rants.org

This post isn’t really for a general audience; it’s for friends and acquaintances who’ve had trouble keeping up with my peregrinations (and who have let me know this in increasing numbers over the last month ).
I moved to from San Francisco New York in January 2008. Sort of. What really happened was that [...]

If you’re looking for office space in New York City — as an individual or a company — consider joining forces with New Work City:

Tony Bacigalupo, who is putting together NWC, recently wrote this:
We’re looking for an anchor tenant to join forces with. Ideally, this anchor tenant would be a growing company in an existing space that’s looking [...]

There’s a particularly insidious kind of comment spam nowadays, one that cannot be defeated by automated measures such as captcha. I’ve been noticing more and more of it on QuestionCopyright.org, and I’m sure other web site admins are experiencing the same wave.
I don’t know if this phenomenon has a name yet; perhaps you can [...]

It’s over.
I don’t mean the Democratic Primary, I mean the general election. The whole thing. Barack Obama is going to walk over John McCain like a piece of gum on the sidewalk.

Why?
Watching John McCain speak tonight, I was reminded of a principle my Go teachers often mentioned: don’t make a move to which [...]

My favorite political blog, TalkingPointsMemo, is usually insightful on policy, and even more so on politics. But what really distinguishes it from the competition is the quality of its writing, even in short, ephemeral posts. For example, this is from an item posted today:

“Many of our foreign policy thinkers seem to be developing [...]

I had no idea Brian Fitzpatrick was behind me. Ben Collins-Sussman did, but apparently he wasy too busy filming to shout a warning. Thanks, man. I’ll remember this.

I just sent this letter to New Scientist magazine; no idea if they’ll print it or not, so I’m posting it here too, as several people have recently expressed interest in this idea:
James Love’s proposal for cash prizes to replace today’s patent monopolies (“Fair prices, fair profit”, page 24, Nov. 10-16 New Scientist Special Issue) [...]

Rather than duplicate what I’ve written elsewhere, I’ll just point to it:
http://www.questioncopyright.org/open_government_data_principles
‘Nuff said.

This Friday I attended a productive and unexpectedly fascinating workshop at UC Berkeley, aimed at developing a model policy for archives that host images — often disturbing and graphic ones — from war zones and other areas of violent conflict. In particular, the Iraq war is generating a lot of such footage (it’s the first war in which [...]

As promised, my chapter from O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code book is now online under a free license:
Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology

Of course, no chapter on programming would be complete without tree diagrams…

Since all the authors’ fees are being donated to Amnesty International, an unexpected result of writing a chapter for this book is that I [...]