Goooooooooooogle Quiz!
Yes! It's another Google Quiz! Three parts, win a messenger bag with the Google logo.
Site Update
The Creative Commons web site was updated today. It now features an interview with Rick Prelinger who donated lots of movies to the Internet Archive.
Hilarious Lessig replacement speech
Mechagolubzilla blasts Lessig's OSCON speech and goes on with a hilarious replacement. It ends with a broadway number with Tim O'Reilly singing lines like:
Your social circles are very cosmopolitan
You hang with Littman and Vaidyanathan
Though your view of judicial activisim is startlin'
To Scalia and Bork and so on.
bogofilter
One problem with bogofilter is that it doesn't decode base64 data, so all these base64-encoded emails I get aren't marked as spam. Does anyone have C code that can decode base64 email messages? I'm sure ESR would appreciate it.
Create a PAYCHECK with your COMPUTER
McCusker has a hilarious response to the "create a paycheck" spam.
Thundercats!
Apple's In-Store Jaguar Events: "Friday night, August 23, at 10:20 sharp... We're letting the cat out of the bag. 100 minutes of free gifts, great savings, theater demos, and the chance to win a Mac. Be there."
Chicken Big
The NSA will not develop any more free software and is putting an end to their Secure Linux program.
The RIAA wants to know the names of peer-to-peer users and considers prosecuting them.
The president of News Corp thinks that we should get the government to clean up the vast wasteland of the Internet. (This one was hilarious.)
The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it's benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content.
[...]
The stall tactics and smoke screens of those who have purposely ignored digital shoplifting can no longer be tolerated and can no longer mask the ulterior motives that have driven them all along. The truth is that anyone unwilling to condemn outright theft by digital means is either amoral or wholly self-serving.
[...]
The prevalence of pornographic Web sites and e-mails is a lot more than an insult to common decency. It's an increasing reason to keep kids and families off the Internet. And these are only part of the virtual logjam of valueless clutter.
- Peter Chernin, President of News Corp
However, he admitted "that his own children sometimes wavered" on whether copying copyrighted material was immoral. No more Simpsons, Sean!
There's one obvious joke, that the head of Fox of all places is trying to tell us about morals. The guy that brought the world shows such as "Worlds Worst Temptation Island Car Crashes When Animals Attack Celebrity Boxing 8" is trying to tell us the internet is sending the world to hell in a handbasket? And just what has his company been peddling for the last ten years?
- Matt Haughey, a whole lotta nothing
Getting Organized
I am terribly disorganized. Most of the time, if I don't do something when I'm asked to, I won't do it at all (or until you ask me a second time). I keep a list of everything to do in my head but I forget stuff and of course I never remember all the things I need to do when I have time to do them. I tried to put together a TODO list but it was unorganized and filled with impossible tasks ("convince everyone to use the semantic web").
Worse, my interests change rapidly. Things I often want to do now are completely uninteresting to me after a few weeks. If I wait long enough, I know that none of the uncompleted tasks will seem worthwhile, which is a strong incentive just to sit around and wait.
Also, time isn't fungible for me. Only at the best of times am I in the mood to code. Sometimes all I want to do is read web pages and things. This is why I can accept on new tasks even when I'm "busy". I may have plenty of big coding projects but not small ones. I may have plenty of coding projects, but still need things to read. Previous schedules were organized by parent-task or importance, which was not helpful at all to my way of working.
So I'm trying a new thing now: organizing my TODO list by what I'm in the mood for (reading, writing, people, maintenance, etc.) and putting on only simple small tasks that are doable immediately. Every day I'll try to knock of one coding task, two writing tasks, two maintenance or personal tasks and one thinking or reading task. I'll keep track of what they are here. We'll see how it goes.
And I'll always remember the wise words of Sandro: "This may sound stupid, but why don't you just what you enjoy?"
Today's Tasks
Coding:
Writing: todo system, time philosophy
Writing: cryptography
Maint./Pers.: integrate new sites (swhack, warchalk) into site lists (blogspace, notabug, aaronsw)
Maint./Pers.: ask ibiblio to mirror webres
Think/Read: djb software pages