Pop over to Flickr to see my photos of Ballunar Fest 2006, in particular Sunday morning’s Key Grab competition.
Archive for August, 2006
Hey, not too shabby! Cuckoo is featured today over at Apple’s Mac OS X downloads site. (If you scroll down the page you’ll see that Pyrothèque is a Hot Pick, too. Oh, and, what up, FuzzMeasure!)
[Permanent links to toastycode products on Apple’s download site: Cuckoo, Pyrothèque.]
Amar writes: “Settlers is OURS now. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.” (IGN: EA Acquires SpellForce Creator, also owner of the Settlers of Catan franchise)
Well, the website for Rice’s undergraduate orientation week has finally undergone a total redesign (probably a result of a new upper echelon at the university, including a new Dean of Undergraduates). Verdict: blah.
The front page is slick and impersonal, and the undergraduate information is buried under a haystack of JavaScript menus. Not particularly engaging. The copy is new, too:
The mission of O-Week is to assist new students in the transition to academic and social life at Rice University, with the two primary functions being: to provide academic advising and to introduce and incorporate new students into their residential colleges. Informative presentations, small-group discussions, academic advising, and class registration are designed to help you enter the university informed and confident about your upcoming years at Rice.
YAWN. Sorry for the snoozer, Class of 2010.
Of course, I’m partial to the version I designed for O*Week 1998, whose design (roughly) and text (exactly) survived two redesigns and seven years.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
These people are all dressed the same, and they know who I am, and they’re telling me I’m going to be LIVING in their building!
These people are crazy! Get me out of here!
WHOA, THERENow calm down. These people have been planning for months, and they’ve been working without sleep for days, doing nothing but preparing for your arrival.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t really vouch for their sanity.
But these are your advisors — a team of several older Rice students who have sworn to spare you from the dull sort of orientation you would have been subjected to at another school. You simply can’t adjust to an intense new atmosphere by sitting in 2,000-seat lecture halls with people you may never see again, listening to boring lectures by faculty you’ll never meet.
To put it another way (taken from the Will Rice College 1998 O-Week book): “You may be nervous, sweaty, and even scared, but we guarantee that you will remember your O-Week.”
OK, are you with me now? Good.
Welcome to O-Week.
I was always pretty proud of that legacy, and it’s sad to see it go. Oh, well; times change, and websites move on.
[On the other hand, the photos that they’re using on the new O-Week website do appear to be from the late 90s…]
Update: What, no information for transfer students on the new site?
Update 2: Yeah, yeah, the new site has all kinds of handy information that the 1998 version lacked. (This is partially because in eight years a lot has been done to put handy university information online.) So I guess I give the new site points for being somewhat more useful than previous versions. But it’s definitely not as much fun.
Some interesting stuff in the Houston Chronicle yesterday and today. First off, today’s frontpager, College parents find it hard to let go, featuring a number of cute Rice stories:
“I don’t want to find any of you hiding in the hedges tonight,” Leebron told a concert hall filled with parents Sunday.
But not everyone is ready to leave. Rekha Malhotra, of Fort Collins, Colo., cried as her youngest son, Parteek, unpacked his belongings.
“I have to call her every day,” Parteek said. “I thought she was joking at first.”
Move It!: Points to Ponder about Metro.
Culberson is fond of calling Metro’s post-election attraction to Richmond a bait and switch. Translation: Previous Metro leaders left Richmond off the ballot for tactical reasons, intending to resurrect it if the measure passed. Thus “Metro created this dilemma,” as he said recently.
The same kind of thinking — cynical or just reasonably suspicious? — might lead others to conclude that Culberson baited the trap by insisting that the routes be spelled out as a condition of his support, then kept quiet as Metro walked into it.
Let’s assume instead that both Culberson and Metro are acting in good faith.
Finally, on Sunday, an editorial calling for VVPATs (voter-verifiable paper audit trails; the ed refers to them simply as VVPBs—”… ballots”) in Texas voting machines, and an op-ed rebuttal by County Clerk Beverly Kaufman.
