one small voicestpeter's blog: The weblog of Peter Saint-Andre, patron saint of Jabber and sometime poet, philosopher, and musicianBe Open- May 30, 2007 Is interoperability enough Principle Six of the Mozilla Manifesto reads as follows: The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide. That's great as far as it goes, but interoperability is not enough. AbiWord is interoperable with MS Word, email is interoperable with SMS through suitable gateways, Ghostscript is...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-30T15:53 Pressing- May 30, 2007 Contemplating a blog upgrade... Joe Hildebrand has moved to WordPress now that it has support for Atom 1.0. Maybe it's time for me to switch from the homegrown XML format I use. But given that I've been blogging quite actively since September 13, 2001, this would be a big migration!http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-30T15:23 GSoC Update- May 29, 2007 First meeting... We just finished our first meeting of Jabber GSoC students and mentors, with everyone in attendance but Tomasz Melcer (who is working on Jingle support in Gajim). A meeting log is here for the curious. Conclusions: Mentors will work individually with students on milestones and project issues as they arise. Both mentors and students will blog weekly about results and challenges so we stay on course. To help me keep track...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-29T11:59 By the Way- May 29, 2007 That and which in English grammar... Recently someone IM'd me about the grammatical distinction between "that" and "which". While there are lots of nuances involved (language is fun but messy), to me the main difference is that you use "which" in phrases where you'd naturally say "by the way", whereas you use "that" in phrases that are directly descriptive of something. Consider a few sentences: The burrito that I had this morning was the best I ever...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-28T20:59 Ish- May 29, 2007 Yet another suffix... In yesterday's post about bricks I said that my wife and I had moved a largish pile of them (today I counted and came up with 896 bricks, which I'd warrant is a largish pile!). What's up with this "-ish" suffix As far as I can see, there are several meanings of "-ish" in English adjectives: Well I just used one, meaning "of a certain nation" -- as in English, Swedish, and Netherlandish. Another is "having the qualities of" --.http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-28T17:17 Breaking News- May 28, 2007 The future of newspapers... In a recent article from the Columbia University alumni magazine, David Craig wonders: "Ten years from now, will people in Dallas or Cincinnati or Pittsburgh pick up a local newspaper every morning" I wonder: Does it matter if the newspaper industry is dominated by businesses that are regionally owned, operated, or focused Do people in Seattle or El Paso or Philadelphia drive regionally-designed cars to regionally-operated hardware..http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-27T21:13 The Wisdom of the Brick- May 28, 2007 A wonderful stability... While my wife and I were moving a largish pile of bricks today, I was reminded of some words from Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn (pp. 120-121): Brick is a superlative building material, the product of 8,000 years of experience in firing clay into modular units that can be mortared together and stacked by hand into unreinforced structures as high as sixteen stories. insert reference to the Monadnock Building here .......http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-27T20:33 SoC Blogs- May 24, 2007 Tracking summer progress... If you're interested in following the progress of the Jabber-related Summer of Code projects, check out the following student blogs: badlop is working on extended stanza addressing and other features in the ejabberd server. Armando Diaz-Jagucki is adding support for personal eventing to the Openfire server. Tobias Markmann is building a tool for designing XMPP data forms. Tomasz Melcer is making the Gajim...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-24T12:01 Revolutionary America- May 23, 2007 Radical equality in action... This post by Victor Davis Hanson seems right on to me, especially his observations about the radical nature of American society: Globalization is mostly driven by the United States, whether defined by the spread of the English language, crass advertising, the Internet, American pop culture of rap, jeans and I-pods or worldwide businesses like Starbucks and MacDonald's. A global sameness seems to trample traditional cultures.http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-22T21:33 Anything But a Right- May 23, 2007 Language matters... Certain sectors of the Internet are all a-twitter about Mark Helprin's recent essay in favor of perpetual copyright. Much sound and fury has ensued, but a great proportion of it signifies nothing because it does not strike at the root of the argument that Helprin and his ilk make. And striking at the root means recognizing this: that copyright is not a right. There is no right to forcibly prevent others from making copies of texts,...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-22T20:41 |