Advogato blog for wseltzer

10 Oct 2000

Tue, 10 Oct 2000 10:20:57 GMT

Some people have been taking interest in the annotation engine, a collaborative annotation project I've been working on sporadically. (Thanks rsp and lkcl.)

Interesting, I also just got spam from Third Voice about the latest version of their still-IE-only browser plugin. (I won't sell my soul for that...) Annotator predates Third Voice for public commentary on web pages hosted elsewhere, and itself owes a lot to the CritLink mediator. It's server based, so much more portable than Third Voice -- once you've navigated the frames, it even looks decent in lynx. Right now, however, it's very slow, mostly at the stage of very inefficient pattern-matching to place notes in the text. It's just a set of Perl scripts talking to a mySQL database if anyone wants to poke around :-).

Ultimately, I'd want to use tools like this in the Openlaw project for collaborative development and editing of documents. Mailing lists have their limits. Law firms must be among the most technologically backward places, so I can claim this to have some sort of relevance to what I'm supposed to be spending my time doing.

27 Aug 2000

Sun, 27 Aug 2000 02:35:30 GMT

So, I'm as bad at keeping an electronic diary as I ever was at keeping one on dead trees. Still reeling under the oppressive weight of Judge Kaplan's decision against 2600 in the NY DVD case, as well as a huge amount of ordinary work (legal research and drafting in other areas).

I got a real laugh out of this dramatic reading of css_descramble.c, and this musical rendition (both MP3). At least if we're being tarred as members of the so-called "open source" movement, which is dedicated to the proposition that material, copyrighted or not, should be made available over the Internet for free, we still have a sense of humor. (Not to belittle the serious point these renderings make that it's impossible to draw a line beyond which a program has no expressive content.)

Westlaw calls...

9 Aug 2000

Wed, 9 Aug 2000 22:36:59 GMT

After the EFF and MPAA briefs pass as ships in the night to Judge Kaplan's chambers, we wait to see whom he gives what grounds for appeal...and how soon. Time, perhaps, for a mid-term assessment of the Openlaw strategy (or more likely, for more law-firm-associate hacking at briefs and research questions).

(so, how does the trust metric deal with certifications on different scales -- I'm here more on the strength of my legal work, supporting open source/free sofware through work with the Berkman Center and its Openlaw project, than my unsightly Perl programming, I'm sure -- can I certify others based on their participation in the DeCSS defense?)

(and why do these textboxes keep eating my quotation marks?)