An interesting take on the upcoming presidential election with regards to technology was written up by Randall Munroe of xkcd. I’m not much for politics but this gives me another darn good reason to like Obama.
Tech Politics
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Monthly Archives: January 2008
The tools we use
I found this quote particularly interesting:
If you are trying out tools that will be part of your productivity, do not judge only by how quickly you can start using them. They are usually the ones that will make you power users and not limit your evolution and improvement. Tools that seem simple, can very well frustrate you with their limitations in the future.
Abhijit Nadgouda (ifacethoughts) – Simplicity and Quick to Use
Growing Organs?
Lily Photos
For those of you who did not get my email, I’ve uploaded 2 albums of photos of my niece, Lily, for viewing:
Lily’s 2nd Birthday
Lily at Lil’s House
Feel free to pass these links out to anyone you know who might be interested.
EDIT: If you’re only interested in photos of Lily, feel free to subscribe to the RSS Feed
Microsoft to squash third world economies
In a rather disturbing article, I found out that Microsoft was none too pleased that One Laptop Per Child has been distributing laptops with a free and open source linux operating system installed (RHEL). They can’t have everyone in a third world country growing up using gnu/linux and not Windows. Plus think about all the money they’ll be losing in the long run. It’s a much better idea to make sure these people pay for the technology they’re using and the knowledge they’re gaining with DRM.
With OLPC based on all Free Software, it was likely that those books would have themselves been under similar licensing like Creative Content. Now, it is likely that third world students will be running DRM-locked textbooks that are only acessable under Windows. -Bruce Perens
Bobby Fischer Dies
Bobby Fischer dies at 64. I didn’t realize he was quite as eccentric as he was. Still, it makes me want to play some chess…
I’m not blind
As I check my Rush email this afternoon, I see I’ve gotten yet another reminder to sign up for the Integrate Chicago Conference. This is really irritating, so I decided to do a little search in Gmail to see how many times they’ve emailed me about this. So far I’ve received 10 email since the first of the year telling me about this conference. That’s 10 emails in a little over 2 weeks. I’m not blind, people! Even if I wanted to go to your ICAM conference, I sure as hell don’t need 10 email reminders about it. One email to advertise and maybe one reminder as the sign-up date approaches should be more than sufficient. Maybe not as many people signed up as you would’ve liked, but it surely isn’t due to the lack of email attention they’ve been getting about it. Give it up and give my inbox a rest already!
Open Source Education
This is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. MIT is sponsoring a program to put their entire coursework online free for anyone to use (called OpenCourseWare). They include tests, lecture notes, videos, problem sets, and more. Everything is distributed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License. It’s a free and open-source education!
UIUC website redesign
In their latest newsletter my alma mater UIUC announced that they’re redesigning their website. It looks like it’s very well designed and fairly functional. I’m hoping they offer a non-flash version for people who do not have flash-enabled browsers, but I assume they will. Why did they redesign it? Because it made sense from a technical standpoint. I miss being at a school where technology and computers were such a big deal. No offense to Rush. Their new med college web design is a much needed improvement over their old one, but I even like the current UIUC web design a little better than Rush’s new one.
The World Isn’t Fair
Good song by Randy Newman (famous singer/songwriter, e.g. wrote/sang You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story):
When Karl Marx was a boy
he took a hard look around
He saw people were starving all over the place
while others were painting the town
The public spirited boy
became a public spirited man
So he worked very hard and he read everything
until he came up with a plan