After The Art of UNIX Programming, I started reading The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. The Mythical Man-Month is about software engineering. It’s not about code. Rather, it talks about how to manage software engineering teams. See, it was written all the way back in the seventies, before the advent of personal computers. Think supercomputers. Yeah. Kinda hard. It was for me too.
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I have no idea what to do about the church website. If I put my mind to it, I could probably finish it easily. The problem is, I’m one of the people who are in charge of the website. I’ve been given a team of people who are interested in this website, and a few people who are skilled but were put in too. It’s been what? A year now? Maybe half a year? Continue reading
Earlier, I linked to Lawrence Lessig’s OSCON 2002 talk. You can have a look at it over at the Recent Linkage. The above four points were the refrain that Lessig came up with to understand. Keep in mind that although Lessig talks a lot about texts and code, he means culture. Culture encompasses music, movies, writings, and much more. Note his example of Walt Disney ripping, mixing, and burning Steamboat Bill into Mickey Mouse and building the Disney of today. I managed to find a transcript and will now highlight a few things. Continue reading
CD burners didn’t just make it easy to copy CDs, they made people realize that CDs cost almost nothing to make. On the same record store shelf, stacks of 30 cent blank CDs sit next to the record companies’ $16 jewel cases. And if it costs a regular person 30 cents to make a perfect copy on their home computer, imagine how little it costs when you own a factory. Even if you’ve never burned a CD in your life, you feel like an idiot paying $16 for CDs when you know you don’t have to anymore. Furthermore, people know a lot more these days about how the music industry works– at least they understand that not much of the $16 ends up in musician’s hands. We’ve all watched multi-platinum bands on Behind the Music file for bankruptcy before they realize how much of a scam their record contract was.
I just had a brilliant idea. It came to me while I was reading through my daily reading list of blogs. For some reason, every once in a while, a Firefox will tell me that a site is down and immediately after I try again, it works. This time it was Planet ArsLinux, the Linux users of Ars Technica. Now then, a Planet is a program that creates a site and aggregates all of the blogs of the members into one big blog.
Who is interested in being part of a Planet TJCAC or something like that? I could set up the planet on orangesimile, and all I would need is your feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), which most blogs should have set up automatically. Tell me now.