How to make the world a worse place
Include a counter on every Facebook profile showing how many times other people have looked at it.
Digifesto
April 23, 2008
TOPP helps keep Ext open source
There has been a lot of concern at TOPP over the past month or so over ExtJS, a JavaScript GUI library, when it was discovered by David Turner that their license was neither free nor open source, as we had supposed. This shook things up because at least two TOPP projects, OpenPlans and GeoExt, rely on Ext (the latter in a somewhat fundamental way.) TOPP Fearless Leaders Jackie Arasi and Chris Holmes joined Turner in persuading Ext against turning to the dark side.
According to a recent Ext blog post, they have changed their license:
Until version 2.1 Ext was released under it’s own license, the “Ext License”. That license granted usage (provided certain conditions were met ) under the LGPL license terms. The CSS and images (”Assets”) distributed with Ext before 2.1 had a license all of their own which was not open source compatible at all. We received quite a bit of negative feedback from some prominent members of the open source community about our license not being friendly for open source projects. Some even said Ext was not open source at all since these licenses did not offer the same freedoms that standard open source licenses offer. Since we have been an open source company since our inception, these comments and concerns struck home and we felt a need address the issue.
We are pleased to announce that all of Ext JS 2.1 is now available under the GPL v3. We anticipate this will allow broader usage in open source software and should make licensing questions and choices much easier.
What a heartwarming story! It turns out the people behind ExtJS were confused about how the GPL relates to JavaScript code, and we were able to help them out about it. It’s great to see the open source community stick together and keep each other on course, even on an organizational level.
April 20, 2008
Sheldon Silver vs. The Internet
Today, while performing an innocuous search for “nyc weather”, I was presented with the first Google ad to catch my eye for a long time: Stop SIlver from Slithering Into His Seat Again.
For those of you that don’t know, Sheldon Silver is the Speaker of New York’s House of Representatives and an asshole. New York’s state government is one of the most dysfunctional in America, known for its “three men in a room” style politics, and Silver was part of the triumvirate when it was at its height. His recent back room scuttling of the popular congestion pricing bill proves that he remains as autocratic as ever.
For the first time in 20 years, Silver has a challenger in the primary, Paul Newell, who seems like a decent guy.
One of the many reasons that this election will be interesting is that it provides an opportunity to see internet-supported civil society in action, and test its ability to cause real change.
In anticipation of that aspect of the race, note the internet presence of the two candidates. The first three links on a Google search of Sheldon Silver are his New York State Assembly page, a Wikipedia entry, and a page declaring him to be a creep and a fraud. The second link on a search for Paul Newell, well above his campaign site, is his LinkedIn profile. It is too early to tell, but we could be seeing a marked shift in how politics gets done, especially on the local level.
April 14, 2008
Funhouse mirrors
This past weekend I was fortunate to see another episode of Rock of Love 2.
There were only three contestants left in the episode I saw: Ambre [sic], Daisy, and Destiney [sic]. The highlight of the episode, for me, was a “private” conversation between the three women on the topic of who among them was in love with Bret Michaels.
Ambre, or maybe Daisy, professed her love of Bret, and then asked the others if they felt the same way. Daisy, or possible Ambre, vigorously agreed that she too loved Bret. But Destiney expressed some reservations. Could she really be in love with Bret after having known him for only such a short time, and in such contrived circumstances? Perhaps she would need to get to know Bret better before falling in love with him.
In personal interviews, the other two contestants expressed their outrage. Who was she to not love Bret? It’s as if she was some kind of impostor, living among them for so long! Apparently, Bret shared these concerns; Wikipedia informs me that by the end of the episode (which I didn’t see), Destiney had been eliminated. Justice was served; one of the more worthy women would go on to win Bret’s heart.*
It is no secret that the popular media distorts the truth for its commercial needs. But what is shocking is that this tendency goes so far as to attempt to paint truth as error even when it is directly and eloquently expressed. In the twilight world of cable, black is white, day is night, and women who have been systematically demeaned by a washed out rocker for a couple months must be in love with him, or else there is something seriously wrong with the situation.
We changed the channel to CNN, which was covering Barack Obama’s “Bitter-gate.” Obama has suggested that the xenophobic politics of some small town Americans may ultimately be due to resentment about their economic insecurity. Saying this proves that Obama is “out of touch” and was a terrible mistake.
* It was Ambre. The younger one.
April 8, 2008
Opening Words
I have no opening words prepared. Here are some others’:
The magic of a word – DADA – which for journalists has opened the door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance.
To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3,
work yourself up and sharpen you wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God.
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
The Internet is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives.
We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which remains in fashion allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our experience. Logical conclusions, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say, boundaries have been assigned even to ex- perience. It revolves in a cage from which release is becoming increasingly difficult.
The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs. Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience.
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
