Category: techie

I have an IBM Thinkpad T21 2648-8AU laptop with a broken modem. This modem apparently is causing boot-level, non-controllable and semirepeatable malfunctioning to various linux distros I have installed. It also causes Windows XP installation to hang up in the middle of it. I later sold the laptop and told the buyer about the problem. The problem remains unsolved. To see OS specific error messages, (more…)

so, i’m using Stephen’s referrer log at http://downes.ca/referrers.htm

and this makes its way to the referrer page:

and that unblurred refferrer links to this address



www5.addfreestats.com/cgi-bin/showuni6.cgi

now what.

Err, I sent this to you via email, then I recalled I had a BLOG (uh…)

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Andrew,
so, I try to comment on your

Blantant misuse of a paper that I wrote
andrewsw.com/news/index.php?p=913

and your comment spam detector thinks I am a spammer. I logged into your blog, with no luck. ):

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First, my condolences.

I’ll vent a bit on something similar that happened recently in the south korean blogging circles regarding a web-based RSS feeding service (Daum RSSNet, rss.daum.net) that benchmarked bloglines.

Something very similar to what was happening to you was done by Daum, and people complained their names were not showing up in the website, etc etc. Do you know what some bloggers suggested in a counterargument?

1) That it was actually good for them because they were getting publicity (how?)
2) That following the copyleft tradition, every single blogger on earth should let their stuff flow freely across the internet.
3) That blogs were designed to be publicly open since they had features such as trackbacks and RSS feeding, and if people didn’t like them (if they didn’t want to be widely publized at the whims of corporations) that they should move over closed, ActiveX based, fucked up private community CMS platforms.

Bastards.
Yup, I just bitched about yellow peoples’ problems in front of a white guy. In english. Sue me.

Ok, I’m done bitching.

Now back to your case.

Credit: TechRepublic is being an ass, but doesn’t it look like the problem in the Michigan State U Boad of Trustees? I mean, Tech Republic saw it there, it was listed as authored by MSUBT, and so they gave credit. They
might not have found your version first. Didn’t they do all that was expected for fair use standards? It seems like MSUBT need to rectify whatever they did with your paper.

Login: that’s messed up. I’m not sure if that violates any existing law, though. Of course it violates common sense, but customary law doesn’t apply intranational, or?

Public domain: I just don’t get it that TechRepublic calls your paper a “white paper” and that “they are publicly available on the internet” for the sole fact that your paper is avaliable at YOUR website. There should be a
semantic difference between the POSSIBILITY of going public and the FACT of being public, the two of them being usually linked together, but not necessarily requiring each other.

So your papaer is factualy public, but that doesn’t necessarily imply you are giving it free rein (in particular, to be used for commercial or pseudocommercial purposes) in terms of distribution. Some people confuse the two. Some people, blatantly disregard the difference and question back, “what’s wrong with what I did?”

What Do Tags Mean? by Tim Bray
tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/01/18/TechnoTags
I’m almost convinced that this new Technorati Tags thing is important, but I’m 100% convinced that I don’t understand where it’s going or what the implications are. Which is OK, because I suspect nobody else does either.

my first impression was that it ressembled hit-or-miss’s weighted categories plugin at wordpress hitormiss.org/projects/weighted-categories now i don’t know the business well but most likely this idea has been around a while. wouldn’t the technorati tags be just another way of representing a distribution of the [category] tag in rss2.0 feeds across the blogosphere?

so there would be a given top x number of categories that technocrati would track down, and then they would be distributed by post quantity. simple huh? as for the undeterminedness of categories, that might be a problem if you deal with a small scale network, but if they do track every single blog (or most of it) as they claim they do, the top big categories should really narrow down to a few mouthfuls. after all, there aren’t that many words in the english language (?)