iTunes Music Store is Evil

I’ve read these things before, but it wasn’t until I bought a CD from the iTunes Music Store, and encountered it’s ugliness first-hand that I can begin to appreciate just how awful it really is.

I bought “Totally Whipped” by the Blenders. Finding a cappella discs from thirteen years ago isn’t so easy; I only ever owned . . . → Read More: iTunes Music Store is Evil

It is worse to copy a movie than shoot someone dead

Today’s post is brought to you by the Creative Commons and BoingBoing.net:

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Shoot someone? Not Smith & Wesson’s fault. Copy a movie? Grokster’s fault
 
Good stuff from Daily Koz.

Regarding Grokster:

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative . . . → Read More: It is worse to copy a movie than shoot someone dead

Swearing in source

It never occurred to me (until this evening) that there might be foul language in the source code I’ve been studying.

Keep an eye on this space for some numbers regarding the use of foul language in source code by the students I’ve been studying for the last two . . . → Read More: Swearing in source

Classrooms are conversations.

Let’s get cranky, shall we?

I’m going to make strong statements, and see if there’s pushback. And, this weekend, I’ll try and turn comments back on. In the meantime, use the gmail address, and I’ll add your comments as they come in.

From Worker Bee, we see this post:

Today I taught my last class of the quarter (Friday . . . → Read More: Classrooms are conversations.

Automator : End-user programming

Automator, a new application in OS X, provides an interesting framework for “end-user programming”.

The application allows the user to drag-and-drop actions, which tie together in a pipeline; there are no conditionals, but you can filter the output of one action before feeding it to another. I’m amazed by its power because of something I wanted to . . . → Read More: Automator : End-user programming

There are other languages, you know.

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, BLOGLINES

Ask Jeeves, Inc. is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Sr. Software Engineer to work at our Los Gatos location. The Software Engineer will develop and implement a large scale data processing system in a distributed environment, in C++. The development tasks involve all aspects of scaling and improving a high-volume end-user . . . → Read More: There are other languages, you know.

Hacking Dashboard widgets

Say you have a widget, but it doesn’t do what you want. The great thing is, they’re only HTML and Javascript.

Take, for example, the widget at right. This is dashLicious, a great widget from protagonist.co.uk. Now, I don’t know if I’ve violated a license anywhere, but I modded my my widget because I wanted to have . . . → Read More: Hacking Dashboard widgets

Oops!

Sometimes we do things because we are dumb.

Lyra:/usr/local/lib mcj4$ ls -al libusb*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root mcj4 37324 Jul 8 18:27 libusb-0.1.4.3.0.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root mcj4 78388 Jul 8 17:29 libusb-0.1.4.4.2.dylib
lrwxr-xr-x 1 mcj4 mcj4 22 Jul 8 18:27 libusb-0.1.4.dylib -> libusb-0.1.4.3.0.dylib
-rw-r–r– 1 root mcj4 48708 . . . → Read More: Oops!

End of the SPAM!

I wanted to generate a quickly searchable database of snippets of text regarding technology surrounding editors, environments, and languages used for teaching CS over the last 50 years. It isn’t complete or comprehensive, but I’ve refreshed myself on key points from a large number of papers in my bibliography, which was the desired outcome.

In the . . . → Read More: End of the SPAM!

2005: Myers and Ko

Different methods, potentially we may have different ways of coming to similar conclusions? Interesting.

Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented IDEs: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks

Design requirements for more flexible structured editors from a study of programmers’ text editing

Yep. . . . → Read More: 2005: Myers and Ko