Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Update: Slides and video available at LispNYC. Ok, it’s really happening this time: Stuart Sierra presents: Implementing AltLaw.org in Clojure This talk demonstrates the power of combining Clojure with large Java frameworks, such as: Hadoop – distributed map/reduce processing Solr – text indexing/searching Restlet – REST-oriented web framework Jets3t – Amazon S3 Join us from…
We had to cancel my talk for tomorrow night, due to problems with the venue. LispNYC will still meet at the Sunburnt Cow, 137 Avenue C, for drinks and discussion. My presentation has been postponed to the June meeting.
Up at Cornell, Tom Bruce has a post about the problem of funding open access to legal materials. This brings to mind a conversation I had with a doctor friend recently about AltLaw. My friend, accustomed to the open-access requirements of NIH grants, was frankly shocked that there are no comparable rules for legal decisions.…
What makes an on-line community? In the past two weeks I have received announcements of three new “communities” all interested in using open-source software to retrieve, share, and analyze data from or about governments. Most of these announcements say the same thing: “A lot people seem to be working on this, but they aren’t talking…
Part of what I hope to do with the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia is bridge the communication gap between lawyers and engineers. The two groups think completely differently. To take a recent example, a new P2P file-sharing system has emerged called the Owner-Free Filesystem (OFF). It stores and transmits only chunks of…
The web is a strange beast. Server logs reveal just how strange. Someone’s crawling AltLaw.org, sending an HTTP Referrer of “http://www.nero.com/enu/downloads-nero8-trial.php” with a User-Agent identified as “MSIE 5.00; Windows 98”. What the heck?
Finally, my blog has a new theme. I liked the old one, but it was getting a bit… old. And the serif-font-on-a-translucent-background-image was never a great idea. I didn’t have time for a complete redesign, so I settled on the excellent Mandigo theme by onehertz. The header image is my own — the view from…
I need a new laptop. My current machine, a rebranded ASUS that I bought on the cheap a few years ago, has developed a crack in the screen hinge, so it’s only a matter of time. I have to admit, I’m sorely tempted by the Macbook Air. It’s a beautiful machine — sleek, light, even…
Paul Graham writes, “Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. … And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits.” Harsh but true. I’ve never been to Cambridge, and never lived in any city…
Since we started putting court cases on the interwebs, first with Project Posner and then with AltLaw, we’ve had the occasional angry email from someone who Googles himself/herself and finds a court case from 20 years ago that reveals embarrassing and career-damaging facts. They usually want the page taken down. Now, sometimes I’m sympathetic with…