Earth: Mostly Harmless

Cory Doctorow vs. Microsoft Employee - it’s ON!

After Cory Doctorow, of the EFF and BoingBoing, posted a story on the latter about Norway’s public broadcaster choosing Microsoft’s WMV codecs, and consequently the Janus (or PlaysForSure, or whatever) DRM system, a random Microsoft employee took it upon themselves to issue a stunningly ill-informed response via his MSN Spaces blog. Cory’s post was in [...] (…)

Useful script for Vienna

Vienna is a really nice GPL-ed RSS and Atom newsreader, which I’ve started to use quite a lot. The only thing which was stopping me switching from NetNewsWire completely was the lack of any ability to send things over to MarsEdit. But, behold, Daryl Manning and the Vienna web site came to the rescue with [...] (…)

Unix for the Beginning Mage

TUAW reports on a new UNIX for newbies eBook, available as a free PDF download. But it’s different from anything else I’ve seen - this one uses the euphemism of magic and spells for commands - something I thought might get quite tiresome after the first few pages but seems to really carry through due to the author’s skills of explanation and analogy. It contains one of the best explanations of relative and absolute paths I’ve ever seen:

Paths

Let’s discuss paths a bit more. Paths are just that: paths. In a forest, we walk along paths so we don’t get lost. In the Tower, we follow paths to different rooms. Filesystem paths are no different; they will lead you to different directories and files.

There are two types of paths to know about: absolute and relative. An absolute path is from the root to your destination. It’s like being at the front door of your house and walking to the kitchen. You are starting from the very beginning of your house. The same is true with a filesystem path — it starts from root ( / ). So any path you see that starts with a slash is an absolute path:

/mudroom/hallway/kitchen

A relative path is from your current location to your destination. For example, if you were in your hallway and wanted to go to your bedroom closet, that is a relative path. You’re not starting at your front door since you’re already in your house.

bedroom/closet

Relative paths do not start with a slash — which is a very easy way to tell the difference between absolute and relative paths!
Now, say you’re in your bedroom, but you wanted to leave and go to the kitchen.

../hallway/kitchen

Notice the dot dot ( .. ). That is a special thing in Unix that says “I am leaving my current room”.
Now that you understand paths better, let’s start walking around the Tower of Nix.

Here’s TUAW’s take on it.

Unix for the Beginning Mage:

Filed under: Terminal Tips, Humor, UNIX / BSD

If you want to learn the OS X command line, but find the available books intimidating, bristle at the thought you should read anything for “dummies,” or just worry that you may by eaten by a grue while plumbing the depths of /dev/random, Unix for the Beginning Mage may be just what you’re looking for. The book, available as a free PDF download, takes a humorous approach to learning some basic features of the unix shell and environment. The premise is that you are a mage in some D&D inspired world learning to cast “spells” from the command line. The better your spellcasting becomes, the farther you advance through the “Tower of Nix.” Best of all, the example commands are all executed in the OS X Terminal.app, although it’s basic enough the examples should work without too much effort on other unices as well. So if you’ve been avoiding the command line, you’re officially out of excuses; drop by and read this very, very gentle introduction to Unix the Unix Mages have put together.

Just keep a Scroll of Kill -9 ready and watch out for that grue.

[thanks Scott!]

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

At the Drive-In

A fabulous idea! The best thing is the use of an FM transmitter, so cars attending just need to tune in their radios to hear the movie’s sound track.

MobMov: the mobile movie slash guerilla drive-in in Berkeley, CA

What is the Mobile Movie?

We are a grassroots movement aimed at bringing back the forgotten joy of the great American drive-in. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, what used to be a dark and decrepit warehouse wall springs to life with the sublime sights and sounds of a big screen movie. Best of all, the MobMov is free.

Social networking

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to provide some sort of social network service for students and alumni at universities in Scotland. The thing is, the social side of things at Scottish universities is pretty good - but it does pretty much consist only of bars and nights out, and it’s difficult to meet many people from outside your own faculty other than through this sort of thing. What I’d like to see more of are kind of ‘half-way’ activities like informal societies and shared interest groups, to try to extend the links between disparate groups at the universities, and increase the general sense of ‘community’.

First of all, my journey started at the Facebook, an impressive social network for students and alumni, which having expanded out of its US homeland is available in about 20 HE institutions in the UK. Andrew Gruen introduced me to this, and while it’s impressive, it’s really only the beginning of what might be possible using social networks.

Last week in a History tutorial I discovered a whole range of interesting, and obscure, links between people attending. Several groups knew one or two other people there, but gradually it emerged that a lot more linked the attendees than was obvious at first. The tutor also mentioned that he had been keeping up with what a few ex-classmates were up to using Friends Reunited. While the intentions of FR may be admirable, it has two limitations for me: firstly, the only real semantic information is based on names, classes and schools; and the second is that it’s a horribly commercial endeavour. I think anything of this nature should essentially be student-led.

What struck me was that all of the extraneous information which people might want to submit could be presented in a semantic form, à la Facebook, but that on the scale of an individual institution, much deeper and more interesting links might be formed than what’s possible there.

The most obvious difference is that people will often know each other better - but on an institutional scale, it might also be possible to leverage clubs, societies and unions into providing semantics (or even allowing users to create metadata on their membership of such things that would emerge into a structure of sorts). Furthermore, the social network itself might be a highly suitable place for clubs and societies to base themselves and recruit new members. After all, if you can see others who are also interested in 2nd century Greek pottery, you might find (obscure societies permitting) that there’s a group set up for just your sort, or choose to set one up of your own.

Enter Ning. A development platform and API for social network apps. I’m going to give this a go, and possibly steal huge swathes of code (possibly). I don’t think it’d be very suitable for actual deployment but it might be useful as a playground to see what’s possible, and how it might work. Also, I’ve been tentatively looking into joining the Geek Society at UoS, so I’ll see if any of them are interested in looking into it. Spoken Word (where I work) might also be interested - hopefully in hosting, but it might also be relevant to the Shibboleth project we’re bidding for.

Unfortunately, as you can see, Strathclyde doesn’t exactly have a thriving societies scene, so I think a Glasgow-wide deployment might be appropriate. It also makes sense given the large numbers of intra-institution social links between students at the University of Glasgow, GCU, the University of Paisley and so on. Who knows, I might even get the unions on board.