Amusing
You see a lot more of phrases like semper et ubique in philosophical and political writing of about a century ago. People were comfortable making generalizations then.(me, on the phone)
While I'm at it:
Support Bloggers' Rights!
You see a lot more of phrases like semper et ubique in philosophical and political writing of about a century ago. People were comfortable making generalizations then.(me, on the phone)
While I'm at it:
If you went to a former girlfriend's birthday celebration, you might be going to an ex parte.(Ren)
I've been very busy for a couple of weeks. I went to Yale, for the Revenge of the Blog conference, and visited my family in Western Massachusetts. The Revenge of the Blog is pretty well documented on-line, so I'm not sure I have much to say about it. It was my first experience of "live blogging" -- several people in the room were posting articles about the conference as it happened. Perhaps more notably, one of the panelists complained about a story posted by slashdot editor Chris DiBona, who's a friend of mine. I managed to find Chris on-line and talk to him in IRC about the story while the conference was still going on.
You can see pictures of the conference or read about it (some of those links have other links to articles about the event).
After that, I went to CPTWG in Los Angeles and heard proposals for the creation of an "Analog Working Group" or "Analog Issues Discussion Group" to "close the analog hole".
This is a pretty big deal. There's still an outstanding suggestion for EFF to create a site about that discussion, the way we did for the BPDG. I think it's clear that the new site would need to be called Cruelty to Analog. (So, where the bumpersticker about the broadcast flag will read "8/VSB is not a crime", the bumpersticker about the analog hole, should regulatory proposals arise, clearly ought to say "Help stop cruelty to analog" or "I oppose cruelty to analog".)
At the moment, the group is still just a proposal, so there may be nothing to see for the moment.
Riana was back in town for Thanksgiving, and I went to karaoke with her and Biella and Praveen at Amnesia, continuing an occasional tradition.
Gwen hosted a reading group at her place, but instead of reading anything, we watched the movie Real Genius. It's great fun.
But, maybe most significantly, I worked on the EFF broadcast flag comments for the FCC. They were filed on Friday, but haven't appeared in the docket. It seems that a few dozen organizations have filed comments -- and a few thousand consumers.
I'll write more about this on Consensus at Lawyerpoint as we read through everyone else's comments.
I played a lot of Boggle in November, and I think I've been getting better at it. It turns out that you don't need those high-tech client-server architectures to play a collaborative networked game. You just need ssh, kibitz, and good old BSD boggle. You ssh into a machine with someone, you start a kibitz session, and you run boggle; then you need a locking protocol or a way to do some kind of concurrency control to keep from typing over one another too much.
The LNX-BBC is advancing by leaps and bounds. It's really cool. We really need testers. Try it out and file bug reports.
We got some new build machines set up, new build procedures (like chroot builds), and added some new features. I think we're very close to a release, so we particularly need your testing efforts at this point.
When I last wrote, I was about to try to watch the Leonid meteor shower. (That's a good sign of just how long ago that was.) I wanted to go out with Kragen for his birthday, but I had a cold and I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to keep warm where he was going. Biella and Praveen ended up taking me to a hostel on the coast, where I was able to sleep indoors under a blanket until the shower peaked. Then we went outside for just about five minutes.
The meteors were very nice, but there were many fewer of them visible than I'd been led to expect. It was bitterly cold out (at least by my new Californian standards) and it was nice to get back indoors quickly.
Seth Finkelstein made a good point about the concept of "harmful to minors". He just asked whether a particular book fits within a newly-minted legal definition of "suitable for minors" -- something which might seem straightforward to answer until you consider how a book can have a cultural and ethical agenda.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I read a book called Harmful to Minors. One premise of that book is that a lack of sex education is much more harmful to minors than exposure to sexually explicit images could possibly be. It's interesting to read in parallel with Moral Politics, which also talks about sex ed.
For several weeks in November, I didn't eat any desserts or sodas. I kept this rule very faithfully. I think I broke it only once when I accidentally requested a ginger ale on an airplane.
My arms didn't feel better, but I lost some weight.
Write a portable ANSI C program which can be run multiple times as an unprivileged user and gives different output each time with the same input. For example:
somehost:~$ cc -o random random.c somehost:~$ ./random 0 somehost:~$ ./random 1 somehost:~$ ./random 1 somehost:~$ ./random 0
Well, you say, that's easy, I'll just read /dev/urandom, or I'll be retro and call random(3) and seed it with the current time, the way we did in the old days. But no, you have to follow these conditions:
I found two ways of doing it subject to these constraints. I should make the constraints tougher, and see if it could still be done, but that would be a spoiler for how to do it.
EFF has leased the space next door (at 452 Shotwell), because we're expanding; last night, we had a housewarming party to celebrate, and hundreds of people turned out, including some pretty well-known activists, journalists, and generally interesting people. I got to see several friends I hadn't seen in a while, and was surprised to find that I knew at least 40 of the attendees.
I also co-ordinated my first ever PGP keysigning party, with 9 participants.
Contact: Seth David Schoen