Dave Winer: Scripting News Awards for 2001. Don’t just sit there; vote for me!
Modesty prevents me from voting for myself. It does not, however, prevent me from writing a Python script to, um, assist you in voting for me. (Hey, the nomination is for Best Scripting Weblog.) However, fatigue prevents me from doing so at the moment. And don’t worry, Dave, honor would prevent me from publishing such a script if I did end up writing it. (That thar’s a whole lotta preventin’ goin’ on.) But you gotta think that someone is going to figure it out. People cheat at everything. Hell, people were cheating to get into the high scores of the prime number shitting bear. Vote early and often.
One interesting note: I was almost up against Eric Soroos in the Best Scripting Weblog category. That’s just too freaky for words. I knew Eric years ago, in another life. We did not part on the best of terms. Three days before I got fired, he emailed me saying that he had read this weblog and wondered how I was doing. I procrastinated responding, not quite knowing what to say after 10 years. Three days later, his was one of the messages sitting in my inbox on my company-assigned laptop when it got hastily backed up, burned to CD, stuffed in a drawer, and never looked at again so I could return the laptop to its rightful owner and get down to the business of being unemployeed.
I wonder if Eric is a member of my karass.
Cameron Barrett: The Dave Winer Big Ego Awards. Cameron and Dave go way back, none of it pretty.
MetaFilter: I guess we should just be happy that 99.9% of the real world doesn’t care who’s blogger of the year.
Winerlog: Just like Dave’s usual badly crafted surveys, now he’s got ‘blog narcissim awards’. Here’s a thought, let’s see how many idiots bother to vote.
Wow, I aspire to someday having entire web sites devoted to mocking me. Then I’ll know I’ve arrived.
Suspect Claims Al Qaeda Hacked Microsoft. This is just bizarre. During interrogation, Afroze, 25, also claimed that a member or members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, posing as computer programmers, were able to gain employment at Microsoft and attempted to plant “trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP.”
In other words, if we give Microsoft a hard time about their buggy software, then the terrorists will have already won.
Kuro5hin is back.
Slashdot: Free & Non-Free Documentation. I am please to announce that I am now starting the GNU Writing Movement with help from the GNU project. We will provide links to existing free documents, with a possibility to rate the documentation quality.
Many people don’t know that the Free Software Foundation, which brought the world the wonderfully controversial GNU General Public License for software, has also written the GNU Free Documentation License for technical writing. Well, theoretically you could use it for any kind of writing, but its purpose was to allow for Free documentation for Free software. I used the FDL for “Dive Into Python”. It is also the license of How to think like a computer scientist (Python edition), DocBook: The Definitive Guide, and many others.
The GNU Free Documentation License is viral in the same sense that the GPL is viral; derivative works must remain under the FDL. This applies to printed versions; a publisher can sell hardcopies, but they must make the same content available online for free. It also applies to translations; for example, “Dive Into Python” has 4 published translations, 2 soon-to-be-published, and 3 in progress or getting started.
More Free documentation links:
- Andamooka:
Andamooka hosts open content books for reading, annotation, and discussion.
List of books. - The Assayer:
Book reviews and discussion for the free-information renaissance.
- Linux Documentation Project:
The Linux Documentation Project is working on developing free, high quality documentation for the GNU/Linux operating system.
- Mandrake Linux 8.1 Reference Manual.
This manual (except the chapters listed below) is protected under MandrakeSoft intellectual property rights. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation…
- GNU.org: GNU Documentation.
- GNU.org: Non-GNU Free Books.
