Copying William Gillis (linkage)

via William Gillis: Shawn Wilbur has made Liberty (1881-1908), one of the most important Anarchist publications, available as PDFs in an archive. Should be interesting and fun. (Post on Human Iterations)

also via Gillis: LOLTheorists. My favorite (that would be Adam Smith, btw):

The Man Who Played Wii

There once was a man who played Wii
All day and all night, to his glee.
"Wii Sports and Big Brain,
I just love 'em!" he'd 'splain,
"I only stop when I have to go pee!"

Cleaning and Painting

So Steve and I have been working diligently on preparing his condo for our habitation come the end of July. We were originally going to start on July 1, but not only were we distracted by our brand-new Device of Distraction (the Wii), Steve's tenants weren't out yet (even though we had asked them in April to be out by July 1). They weren't, in fact, out when we arrived on Wednesday, although they were in the process of leaving. It's fortunate for them that they never paid a deposit or anything, because we spend 5 hours cleaning just the kitchen and the living room that day. And not cleaning as in "vacuuming, mopping and steam cleaning". Oh no. Cleaning as in "putting into trash bags the mounds of garbage left laying around". 6 trash bags Wednesday. We came back on Friday for another 5 hours of 'cleaning', resulting in 8 more trash bags. You don't want to know what the bathroom was like.

Yesterday, though, we were finally able to get some actual work done. With the help of Steve's stepdad, we tore up the carpet in what will be the office, painted it and the hallway, and cleaned (as in mopping and using bleach) the bathroom and the kitchen. Today we're planning on painting the kitchen and the bathroom (and any more touchup on the area we've already painted), and getting the bedroom ready to paint. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to lay the flooring in the next week or so, so that we can start moving stuff from the apartment down. It's a tight schedule, but I think we'll make it.

Article Links for a Hot and Humid Tuesday

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface - Everyone involved in making software should read this.

Social Software and the Politics of Groups - Interesting short article discussing how software developers design for a single user, not for groups, and how this can affect the success or failure of that group's goals.

Representation Versus Depiction - An old (in web terms) essay about the differences and advantages of representation (eg, text, icons) vs. depiction (eg, photographs).

Eben Moglen's "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3"

From the introduction at James Eaton-Lee's transcription of Moglen's speech:

On the 26th June 2007, Eben Moglen gave a talk on "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" hosted by the Scottish Society of Computers and Law, at the Edinburgh University School of Law. This was a highly interesting talk, and particularly topical, since the official release date for GPLv3 was just 3 days later, on Friday the 29th of June 2007.

-- http://jeremiad.org/moglen.shtml

I read the transcription on Groklaw, but there's also one on James Eaton-Lee's site (linked above) and one that's harder to read on the Internet Archive. There's also a video if you have the bandwidth.

Please take the opportunity to read it; Moglen's speech covers much more than merely the GPLv3 and the software industry, but also the changing world we live in.