Law Students

almost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc.

By Luis

I still have one more week of vacation, which means I’ve been starting to play a bit with software to get my brain off law for a while. Some notes:

• lazyweb: as previously mentioned, I’ve got a remote control which, to the computer, looks like a keyboard. For an upcoming project I’d like to remap the keys (make the current pgup button ