Oct. 29th, 2003

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Gloomy, like Eeyore.

Didn't make it to the pool this morning. I overslept and couldn't get up the energy to get out of bed anyway. By the time I climbed into the shower, it was already 6:20, much later than I usually make it out of bed. I did get onto the bus in time, which was reassuring.

Yesterday, Yamaarashi-chan came over and helped up carve up the pumpkin in anticipation of the holiday this Friday evening. That'll be fun. The girls scooped out the pumpkin innards and helped draw the commercial stencil face, then Omaha and I carved out the drawing. Omaha and I made dinner together-- she made chicken nuggets in a bread and herb sauce with honey dip for the girls, and had me cook sage-crusted chicken thighs in white wine on a bed of polenta, tomatoes, and proscuitto.

As some of you might recall a couple of months ago I posted my "Works in Progress" list for stories. Here's the sister list:

Long list )

Of these, the one I'm most serious about is Plotlines; I've obviously been making progress towards getting it written, although right now that progress is stymied by resources-- the amount of time I need to dedicate to programming is much greater than that of writing.

But there are others there that I really would love to get to. ObjectiveWeb is a webserver like WebObjects, only written entirely in C++ with a Python front-end so one could write mostly HTML with some inserted logic for results, tables, and automated forms, and have it all "just work." GoX is a return to my college love of the obscure art of static databases, where the dictionary of document terms would be paralleled with a dictionary of tags, allowing incredibly fast access to static collections of heirarchal data archived for long-term storage. I've even run some test programs-- on reasonably modern hardware (a 7200 RPM hard drive and a Pentium-2 CPU) and a database crunched down to half its original size, retreiving and decompressing the target of a known XPath would be twice as fast as operating on the uncompressed original.

And last but not least, there's Faeryloom. This is strictly in the brainstorming phase, but look: GnomeVFS provides plenty of back-end features, NEON or CVS provide for collaboration and content management of sources, Gecko provides standards-compliant rendering, Conglomerate has an excellent XML-containerizing view of the document object, Bluefish has a great editing front-end for HTML text, and Denim (A java product under the BSD license) is probably the most intuitive interface for the rapid development of websites I've ever seen. Between these tools, there is no reason GTK/Gnome lacks for a Dreamweaver clone except programmer laziness.

If I had a spare lifetime...
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Protection From Elves Week, 2003
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation

Elves can have debilitating effects on communities, marriages, families, and children. During Protection From Elves Week, we commit to take steps to confront the dangers of elves.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE DUBYA, President of the Christian Nation of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 26 through November 1, 2003, as Protection From Elves Week. I call upon public officials, law enforcement officers, parents, and all the people of the United States to observe this week with appropriate programs and activities.
elfs: (Default)
I cannot believe this crap!

Look, if I write software, it's mine. It's my property. Do you know what the legal definition of "proprietary" means? It means, simply, owned by someone.

If I license the software to you, I still own it. It has my copyright on it. It's mine, I've just given you certain legal rights with respect to using it. One of those rights may be the right to redistribute the software; another right may be to examine the source code; another right may be to modify the source code; and finally, one right may be to redistribute the software with those modifications.

I may attach certain legal responsibilities to those rights, such as the right to attribution, or the maintenence of clear demarcations of responsibility between my original code and your changes.

SCO wants to argue that if I don't charge money, if I don't keep my property "secret," I have no right to make such agreements with others. Since I've not kept my intellectual property secret, I have no right to it as "property." I'm not being "proprietarian" in the sense SCO wishes to redefine this very common legal term.

The GPL is a contract; it's clear contract law. SCO wants to take away the hard work I've done and make it "fair game," to destroy my copyrights and void my contracts.

I'm so fucking furious right now I'm nearly seeing red.

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Elf Sternberg

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