There’s a school of thought that URIs should be opaque identifiers with no inherent meaning or structure. I think this is clearly a bad idea on the human-facing web, but it is more reasonable for computer-facing web services. However, I’ve been generating a lot of RDF lately, trying to organize piles of metadata in AltLaw.…
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New York State’s Office for Technology released a Request for Public Comment on selecting an XML-based office data format. The choices are OASIS’ ODF and Microsoft’s OOXML. Responses were due by 5 p.m. today, Dec. 28. My response is below, submitted just in time to meet the deadline. I didn’t have time to answer all…
Further thoughts on my new XO-1 Laptop: It is possible to type on it, albeit not as fast as on a regular keyboard. It’s a real Linux installation — Redhat — on an x86-compatible processor. You can run “yum” in a root shell to install any package you want. The hardware/software integration needs some more…
Just got my XO-1 laptop today, and I’m using it to write this post. First impressions: It’s light–weighs about as much as a hardback book. The screen is sharp and readable, with or without the backlight. The built-in rubber keyboard is difficult for an adult to touch-type on. I’m hoping I’ll get used to it.…
While playing with my current all-consuming project, AltLaw.org, I came across this case: Wallace v. IBM. In 2006 a man named Daniel Wallace sued various distributors of GNU/Linux, including IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, for “price-fixing.” Since the GPL ensures Linux will always be free, Wallace argued, he cannot afford to enter the market with…
After the New York Times’ premature announcement of AltLaw.org — I don’t mind, publicity is good — I discovered the downside of getting linked, even indirectly, from a major site. I woke this morning to find 632 bounced spam messages in my inbox sent from spoofed “@stuartsierra.com” addresses. Gotta update my catch-all email settings.
I have achieved the dream of every geek: I have become a professional blogger. Well, sort of. In February I was hired as the Assistant Director of the new Program on Law and Technology at Columbia Law School. I’ll be doing a mixture of programming, web design, and administration for … whatever we decide to…
Working alongside legal academics, I hear a lot about a web site called SSRN, the Social Science Research Network. It’s a free service that hosts thousands of academic papers on law, economics, and business. It also tracks the number of times each paper is downloaded and publishes regular reports on the most-downloaded papers and authors.…
I just noticed that the Askimet spam filter plugin for WordPress provides PHP code to display its spam-comments-blocked counter on your blog. I wonder: could one use the number of spam comments received as a measure of a blog’s popularity? Presumably spam bots target sites that are more heavily linked by other sites, making them…