{"id":911,"date":"2009-09-23T17:12:06","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T21:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=911"},"modified":"2009-09-24T12:01:35","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T16:01:35","slug":"odd-lots-82","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=911","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>Maybe I thought of it first. I don&#8217;t care. <a href=\"http:\/\/blackerton.posterous.com\/and-getting-weaker\">This guy did a great job<\/a>. What He Said.<\/li>\n<li>I was wrong about the Alice programming environment: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alice.org\/downloads\/authoringtool\/linux_readme.htm\">There is in fact a version for Linux<\/a>, though the developers admit it&#8217;s a little buggy and largely &#8220;proof-of-concept.&#8221; (Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com\/213446.html?thread=805318#t805318\">xuwande on LiveJournal<\/a> for the tip.) To me, Alice looks a lot like the primordial Alto-based Smalltalk environment described in the seminal 1977 Xerox publication, <em>Personal Dynamic Media<\/em>, and I&#8217;ll install and explore the product (probably under Windows) as time allows.<\/li>\n<li>And even though this is mostly a research project (with no promises or even strong hints that it will ever become a product) <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5365299\/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet\">the Microsoft Courier<\/a> looks mighty good to me from an ebook reader standpoint. The interface is a little busy for my tastes, but we&#8217;ll see how it goes. Maybe it would be a waste of the device to use it for nothing but reading ebooks, but I consider it my prerogative to waste whatever part of a device I don&#8217;t consider useful.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe it&#8217;s not just me. As much as I like the Kodak EasyShare pocket cameras (Carol and I each have one) the EasyShare software is hideous and has given me nothing but trouble. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/gadgetlab\/2009\/09\/hands-on-with-the-horrible-kodak-photo-frame-key-fob\/\">This seems to be a trend<\/a>. Can you imagine a new Mac app from a major vendor that still needs PowerPC emulation? Egad.<\/li>\n<li>I guess it&#8217;s better for a church to be full of books than empty of prople, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2009\/09\/23\/church-converted-int.html\">these guys did not do a bad job<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Suddenly we have <a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2009\/09\/22\/the-sun-perks-up-some-real-spots\/\">not one but two large sunspots visible at once<\/a>, a situation not seen for over a year. Alas, I spun the dials earlier this morning, and 15 meters isn&#8217;t any livelier than it usually is here, which is to say, dead.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.computerworld.com\/14788\/google_book_settlement_goes_back_to_the_drawing_board\">The Google Books Settlement may well be dead on legal grounds<\/a>, something that doesn&#8217;t surprise me at all. What Google needs to do now is just publish an open invitation: &#8220;Anybody who holds rights to a printed work and wants the work to be posted on Google Books under the terms below, fill out this form. We&#8217;ll handle the scanning.&#8221; I&#8217;d be first in line in what I&#8217;m pretty sure would be a stampede that would sooner or later bring in all the the stubbornest skeptics. The key: <em>I&#8217;m willing to admit that my out-of-print works aren&#8217;t worth much<\/em>. 1% of a loaf is still better than no loaf at all.<\/li>\n<li>ADDED 9\/24\/2009: Here&#8217;s a guy saying something that isn&#8217;t often said: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/epicenter\/2009\/09\/preserve-google-books\/\">Google Books is a fantastic research tool<\/a>, and far from being evil, the Google Books settlement was just the first (now aborted) effort at something that <em>simply has to be done<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe I thought of it first. I don&#8217;t care. This guy did a great job. What He Said. I was wrong about the Alice programming environment: There is in fact a version for Linux, though the developers admit it&#8217;s a little buggy and largely &#8220;proof-of-concept.&#8221; (Thanks to xuwande on LiveJournal for the tip.) To me, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[41,17,15,16,14],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware","tag-publishing","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":913,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions\/913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}