I have learned that PHP is an excellent shell-scripting language for Windows. Using the COM interface, you can do all sorts of crazy stuff to Office apps using PHP.

Unfortunately, this is really poorly documented.

So, when the developer (me) is under pressure, it's actually quicker to learn VB than to use PHP. Sucks.

i live in new york, which is the biggest city in the country and probably the richest city in the world. now, the following is my opinion and it might be bullshit, but...

NY should be an ass kicking all out party town if you just look at the math. there are mad colleges, bars, freaks, beautiful people, artists, musicians. there are a million places to go out and bands play here all the time.

why does new york fall short? i have never quite known the answer to this. maybe everyone's just too busy working their asses off to enjoy themselves. once you stop working your ass off, you are too poor to go out, or so it seems.

maybe there is too much choice and you can never get enough people to focus on one thing, one spot, or one movement to make it make a dent in the seas of humanity.

or MAYBE the thing is that everything that can be done here is rooted out and discovered too early by too many people. a cool place opens up on your block and it's in a magazine before you even get to go there. every show i want to go to is always last week or sold out. my favorite places to go are so crowded on the weekends it's fucking ridiculous. in the summer, even the stoops where you could just sit and sneak a beer are full of other people. who ever heard of sharing a stoop? i've done it. basically, there are so many people here who want to go out and hang out, that if where you are is not crowded, you got to start asking yourself why.

i don't know. somehow, it's the medium sized places like cleveland and shit where you hae a really wild time.

am i wrong?

my home is my room. my apartment is one room big. what does this have to do with computers? nothing. fuc k you.

i threw out a lot of my stuff. i got rid of boxes full of stuff. someday i may remember that stuff and want it, but mostly i did not even know i had it in the first place. either that, or it brought back bad memories. i have a lot of those.

now the opposite is happening. in my newly empty roompartment i am letting the shit pile up. little shit. coffee cup lids, full ashtrays, beer cans, scraps of paper, the dishes. my kitchen counter has a tower of beercans right now, and a paper bag. it is comforting. it reminds me that i am concentrating on the important. i am keeping my nose to the grindstone.

here is another measure of how well i am focusing: i have not read this site in a few days. actually, not since last friday. i have been too busy doing other shit, but i havev been right here on the computer, with /. a short while away.

that is called a full life. it is good. it is good to be busy in this way. soon, my semester will start up againn and i will be busy in the other way. i will then maybe distract myself with this place again.

here's something else i was thinking of:
some of my colleagues came up with a great project last semester. it's a p2p ide. looked at another way, it's an IM client with a built-in IDE, where one user can take control of the document in the editor and edit while the others see the changes in real time on their screens.

that is some serious groupware shit. similar to groove which is cool, though totally ms specific, so it sucks in the end.

decentralized groupware is the future. the friendnet is decentralized groupware. like outlook, and like a file server, without the file server or the exchange server.

porridge with honey.

Is anyone else feeling Mp3 Guilt?

I have no love for the record companies. They provide no service to the world, except to create artifial scarcity of that which can now be distributed without them.

I have 18 GB of mp3s, though. I do feel as if some of the musicians should be compensated. I have Mp3 Guilt.

today was my day to install redhat 8.0 on my computer. one of my computers.

i got started not too late, and began a massive backup of my mp3 collection. when i got back from the glasses store, the backup as done. deleted 18 GB of MP3s. it felt wierd.

now to resize the ntfs partition to make room for RH. I have a 27GB partition with 21GB free. OK, download the ntfs utils and set about following the instructions to boot into linux using the RH cD and then use the utility from the shell.

problem numero uno: in my laptop, there is an interchangable fd/cd module. i'll need to create a boot floppy. OK, no problem.

problems 2-n: boot floppys don't have enough memory, wrong kernel, won't boot, have a modified version of mount that doesn't support msdos.