Last week at the Usenix Security Symposium, I gave an invited talk, with the same title as this post. The gist of the talk was that the debate about DRM (copy protection) technologies, which has been stalemated for years now, will soon enter a new phase. I’ll spend this post, and one or two more, explaining this.
Though his post isn’t exactly a recap of the talk Professor Felten delivered, it’s an excellent survey of the points and ideas he presented in that talk, which I was fortunate enough to hear in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. At the end of the talk, I got up and asked what now seems like an embarrassingly dumb question:
Dan Sandler: You mentioned that there is an argument to be made in favor of using DRM-based lock-in to reward companies for their R&D investment [example during the talk: Apple and iTunes/iPod/iTMS]. Don’t we already have a well-established legal tool for exactly this purpose, called “patents”? Used this way, DRM is like a meta-patent-factory [yes, I actually said this—what was I thinking?] that can create patent-like protection, enforced by technology, without any kind of oversight or expiration date. So, my question is this: Do you think that, as “copyright” loses primacy in future arguments for DRM, the DRM debate will meet up with the ongoing technology-patents debate mid-stream?
Prof. Felten: I have to admit that it’s quite refreshing to come to USENIX Security and hear someone arguing in favor of patents.
[The Audience laughs thunderously.]
Of course, the correct (read: witty) riposte here would have been, simply, “I’m new here.” Failing that, I mumbled something or other into the microphone, and Felten continued by explaining that, yes, you might think that a great meeting of the minds will take place in the halls of government, debating the issue on the merits, whereas what will actually happen is all the people who like {patents, DRM, flag-burning, kitten-killing, whatever} will stand on one side of the room, all their opponents will stand on the other side, and each side will be counted to determine who wins.
Hey, this little improvement snuck past me during the glut of WWDC semi-hype: RSS reception coming to Mail.app in Leopard/10.5.
Chronicle: Culberson wants rail along Southwest Freeway. “The Houston Republican wants Metro to align the rail route with the Southwest Freeway from Main to near Kirby, where the sunken road, in essence, runs through a long concrete box.”
What Culberson, the Afton Oaks residents, and other rail opponents miss (through honest or willful misunderstanding) is that the Universities line is not intended to be primarily a commuter rail. It is instead a part of the ongoing long-term process of revitalizing and integrating Houston’s central neighborhoods; it will connect residents and students to existing workplaces and retail inside the loop. If you build the Universities rail line where there are no residents and no businesses, nobody will ride it. Now that’s a waste of tax dollars.
This isn’t urban planning; this is rail sabotage, and election-year constituency pandering that will have a detrimental impact on Houston revitalization for decades. To read more about resident-focused and business-friendly urban planning that can be brought to bear on the problem, poke around Christof Spieler’s Intermodality blog (look here for hard facts about rail on Richmond).
(Update, 12AM: When, by the way, will the ridiculous argument that “this line was voted on Westpark” die? Anti-Richmond-railers argue that the ballot explicitly places the east-west Universities line along the Westpark corridor, because that line’s bullets are under the heading “WESTPARK”. Does this mean we should also expect a rail line along a road called “SOUTHEAST”? METRO hadn’t yet conducted feasibility studies for the Universities line, and so the “WESTPARK” section is consequently quite vague, especially when compared with the other sections which identify specific roads and rights-of-way that will be involved in those other lines. Besides, even the Westpark corridor doesn’t extend all the way to Wheeler Station; Richmond must be involved somewhere, and as you can see it’s a part of every proposal METRO has put on the table.)
Update 8/14: Charles Kuffner follows up the Chron article with a clear statement of the anti-rail endgame:
The plan is simple: If Richmond is off the table, Metro is forced to put forth a lesser plan, such as this elevate-it-over-the-freeway scheme. The required feasibility studies then show that ridership will be insufficient and the expense will be excessive. Naturally, the Federal Transportation Administration refuses to provide funding, leaving Metro with the choice of finding its own money or giving up. And thus the anti-rail forces win.
