Category Archives: good code

I am told by Allen that a very respectful AutoWeek executive called to apologize. The mistake was an intern’s. They have reached an amicable settlement. Continue reading →

Recall Sun’s decision to GPL the hardware-level design for its latest SPARC chips? Now here in Europe, there’s a plant shipping silicon using the design. (Thanks, Jim!) Continue reading →

This Thursday, September 14 at 5PM (SL/Pacific), PopSci.com and Creative Commons will be hosting a concert in Second Life featuring Jonathan Coulton as well as popular Second Life musicians Melvin Took, Kourosh Eusebio, Etherian Kamaboko, and Slim Warrior. From Jonathan Coulton’s blog:

I will be playing live from a secure, undisclosed location in the real world, but you will see my handsome avatar onstage at a venue called Menorca in the Second Life universe. You can also listen to the concert via a number of streaming type websites … The whole concert, audio and video, will be Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to record it.

More information is available on this wiki.

Continue reading →

This, this weekend, here in Berlin. Hop a plane. Very cool event. Continue reading →

Check out webcitation.org — a project run at the University of Toronto. The basic idea is to create a permanent URL for citations, so that when the Supreme Court, e.g., cites a webpage, there’s a reliable way to get back to the webpage it cited. They do this by creating a reference URL, which then will refer back to an archive of the page created when the reference was created. E.g., I entered the URL for my blog (“http://lessig.org/blog“). It then created an archive URL “http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33“. Click on it and it should take you to an archive page for my blog.

Why, you might ask, would you ever want to substitute that long ugly URL for the short and spiffy http://lessig.org/blog? Well first, and most obviously if you’ve ever written something for publication, URLs are not always short and spiffy. Second, the point is to create an archive of a page at a particular moment.

A bunch of us have been talking about a service like this for sometime. One idea we had been talking about was a slight modification: Rather than a link that always took you to the archive, the link would first check whether the page referenced is still there unchanged. If so, it would give you that page; if not, it would take you to the archive. Difficulty with this is dynamic pages.

It would be fantastic if the consortium running this would keep a publicly accessible archive of the URLs they generate tied to the original URL — so if the service goes bunk, there’s a way to recover the original URL. And someone should write an app that could sit on a toolbar — ArchiveMe — and when clicked, generated the URL (and put it in the copy/paste field).

But these are quibbles: This is a very cool project, really really needed. Continue reading →

Want to read a book on your iPod? This cool site will convert a text into notes that can be read on an iPod. Here’s my book Free Culture so converted. Continue reading →

Is there such a thing as a program to simplify AddressBook cleanups? (I’m using the OS X default). I’ve got over 5000 entries, many automatically inserted, many many duplicates, etc. But it takes forever to delete, merge, correct the entries. I know I could dump it into a spreadsheet and do it that way, but has anyone seen code to do this more intelligently? Continue reading →

Don Marti has a very cool style sheet to make it possible to turn a blog entry into a letter to Congress. Continue reading →

So I’m sitting at a hot Internet Cafe in Costa Rica, interrupting the month with the family, to follow Dave’s lead in drawing attention to just how Edwards’ gets the net. As Dave explains, former-Senator Edwards has begun distributing video using BitTorrent — demonstrating the important value of this technology that has nothing to do with “piracy.” Now if only he’d signal clearly the freedoms that run with his video…

(Thanks, Dave) Continue reading →