On Tuesday I got to testify in court for the first time, as a defense expert in a criminal case in Contra Costa County Superior Court. This is also the first time I've been cross-examined, although not the first time I've submitted testimony to a court (nor the first time I've testified in person at a governmental hearing). My testimony was given at an evidentiary hearing with the jury excluded.
I testified about RFC 2822 message headers and, in particular, how to interpret the times in Received headers. The judge stated that he accepted my testimony, but he granted the People's motion on other grounds.
While I was waiting outside the courtroom, I saw a prosecution witness in another case get upset and threaten to leave without testifying. The prosecutor in that case overheard him and threatened to have the witness arrested and held in contempt of court if he left. The witness ended up leaving anyway and apparently was arrested outside the courthouse and brought back inside by force. Having witnesses arrested for noncompliance with subpoenas is the kind of drama that I just haven't seen in civil cases...
I was amused to learn that German and Dutch-speaking programmers are using the word "geXORt" where we would use "XORed" in English -- as a past participle to show that an exclusive OR operation has been performed.
I don't know what the Portuguese equivalent is; I did find a tiny number of Google references to the plural "XORados" (and one reference to that form in Spanish), but none at all to the singular "XORado".
Philip Zimbardo on prisons, situationalism, abuse, anonymity, and transparency. Even though institutional review boards wouldn't let Zimbardo repeat his prison experiment today, he says, in effect, that it's being repeated constantly in actual prisons around the world -- with the same results.
I wish I could remember where I heard about the Xgl demo video that impressed me so much. Many of the graphics effects there were just startling to me. I hope this can be done with underlying free software drivers and that it's not relying on the proprietary accelerated drivers.
Many people know that Richard Stallman is frustrated with the multiple meanings of "free" in English, which continue to confuse people about what's meant by Richard's term "free software".
Richard started using the example of "free as in speech, not as in beer", or, sometimes, "free as in freedom".
I was just reminded of another meaning of "free": unoccupied, vacant, or available. So I want to say "the apartment downstairs is free as in malloc, not as in beer".