6 hours later, nothing accomplished. lots of floppies lying around. computer with only one OS. headache. hungry. it would have been better just to walk over to the computer store and buy partition magic.

for the record, the best floppy distro i could get to work was the muLinux.

it's about as bad out right now as it ever gets in nyc. that means it's about 32 degrees farenheit and raining hard. still there are people walking around witjhout umbrellas.

at least my roof is holding water. almost every roof in this city (except for the suburban areas) is flat. a flat tar paper roof will leak. my super says that they all do. why are they all flat? what was the thnking?

mine had a leak for years and no roofer could fix it. my brother found the leak in about 5 minutes. he did what nobody had done: looked at where the water was likely to be coming in and poured water around the area. he IS an engineer, though.

it took only a few minutes of caulking to fix it. i saw an interesting thing while my super was doing the caulking, though. he only caulked about half of the skylight that was letting in the water. then, when water still came in, he caulked up the rest. there is a lesson there for me. i guess that lesson is FINISH THE FUCKING JOB.

at least my bike is fairly dry. it's locked under one of those sidewalk scaffolds that is permanently attached to my neighbor's building.

this shitty weather will allow me some time to stay in and work on my winter break programming project, which is to modify Dieter Wimberger's java telnet daemon library so that it can work as a telnet animation server.

personally, i think telnet is cool. it can serve a shell, which is what it is usually thought of as doing, but it can really be the interfacce for any number of applications. it has advantages over a browser interface: it's faster, it's easier to redraw part of the screen, it can take keyboard commands better. the library linked above has methods to take input, give output to specific areas of the screen, even do title bars and stuff.

i justy need to figure out how Dieter expects me to write the underlying application. his java code is nice, though. very clear and well designed, in my amateurish opinion.

telnet clients come with all linux and windows (which is strange) boxes so a lot of users can access it. i use it to look up books on the nypl database. i use ssh to read my email on my server. i'd like to have a sort of telnet site, in the way that i would have a web or ftp site. i'd also like to just do a animation app, but better than the standard ASCII ones.

i'll also get to install linux on this laptop of mine, i hope, this weekend. i have a lot planned, but my palm pilot says that this activity is scheduled for sunday afternoon. i had some time this afternoon, because nobody wanted to go with me to the yayoi kusama show, so i downloaded all 5 redhat 8.0 disks and burned them to CD at my girlfriend's house (while also doing some video editing).

i'll install a dual win2k and linux system. usually win2k takes about 4 hours for me to remember how i want everything set up and to do it. the infinitely configurable linux, however, should keep me busy a lot longer than that.

my palm pilot (actually a sony clie running a palm OS) also said that i was to do some painting with the chroma key paint this afternoon, but it is a bit too moist out, as mentioned above. it is amazing, comforting, and scary all at the same time how much more i get done when i remember to put it all in that palm pilot. i have no fucking memory. that's why i have always kept journals (ever since i realized that i have no memory). that is why i can now not be efficient without the little computer.

the /. community is not so bad. like any community, you have to know how to deal with it. a lot of that is knowing how to avoid people.

The friendnet concept is crucial. More and more, groups come together to do work. That means they are on the same network, but not necessarily a private one, and they need to communicate and swap files. They do not have time to install too many software packages, and they do not have domain names associated with their IP addresses.

They do trust each other, and they tend to need to form these groups dynamically, not just once or twice a year.

I am thinking of study groups on a campus, and of coworkers in an office.

In places where I have worked, email is the number one way that this issue is addressed.

FriendNet is a groupware concept that addresses this common problem (set of circumstances).

I had written more, but it GOT FUCKING DELETED!

Blogs are the best. Who reads anything else of the www? The web is a written and read medium, and it's best that one recognize that. Maybe the web will turn out in the end to be what Tim Berners-Lee thought it would be, after all the other stuff moves on to web services and that sort of thing.

It seems also like we are at the point where the multipurpose browser is in danger. Already n% of the users of the web read it through things like AOL's software and the MSN Explorer, and who knows how many use things like inline autocomplete in IE. After uninstalling the flash player, I realized that there are tons of sites that rely on it. Much of the web is moving on to post-html.

i just lost 1/2 hour of writing. what the fuck? this system sucks.

