Older blog entries for schoen (starting at number 242)

Free Dmitry!

Job

I got a job, as Staff Technologist of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're down the street from me, so I'll be able to continue living in San Francisco.

As Staff Technologist, among other things, I need to identify civil liberties issues in standards and architecture (a la Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace) and, in general, find civil liberties issues that are of interest to EFF.

I'm still interested in consulting work.

LNX-BBC

The LNX-BBC project has sent version 1.618 to Hong Kong for duplication. We will be giving out a few thousand of them at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco at the end of August.

You can also burn your own copy and try it out. I didn't choose the image that was sent to Hong Kong, so I don't know which it was yet: but you can try one of the latest of our nightly builds. (Mirrors would be welcome.)

Allegedly, we're giving out advance copies at the BayLISA picnic tomorrow (Sunday). I don't know how we're going to get there, because none of the developers who have cars are free tomorrow.

You can also buy business-card sized CD-R blanks for about $0.49 apiece from various CD-R media vendors. The 50 MB version works fine with our image, if you can't find us at LinuxWorld or in person.

I'm going to post a list of changes for 1.618 here. (I'm afraid there are probably a few more changes that we didn't manage to document.) Your suggestions for future releases are welcome; here's what I have in mind.

In other news

Welcome back to leonardr. (That reminds me: we included robotfindskitten in LNX-BBC 1.618.)

The new LNX-BBC web page is up. I'm going to send an announcement of the project to various places in the next few days. I also created an Advogato project for it.

There is an anonymous rsync module which provides access to our work in progress on that project. However, since our server is currently on an ADSL line, I'm not going to link to that here; if you're really curious to look at it, go look at our project mailing list archives. :-)

I'm also going to give a presentation on bootable Linux CDs (and the Linuxcare BBC and now also the LNX-BBC) at the upcoming LinuxWorld in San Francisco in August, and I'm interested in speaking about it at other conferences, too.

I have other news, which is continuing to go into my other diary, but I thought it would be good to poke back in here and mention what's new in my free software world.

I revised my personal page here to show that I'm looking for work.

I miss writing diary entries here -- it's great to watch the Recent diary entries page regularly and to have diary conversations with people.

But a good thing about keeping a diary on my own site is that I can be free to be verbose and off-topic without getting flamed (well, so far).

I have created a new independent Bootable Business Card project which is based on the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card; people who are interested in this might want to subscribe to our new mailing list.

Moving diary

I moved my personal diary to vitanuova.loyalty.org; I just wanted to remind people who might be interested (if they didn't read the recent diary entries page over the weekend).

Victimless crimes

ishamael wonders (basically) why police enforce laws against "victimless crimes". I thought of four general reasons, but I didn't finish writing up my description of those reasons, so I'll have to get back to everybody if I do.

BBC

I'm going to work with Andrew tomorrow and we're planning to have a small number of 1.5.9 or 1.5.9.2 to give out at a LUG meeting in Southern California later this month where Mike is speaking.

Moving diary

Now that I've been writing here for a year, I'm moving my personal diary to

http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/

Thanks to everybody who read it here. I may still post diary entries on Advogato about technical subjects.

Take care, everybody!

... that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.

(California Constitution, Article XX, Section 3)

But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

(Genesis 4:5 (KJV))

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

(Ernest Dowson, "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae")

Cookiemancy

(Chinese restaurant) fortunes: "Now is the time to try something new." "Now is the time to try something new."

If only we'd had three people at dinner -- then it would be certain.

Life is unbelievably complicated!

I had a nice time with Zack this weekend and got to talk to him a bunch, have dinner, and do some errands.

I found my CueCat and scanned a bunch of books. (I hadn't scanned anything since moving, because I misplaced the CueCat when I moved, so that's quite a few books already.) I still haven't published my scripts, just because I'm ashamed of how ad hoc they are. No great elegance, generality, modularity; just quick hacks. And they work really well, but I'm still ashamed to publish them.

