.org2 Calc, then enter the following formula into a cell: =GAME(“StarWars”).
Enjoy.
Someone else has noticed these. I’m a casual evangelist for these things. They taste significantly better than a Powerbar and they’re better for you than other better-tasting items.
Perfect for endurance cycling or endurance hacking. Brilliant!
New poll results from Zogby Interactive put Democratic front-runner Jim Davis only two points behind overall and Republican front-runner Charlie Crist at 42%-%40. Davis leads Gallagher by three points at 41%-38%. Both of these are within the 4% margin of error, so pay attention; this race is about to get interesting.
This is absolutely hilarious. Given my past sentiments toward “Web 2.0″ as a confirmed technological curmudgeon, Isolatr is a web page after my own heart.
An example of Anti-Social Networking technology, Isolatr’s patented technology is dedicated to “Helping you find where other people aren’t.” Their instant messaging client is dubbed IMolatr and according to the description: “With IMolatr you are always listed as away, and if people try to contact you IMolatr will actually set their hands on fire!
Matt Magain has a great April Fools article on how you can build a wildly successful Web 2.0 application without ever actually writing an application.
Publish an API for your application to get developers interested in hooking into it. Implementation of specific methods isn’t important at this stage; just put a series of stub methods in place that return the value 42. Don’t worry, they’re geeks — they’ll have read Douglas Adams, so they’ll get the joke. Not only will they forgive you, they’ll like you even more for your subtle humour. And if anyone complains, remind them that your app is still in beta.
As the (oft-quoted) saying goes:
0: Create a catchy name.
1: ???
2: Sell to Yahoo.
3: Profit!
Some quick updates from the campaign trail.
We had a great turnout at our fundraiser tonight and last night, which brings us right to the end of the first quarter of 2006.
A quick glance at my calendar says we have scarcely five months until the election. (Sept. 5 is our Superbowl) I’ve been working for the campaign for three months already. There are never enough hours in the day, nor enough days in each month to get everything accomplished, though we are moving forward every day and tomorrow always brings new and exciting challenges.
If you haven’t seen it yet, take some time to visit FarrellForFlorida.com and see what I’ve been doing lately.
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