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My Writings Other Reading Books My Writings Surviving in the Age of Free, Open Information How have the means of surviving that are closely tied with information changing in the Information Age? Why I Like Unix An excerpt of an email response I sent to my dad, after he mentioned he was reading an article compaing the cost of Linux vs. Windows. I talk about why cost is a minor factor in the decision for me; I like the programmability and toolbox of unix.

Perl Tips I’ve created this documentation because I’ve been programming with Perl constantly and extensively for the past four years. wish to help up-and-coming Perl programmers achieve their finest. The vitals use strict; Always, always, always, in all of your code, always use strict;. You use this pragma by having a line at the top of your code: use strict; This module enforces prepending data types with their proper labeling; this means prepending scalar names with $, arrays with @, and hashes with %.

Below are projects that I have my eye on, ones I plan on following through on in my free time. If you have any comments, or are interested in working on one of them with or without me, or just giving me some ideas, let me know. Also let me know if you know of such a project already in the works, started by someone else; I hate to duplicate effort.

Lawrence Lessig, in the future of ideas RCA From the beginning of chapter 13: In the 1970’s RCA was experimenting with a new technology for distributing film on magnetic tape — what we would come to call video. Researchers were keen not only to find a technology that could reproduce film with high fidelity; they were also keen to find a way to control the use of the technology.

Introduction Having botched releases is a software developer’s nightmare. One spends a lot of work designing, coding, and publicizing, only to have it so that users who download the just-released package can’t use it at all. This destroys users’ faith in the software and developer, and may not even come back to it when the problem is fixed. Even worse, often the users will not even report the problems to the author, so the developer is left in the dark as to the fact users are having problems!

Initially this writing was going to talk about surviving as a programmer in the age of Open Source. However, as I thought more about it, what I’m really trying to cover is the entire, broad spectrum of issues that have and will continue to arise as long as information becomes more and more free to reproduce, modify, and share. This writing will discuss the implications of the new movements, and suggest how to survive among them.