DJB's Export Court Case
Why is a pair programming expert filing that pair programmers are happier and Tim O'Reilly explaining that books cost money? What does this have to do with export regulations? Why is Bruce Schneier explaining how one-time pads work? (More documents.)
Bernstein's started a writing fund: "Donations to the Writing Fund will directly support my writing projects. (They'll also help convince me that I should stick to an academic career; if you don't donate now, I'll go work for Microsoft! ... Just kidding.)"
Why is the FSF accepting donations for Bernstein's court case? I thought the EFF was handling the case...
Zoooooooooooooooooooooooooko!
It's time for another Zooko dance!
Head in the Clouds
Scott McCloud's WebTake on Brenda Laurel's "Utopian Entrepreneur" is cool. He HATES REPURPOSING too.
Ka-blam, spam!
Mail in Jaguar claims to use Adaptive Latent Semantic Analysis. What is that? Chris Langreiter: "LSA, in my experience, produces slightly amusing general weirdness rather than sensible search results. Of course your definition of 'sensible' may vary." According to the LSA FAQ: "It uses singular value decomposition, a general form of factor analysis, to condense a very large matrix of word-by-context data into a much smaller, but still large-typically 100-500 dimensional-representation. [...] After training on an introductory psychology textbook it achieved a passing score on a multiple-choice exam."
In general, it seems good for finding synonyms and such, but as Paul Graham has shown, that kind of heavy stuff isn't really necessary -- spammers do a great job of avoiding synonyms for themselves, thankyouverymuch.
Lessigmania
O'Reilly has put up a transcript of Lessig's speech at OSCON.
What have you done about it?
Dreams
I tried to do some Feynman-like experimentation of my dreams this afternoon. In one dream, I sort of woke up from dreaming and my brother Noah brought an interesting piece of paper over. It was about different counting systems. How most people used counting systems where numbers were in a large circle (Perl was given as an example) but there were others, such as the Recordative Counting System (used in Perl's Learning.pm). I was about to read what that system was when Noah took the piece of paper away. I tried to call him and get him to bring it back but I was only half-awake and I couldn't get my mouth to follow the instructions. I drifted in and out of sleep a little more before I had the idea to move my arms in an attempt to wake up. I did so and woke up and Dad, who was sitting on the couch next to me said, "You were talking in your sleep." I was puzzled at first but then I realized -- I was sleeping during my talk!
Short Story
I want to write a short story I dreampt a while back here... Maybe later.
Too tired now. Maybe later.
Diary
Slept a lot. Got depressed, frustrated with life plans and such.