The Crutis

I’m taking a digital intellectual property law class as part of the University of Utah’s computer science program. So far it’s been very dry, but we’ve been given a take-home exam which is to examine and propose changes to section 117 of the copyright act. While doing research I found a quote worthy of sharing:

‘Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water
not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business
models that take this into account, the sooner people will
start making money again.’ — Bruce Schneier

Just in case you were wondering, even your cool week was not this cool.

I’m working on a web application at work, and would really like a nice spider that crawl the application and find dead links. Any suggestions? Oh yeah I almost forgot, the spider needs to be able to authenticate as a known user to get into the application which is the real hang-up.

I don’t get a lot of direct traffic here, so I’ve switched my feed to run through Feedburner to get some traffic stats. Hopefully the three or four of you that actually subscribe to my site won’t be too adversely affected.

The 25 songs on my iPod (by number of times played), interesting how these percolate to the top over time. The #1 track is from a night when I put the song on repeat.

Continuing my recent string of random quotes, I found a good one today on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog:

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci

From your 42 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 858 items, starred 9 items, and shared 129 items.

I have a feeling that I’m sharing a lot more than I’m getting back from my fellow Google Reader users.

I just installed Visual Studio 2005 at work; the “Professional” flavor. Now… I’m wondering why a professional would not want to unit test his code. It would seem that in the opinion of Microsoft that a professional would have no desire to do such a thing since I am unable to open a solution that contains unit tests which I created using the “Team” edition of VS 2005. Call me stupid, but there is nothing professional about developing untested code. Better yet, call Microsoft stupid for not including this in every flavor of Visual Studio.

*Disclaimer: I am not an anti-MS bigot, I just think the company is missing the boat and losing enthusiast developers by making tested code a “feature” rather than a first class paradigm in development.

Though we might have precious little
It’s still precious

-NEP

I confess that I am a dreamer. Someone once called me “just a dreamer.” That offended me, the “just” part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing in your dreams. — Douglas Englebart

This is one of the finest quotes I’ve come across lately. As Microsoft ships Windows Vista, it’s important to remember that the real potential of computing has not been tapped. If you think any of the new products you’ve seen lately like Vista, the iPhone or anything else is a significant step forward in how computers improve your life, read a few of these articles and see how much we’re missing.

Beyond The Box

Dreaming of the Future

Bootstrap Institute (Doug Englebart’s site)