It's another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
Last year I was [3]1 I didn't have a lot of fun
And now I'm gonna be [3]2 I say oh my and a boo-hoo

stooges, 1969.

This article (What's Your Earliest Memory?) is the coolest thing on /. in fucking weeks! Of course, as has been the trend for months on this site, the responses to the "Ask Slashdot" question are full of "look it up" and "this is not linux."

Some jerk actually writes, I can remember all the way back to when Slashdot had news stories Linux geeks cared about. Not dinner party conversation starters. What's next Dream analysis? Sheesh.

Fuck that. It's news for nerds - not only about linux. Some great responses.

What if I just went through comments marking all friends of friends as friends, and all enemies of friends as enemies? What would it look like after a few months? Seems like this friends and foes thing has the potential to backfire. Not quite sure how, though.

If you ignore a rule, you FLOUT it, not FLAUNT it. I even heard this mistake on the radio news today.

Record Sales, MP3 downloads, and the Annihilation Hypothesis

The sales of recorded music have fallen recently. Many articles have been written and statements made about whether this decline is due to the downloading of MP3 files. The claim has been made that MP3 downloading, if unchecked, would destroy the recording industry, a claim I term the "annihilation hypothesis".

Unfortunately, much of the analysis appears to be little more than looking at the most rudimentary of numbers and then using one's favorite hypothesis to explain them. There are partisans on both sides trying to spin the numbers to fit their message. Most of the claims that I have seen are often unsubstantiated and sometimes are based on the use of different definitions.

In the following report I look at 30 years of record sales to try to determine what have been the most important influences on record sales. I then use this information to examine what has happened in the market recently to try to determine whether there is evidence that MP3s have caused harm and how large that harm might be.

Here's a thought:
Programming would be easier (especially cross-platform programming) if HTTP were adopted as a standard way of accessing files in a file system tree. Of course, this also might be a huge security problem, or at least require a clunky security solution. The concept of 'users' in HTTP is not so hard, but 'groups' is not there. Alright, forget about it.

It's Christmas Eve and I'm sitting here reading /. Is it just me, or are the comments especially mellow tonight, even on ask./..com?

It's snowing lightly outside in New York and my radiator is hissing. This radiator is very small. I used to have a huge six-footer, which I replaced with this one that's the size of a large cereal box. It's a crazy way to control the temperature - replace the whole radiator, but steam heat is either on or off. Actually, I've seen radiators in Austria that are adjustable with a dial, but my super says that won't work with these.

My super has a degree in computer science. More and more, I can see why he's a super.

But I love Computer Science. I mean, I think about it so much, I can't imagine stopping. Maybe I could stop to become a video editor or an electrical engineer. Even still, I'd have to fuck with computers.

I've been reading RFCs at the IETF page. It's good to read it from the original source, sometimes. Here's a thought I had: most of the problems in coding that i have come from either not understanding the terminology, or thinking I have to understand something I don't. On the latter, library-based OO programming is the greatest, because it means that if I can find a good library, I can concentrate on the part of the problem that I want to solve - on the new part.

This is why, despite being a dud in so many ways, java is so cool: lots of libraries. I wrote an SMTP client tonight in about 20 minutes in java.

Why isn't there a java compiler from Sun?!

Finally, I posted this to /. but it never got picked up:

Remember when the music industry was convicted of price-fixing? Well, everyone who bought a CD between 1995 and 2000 in the US is eligible for a piece of the settlement -- between $5 and $20. If enough people sign up, the money goes to charities that are working to reform the music industry.

from BoingBoing.net. http://www.musiccdsettlement.com/english/default.htm

Here's a problem with MetaModeration: user is asked to moderate on threads he has not read. How many moderators will take the time to read the thread. Can't the system track who has read what (cookies)?

This leads to the problem of too little use of the Off-Topic moderation, too much Funny, and no recognition of the huge amount of redundancy.