Welcome

Welcome to the new swhack. We're going for a relaxed feel here. Aaron, Sean and Morbus will provide quips, quotes and links for your amusement. Sit back and enjoy the ride. Aaron's editing today from technological necessity. Perhaps we will do more exciting things in the future.

Behind the Schenes

Let's talk tech for a second. I'm chatting with Morbus over AIM and Sean using an AIM->IRC bridge bot I wrote using the Twisted Framework (although the Twisted people say I'm not using the cool APIs). I'm editing this in my favorite text editor, using rsync to upstream it to the web server. Eventually, we'll probably have a cleaning script that will link all the pages together for us all nice like vitanuova.

Check out our old-school right-aligned address tag. And the zero-space blockquote cites.

Today's Vitanuova

Speaking of vitanuova, it's got some great stuff today:

I actually bought some heavenly hash ice cream before writing that cryptographer joke in my previous entry. I'd been writing about SHA1, and went to the supermarket, and somehow the ice cream jumped out at me, and then I got it home and said "Oh!".

And doesn't everyone want a little LATIN SPAM!!!

When at LinuxWorld, Seth covered up his name tag because "being Seth Schoen is therefore inconvenient when you want to ask basic and uninformed questions about Palladium."

The dinner sounded pretty cool which brings me too...

Latest Kragen-Journal

Aha, they were all at Full Tilt. Here's some Wired News coverage of the dinner. I really wish I'd gone now. Oh, it was 21-and-over. That really sucks. On the other hand, it looks like I might get to go to Palo Alto soon. There are so many people I'd like to see. Seth Schoen, Brad Templeton, Kragen, Cory Doctorow, Danny O'Brien, Ka-Ping Yee, etc. I probably won't see many of them, though.

I wonder if anyone recorded the Lessig speech.

Lessig is More

DarwinMag has an interview with Larry Lessig. [JOHO] "I see the beginning of discussion of [sneak-attack patents on standards] in 'RDF,' a standard to enable a description of data to be used for all sorts of Web services."

Simpons on Tour

Sean found some good Simpsons quotes to go along with my piece on factory tours:

Martin: When will we be able to see a finished box, Sir?
Guide: Well, we don't assemble them here -- that's done in Flint, Michigan.

- Q&A at the box factory, Bart Gets Famous

The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.

- Military school Commandant's graduation address, The Secret War of Lisa Simpson

<sbp> Hmm... perhaps I do watch the Simpsons too much. At least it's an acceptable vice.

TODO

Sillyness

<sbp> wiggidy wiggidy; kickin' it *old-school* wit' you bad brothers! yeeeeeah!
<AaronSw> Did i wander into the abuse room? I was looking for self-deprecation.
<AaronSw> DeprecationWarning: Use of Aaron is not recommended, please use Sean instead.
<sbp> self-deprecating remarks are all well and good, but... you have to ignore them since you're self-deprecated

Terrorist Copyrights

RIAA: RIAA and Law Enforcement Foil CD Pirates in Dallas. "As part of a collaborative initiative to curtail the sale of unauthorized Arabic sound recordings in the United States, the Dallas Police Department and the RIAA’s Anti-Piracy Unit worked together to execute search warrants from the World Wide Food Store in Dallas, Tex. on May 22, 2002."

Phew, good thing we have the RIAA to keep those terrorists from distributing their sound recordings. They're sure to have embedded codes to activate all 2 of the Al-Qaeda sleeper cells.

Technical Documentation

There's a serious lack of good technical documentation. How come no one can explain how things work simply but accurately? Half the things I read are pages and pages of boring details which aren't comprehensible without understanding terminology which can only be picked up by hanging out in the community. The other half is a bunch of grandma-explanations that don't actually give a good idea of how things really work. djb's references and explanations (like his SMTP references and AutoIPv6 argument) are actually pretty good. I suspect it comes from his teaching experience. Even on mailing list arguments it seems he's always writing for a general audience, explaining everything clearly and concisely.

And there's very little on the kinds of things I'm interested: the fundamentals of systems. How are packets routed? How are routes propagated? How are root servers updated?

I guess it's the child's "Why? Why? Why?" applied to computer systems. Sean points out a TimBL page I'd never seen before, on "Why?" Buttons. 'It is important to encourage children to ask "why?"' (why?)

Latest EFFector

What a day! A new EFFector issue out too.The FCC proposed to issue the broadcast flag mandate that will put copy protection in everything that can play TV.

Cory Doctorow wrote an article on the dangers of these new DRM regulations for TidBITS.

The judge merged the EFF's ReplayTV suit with Replay's suit as the EFF requested.

Barney is going to beat Wil Wheaton up at the DNA Lounge.

Personal Notes

I missed the RDF Core telecon. I went to the Post Office. I went to the dentist (who said I should work on cleaning my front lowers better). I had a telecon. I pointed my IRC->AIM bridges at #swhack and #sbp. I created this page. I updated the people I want to meet. I changed the slogan on my website to "Technology and social change".

Sean pointed out that this is becoming a diary. I've never really kept a personal diary. I tried to convince myself to write one once by saying that future Aaron would like reading it but that didn't work to well: I only wrote a handful of entries because I kept forgetting to write. Perhaps having Google read it will be a better incentive. I think I also have more time now.

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Aaron Swartz