Posts

I’m working on a new trailing edge design for this site over the weekend.

Jimmy Carter has finaly been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. We turn to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for exhaustive coverage.

Eugene Volokh posted his prediction for Eldred v Ashcroft today. After reading some about the case yesterday, I remembered the discussion that arose when Congress agreed to extend copyrights by 20 years back in 1998. It was one of the more stupid bits of Congressional prostitution in recent memory, and I sure hope that the Supreme Court will right that wrong now that they have the opportunity.

One of the main reasons why I rarely add new features to this site is that my development environment has always sucked rocks. When I want to make changes, I generally ssh into my shell account on the Web server, hack on the pages some using the antiquated version of vim that pair.com has installed, and pray that everything works like it’s supposed to when I’m done. Every once in awhile I download files and work on them on a local machine, but that’s rare. Anyway, last week I picked up a new old PC from my former employer, and after offering it to my wife (who, it turns out, is still holding out for a Mac), I installed my beloved Gentoo Linux on it and endeavored to set it up as a playground for personal projects like this site. Now I have Linux, Apache, MySQL, CVS, and a bunch of other nifty stuff running on my own personal server, and thanks to dyndns.org and the port forwarding features of my LinkSys box, I have the ability to get to it from anywhere via the Web or SSH. I’m still messing around with the MySQL configuration a bit, but by and large, things are going swimmingly. Now I have one less excuse why I don’t hack on this site as much as I should – we’ll see how this turns out. ...

Wired News has launched a new standards-compliant redesign. I applaud them.

I’m always a sucker for photos of a graduating class of female Iranian police cadets. Iran is an Islamic state and denies rights to women, but at the same time, they issue them machine guns. I was telling someone the other day that Iran is my pick for Islamic state that has the best shot at joining the modern world, membership in the axis of evil notwithstanding. They have a functioning democracy (despite problems with entrenched religious frreaks in the judiciary and intelligence service), an educated populace (72% literacy rate, 65% among women), and natural resources. Iran actually has a slower population growth rate than the United States, and the life expectancy there is a fairly robust 70 years. Looking at the human rights reports for Iran, you don’t see any wholesale suppression of various ethnic groups or religious sects either. Anyway, of all of the Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, I think Iran has as good a shot as any of them at making some real steps forward toward becoming a liberal Western-style democracy with guaranteed civil rights for all its citizens. We’ll see. ...

The Eldred v Ashcroft case would seem to be right in the rc3.org wheelhouse, being that it’s about technology and politics (two of my primary obsessions), but I confess I haven’t been paying a lot of attention. Now I want to get up to speed. Here’s what I’ve been able to find so far: eldred.cc -- the site NY Times preview lessig.org NewsWeek preview LawMeme first hand report Washington Post: Eldred v Ashcroft primer Declan McCullagh report Google News search More later … ...

Outside the scope of the seemingly ended dialogue on going to war with Iraq at Slate, Michael Kinsley offers another critique of the administration’s war preparations.

Paul Boutin reports that Chris DiBona has left Slashdot to join a startup that will produce a new MMORPG. The other founders are also well known members of the Linux world. They claim that the key feature of their game, Rekonstruction, will be massive scalability that lets many more players play in the same world at once than is possible with the current crop of games. Sounds interesting, but that’s the claim made by every single MMORPG when it’s in development. One issue, obviously, is whether the game’s servers scale well enough to allow so many players to inhabit the same “space” at once, but another is the amount of content required to entertain huge numbers of people at the same time. Put simply, think about MMORPG universes as amusement parks. DisneyWorld can comfortably support some number of people, if you want to double the number of people it can support, not only do you need more infrastructure, but you need a hell of a lot more rides, otherwise you’re just going to have long lines and more disgruntled customers. In a game like EverQuest, there are only so many fun things to do at once, and building more fun things to do is expensive and labor intensive. It’s easier to just split people up onto many servers and create less content. One way around this conundrum is to provide for player-created content. If players can add to the game world, then the amount of content might more easily scale upward as the number of players increases. Of course, the other side of the coin is that many people will create garbage, and you either have to get the player base to accept garbage or review the content to weed out the garbage. The worse problem is that people cheat. Players will create content that can be exploited to gain advantage in the game, and tell their friends how to exploit it. People who run these games have a hard enough time preventing exploits without the added wildcard of player-created content, when anybody can create anything, it takes more scrutiny to keep things under control. ...

Apparently still kicking: Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second in command. That’s too bad.