I talked to Zack a bit about computer chess, and he showed me a really excellent chess-playing program called Crafty. We're curious whether we could make this run on a Mosix cluster (say) and do deeper or faster game tree searches. I wish we had some extremely strong players to make Crafty play against in case we managed to make that work.

I'm planning to see my cousin Ronnie on Monday night.

I wrote a poem called "Infandum: for March 26".

Saturday

We met our new landlord, signed a lease, and are now officially tenants here. Our first rent check is due by April Fool's Day.

Maybe I should have a housewarming party.

I had a great time at the Anarchist Book Fair with Anirvan. I bought several books (and a t-shirt which said "Free speech is for everybody"; I passed up the Proudhon "to be governed" shirt, but I did get a copy of Proudhon's What is Property?). Afterward, we went to the three bookstores in the 9th and Irving area until dark, and then we spent a while chatting afterward. It's really hard to resist buying books: I ended up buying at least one book everywhere I went that was selling them today.

Chelsea Books was my source for the very interesting Computer Chess Compendium, edited by David Levy -- a very large collection of technical papers on the problems encountered in trying to write chess-playing AI programs. There are all sorts of discussions of position evaluation functions, heuristics, and game tree pruning. I'm sure that some good work has been done since the book was published, but I've never seen any of this material explained in print beyond basic game tree material.

The new Linux Journal came in the mail.

American Amusement

James Tyre pointed out American Amusement v. Kendrick. (This isn't a final opinion; the case was remanded to District Court for further proceedings.)

It was very surprising to learn there that American laws regulate sexually explicit material because it's (considered) offensive rather than because it's (considered) harmful. But such is the view of CA7.

The main worry about obscenity, the main reason for its proscription, is not that it is harmful, which is the worry behind the Indianapolis ordinance, but that it is offensive. A work is classified as obscene not upon proof that it is likely to affect anyone's conduct, but upon proof that it violates community norms regarding the permissible scope of depictions of sexual or sex-related activity. [Citations omitted.] Obscenity is to many people disgusting, embarrassing, degrading, disturbing, outrageous, and insulting, but it generally is not believed to inflict temporal (as distinct from spiritual) harm; or at least the evidence that it does is not generally considered as persuasive as the evidence that other speech that can be regulated on the basis of its content [...]. There are people who believe that some forms of graphically sexual expression, not necessarily obscene in the conventional legal sense, may incite men to commit rape, or to disvalue women in the workplace or elsewhere, see, e.g., Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (1993); but that is not the basis on which obscenity has traditionally been punished. No proof that obscenity is harmful is required either to defend an obscenity statute against being invalidated on constitutional grounds or to uphold a prosecution for obscenity. Offensiveness is the offense.

This is surprising to me. I don't believe other courts would generally agree. (The famous judge Richard Posner wrote this decision; it's interesting to compare it with an earlier decision of his that nude dancing is protected by the first amendment.)

There's something happening here

I speculated in a message to Wolfgang about an emerging political movement with a nexus around free speech, free software, and transparency in technology. I keep running into the same people over and over again in different issues (I made a list); somehow there almost seems to be a consensus in certain circles on a whole range of seemingly not-quite-connected issues. I'd like to write some more about that.

I don't want to make the overreaching speculations that people have come to associate with Jon Katz. He's not a bad writer, but everything with him, but everything, seems to be a revolutionary social paradigm shift. And I just don't think that's right. That's where Wired has often run into trouble: they look for a vast significance in everything. And I don't blame them; I look for a vast significance in everything, and I always suspect that everything has a vast significance. But Wired, say, or Jon Katz, is always telling you they've found it: every month, or every week, they've got the key.

Well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; and sometimes a technology is just a technology, a technologist just a technologist.

Still, I think there's an interesting and somewhat concrete pattern. I don't know just what it is. I keep running into the same people.

Friday

There were some meetings and conversations at Linuxcare relating to the merger with Turbolinux.

I felt a little sick in the afternoon and mostly better. We're still poking at the BBC kernel.

Tomorrow we sign a lease with our new landlord.

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