random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
Made a quick overnight trip up to San Jose for GDC. Southwest works great here; if you buy in advance, it’s only $39 each way (!) — also, if you get there early, they’ll switch you to an earlier flight w/o hassle on the spot.
More GDC pics on my IM bloog.
While I was up there, I hung out at Yahoo for a little bit and had dinner at Google w/ friends. Ernie posted a little summary.
SydShamino comments insightfully on the Kahle v Ashcroft /. discussion:
So does the author have the right to say “I don’t want my work released, ever, so any old copies out there can degrade until they are unuseable but no one can make any new copies.”????
Answer honestly. Do you believe that this is true, that an original content creator has perpetual rights to control the use of his work?
If so, congratulations, you believe in the European model of copyright, where it is an inherent right of a person.
In the US, however, copyright is not an inherent right. Instead, public domain is the inherent right, and the constitution grants a limited monopoly on creative works ONLY so that the public domain is improved. Thus, in the US, once an author/creator/etc. chooses to write down and release a work, he or she has given up perpetual control of that work. The constitution demands that, after a limited monopoly, the public domain shall inherit the work.
Frankly, I agree with the constitution. Some things belong to humanity, not to the greed or whims of those in control. The sum body of human creativity is one of them.
Years later, Brainjar’s DOM Viewer is still indispensible when dealing w/ IE Events.
I flip-flop back and forth when writing event listeners. Right now I use a modified version (extra boolean to control capture) of scottandrew’s old addEvent function and ad-hoc the rest of it (damn IE and their useless event handling referencing; since it’s always reference via the window object, this becomes useless), however, sometime I’ll have to give dithered’s DOM2 Events a spin.
Brad wrote a Secure Copy Droplet applescript that looks extremely useful.
related: wsanchez has a little hack called DropScript that does turns UNIX executables into droplets (cool).
Renamed realsched.exe and realevent.exe to .crap extensions (in C:Program FilesCommon FilesRealUpdate_OB). This gets rid of stupid popups when running RealOne.
(I’ve mostly been using Real Alternative w/ Media Player Classic, but sometimes I still need to run the Real player. This makes it slightly less annoying)
While I’m slacking off… who knew there’d be such a bruhaha over TypeKey? (summary at idly.org) I think the actual implementation might not have been thoroughly thought out (specifically re:idtheft), but who hasn’t been expecting something like this coming from… well, just about everyone? (personally, I have a fondness for a PGP-based solution, althought the idtheft issue can just as easily be solved by requiring a TypeKey signature on the referenced webserver which the TypeKey service can check)
Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link? – excerpts from tonight’s 60 Minutes interview:
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other
people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did
this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation
left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back
with a report that said Iraq did this.“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been
looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no
connection.’“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a
connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come
back with that answer. We wrote a report.”Clarke continued, “It was a serious look. We got together all the
FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the
report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’
They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it
got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced
and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’“I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because
after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I
don’t think the people around the president show him memos like that. I
don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t– wouldn’t like the answer.”Clarke was the president’s chief adviser on terrorism, yet it
wasn’t until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the
subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn’t
take the threat seriously.“We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda.
That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed
back and back and back for months.“There’s a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some
blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza
Rice asking for, urgently — underlined urgently — a Cabinet-level
meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent
memo– wasn’t acted on.“I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold
War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were
preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They
came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq,
Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the
preceding eight years.”