Monthly Archive: July 2009

A member of my community is frightened and disturbed by the results of this year’s No Child Left Behind scores. Only 35 and 47 percent of 11th graders in two area high schools passed the math tests. In a letter to the local newspaper, he asks us to:

Imagine an airline pilot being correct 35 percent of the time; imagine a brain surgeon being correct 47 percent of the time; imagine a pitcher throwing strikes 35 percent of the time — none would have a sustaining career.

A promising start, but I think he erred by turning to baseball for his concluding example. Presumably he’s talking about Major League Baseball. Let’s continue: Imagine a batter getting base hits 35 percent of the time. That’s terrible! No, wait. He would be paid millions of dollars while playing in a billion dollar stadium subsidized …

One indication of the quality of this book is that I read the entire thing. And not only that, I finished it in about a week. It was engrossing enough that I kept wanting to pick it up to find out what happens next. It helped having a trip in there where I had time away from a computer to invest in some “long form” reading, but still.

Say Everything is a book about blogging: “How blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters.” I’ve been reading (and writing!) blogs for many years and was familiar with some parts of the story. I’ve read some of the people profiled in the book, and I had my own opinions on the significance of the form, but I …

GNOME’s gedit text editor is great, but I’m bugged by a couple of things:

If I pick a “recent” file from the File menu and the file is currently unavailable because it’s on a file system that’s not mounted, gedit takes the liberty of removing it from the recent files. Why not leave it there? Chances are I’ll be mounting the file system and wanting to get at it again. And if it’s a “dead” file, it will fall off the list soon enough anyway.
If I print something and choose multiple copies, gedit remembers this setting. (Even after closing and reopening the application.) This seems hostile to me, since most other applications don’t do this. I never remember to look there and keep getting extra copies on future print jobs. Maybe this is a GNOME common …

Great post today from Benjamin Mako Hill about free software advocacy and principles. It’s not very long so you should just go read the whole thing for yourself, but here are a couple of choice parts:

One reason I tend to stay away from “open source” claims in my own advocacy is that I’m worried by the way that these arguments rely on a set of often dubious empirical claims of superiority. Free software, on the other hand, can be seen as statement of principles. Regardless of whether we say “free software” or “open source,” I’ve found that a focus on principled statements is both more robust against counter-arguments and does a better job of describing the motivations of most contributors.

[...]

Humans are driven to imagine worlds that they would want to live in. For a growing group of …

I try to make standards-compliant web pages here at movingtofreedom.org. It appeals to my petty, detail-oriented side. The compiler in me loves it when W3C or xmllint or tidy reports a valid web page. A pass from xmllint or tidy, or the green “valid” result from W3C is like a pat on the head. Good boy!

Why do I use XHTML for this place? Because that’s what WordPress templates were using when I started this site in 2006. I’m sure that’s still the case today, although some searching tells me it doesn’t have to be that way. XHTML seemed like the thing to do three years ago and I was happy to learn about it and conform to the transitional XHTML doctype. I wasn’t so excited about the strict doctype, but figured that was a concern for another day.

(Tangentially, an …

Free Software is software that you are free to share with your family, friends, and neighbors.

Isn’t that a nice thing? It doesn’t cost anything to make copies of digital information, and we have these wonderful machines and a worldwide network that are perfect for copying and sharing. Why not use these tools to freely share our accumulated knowledge? You may also modify the software, if you are so inclined, and are free to distribute your modified version. You don’t have to ask for permission for any of this, either.

That puts things rather simply, and leaves out some fine print, but this is essentially how it works. And it does work. We’re in the midst of a free software revolution! Although like all revolutions, there are counterforces at work.

For a good introduction to what free …

The free culture movement, according to a recent Wikipedia revision, is “a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media. The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely reject the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity.” Also: “The free culture movement takes the ideals of the free software movement and extends them from the field of software to all cultural and creative works.”

That sounds like a good start at defining free culture, and is something I agree with. Copyright is a privilege that has been over-extended and is abused by many of those who hold copyright on artifacts of our culture. I am very much in favor of creative people earning rewards for their …

We’re under attack! From the Bronze Birch Borer beetle. We trimmed off dead branches and removed the fourth trunk from this clump yesterday but couldn’t reach the dead stuff at the top of one of the trees. Here’s what it looks like when these guys get to your beloved paper birch and start killing it at the crown:

It’s a Big Bummer. This has been a great tree for us. We injected some insecticide into the base of the surviving trunks. Maybe that will help, but the outlook seems grim.

(Our friends up in Canada have an informative page about insect pests that links to a brochure about the Bronze Borer. Nasty little biter.)