brentashley

je voudrais ecrire en français aujourd’hui. je regrette que je n’ai jamais l’opportunité à pratiquer mon français – si on peut être bilangue, je pense qu’on doit essayer (au moins, plus fort que j’essayes).

j’ai recu, cette semaine, un version de mon JSRS faites pour utiliser avec PHP, merci à mes nouveaux amis, Sébastien CRAMATTE et Pierre CAILLEUX, de Boulogne Billancourt, France (leur website). Je vais le mettre sur mon website bientôt.

I’ve just released the latest JSRS with PHP support as provided by Sebastien and Pierre. Cool!

Craig Mundie, Senior VP at Microsoft, spoke about The Commercial Software Model at The New York University Stern School of Business today. Even before the text of the speech was published, Slashdot and others responded with predictable polarized gainsaying.

I’m not going to argue the minutiae of Craig’s speech or the whole Open Source vs Intellectual Property thing. For what it’s worth, I’m more on Microsoft’s side than the OSS side. However, you don’t have to probe the actual issues to derive analysis from this particular Microsoft move.

Here’s the thing:

Let’s say that things are as they are presented. Microsoft believes that their commercial software model will prevail. They believe the OSS community is misguided and will fail miserably if they insist on continuing with their flawed unsustainable business model.

So what the heck is up then with clueing your opponents in to their own folly? This isn’t the Microsoft we know and [insert your preference here]. What kind of poker-face is this? You should be straining to hide your glee that you’ve got a straight flush to their pair of threes, not warning them that now’s the time to discard and regroup!

That is unless you’re bluffing. Unless you suspect there’s an outside chance they might just prove to have a better hand than you.

Now I don’t know which hand is better, but it seems inescapable to me that Microsoft wouldn’t be playing this strategy if they were really confident about their long-term position.

got to talking today about old obscure cartoon characters – Underdog, David and Goliath, Mr. Peabody and Sherman. major cool Brattli code on the Wayback Machine site’s opening page…

ASCAP, give your fucking heads a shake. So I guess if I’m walking down the street and accidentally fart out the chorus to Dylan’s Blowin in the Wind, I’ll have you threatening to sue my ass.

better get some absorbent underwear before you piss yourself listening to this stuff

scottandrew has been thinking aloud about adolescent fiction and it reminded me of one of my favourite books of all time – Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.

Overlooked by many because of its wretched Hollywood bastardizations, it is fantastic (in the fantasy sense of the word) storytelling of the highest form. Don’t take my word for it – click the link above with all speed and read some of the first chapter. Riveting stuff.

It may surprise you that Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American who had a remarkable life of his own.

Along with the paperback Tarzan books (I think I had at one time the first eight in the series) I have Burne Hogarth’s illustrated Tarzan – a true artistic treasure, absolutely breathtaking.

it must be spring. had barbequed burgers and corn on the cob for dinner. yum yum. reminds me that i have a longstanding responsibility to humanity to compile and report statistics about the ages-old corncob question. this seems as good a place as any to get a demographic sample. i’ll report when i get critical mass.

[ iframe removed – way out of date ]

of course, if you’re using Netscape 4.x you won’t see the survey form i included in an iframe between this paragraph and the previous one. well, that’s just TFB for you. wake the fuck up, drag yourself into the 21st century, and get yourself a real browser.

lotsa snippets today

cool 1K DHTML API library at Dithered, as discovered via scottandrew. what a frickin braintrust there is amongst bloggers.

it’s bugged me for a while now that the GPL and even the LGPL dump so much restrictive baggage and responsibility on the user of the copylefted work. i wouldn’t mind using SourceForge for a project or two if i didn’t then have to burden the potential users of my code with all the crap on these licenses. it seems to me that with the GPL, the open source community has simply created a counter-establishment license designed to impose controls on intellectual property. maybe i’m naive, but this is my license

how come it is that as soon as you hear “in order to serve you better…”, you know it’s gonna be followed by something that should have been prefaced with “in order to increase our bottom line…”?

word of the day: terpsichorean. i first came across it in the classic cheese shop sketch.

well, i’m 40 today. fantastic family, nice house, my own boss, yet i’m only halfway there. who could ask for anything more?

being definitely a technical logjam breaker kind of guy, and most assuredly not an aesthetic design type, i’m glad there is diversity in the world, because the people who have the design talent and are willing to share their knowledge (scott andrew lepera, eric costello are two of exceptional note) help tremendously to fill the gaping holes in my talent. i’ve finally css-ified my business and family sites. no great shakes, but a good sense of accomplishment.

my $&*% frickin frackin cable internet provider has had me down from 10am to 4pm every day for almost 3 weeks now. they’ve got some heinous routing problems (with non-routable 10.x.x.x networks in the middle of the routable cloud) that they are apparently having difficulties setting right. not only that, but they have two of their own servers collectively streaming 100kbits per second of unwanted multicast traffic at me (and everyone else around me) at all times. the problem, of course, is that if i complain too loudly, i’ll be scrutinized to the point that they’ll clue in to the incoming dns, smtp, ftp and http traffic, a slight stretch to their terms of service, and i’ll have to go out and colocate a server for big dough. yeccch.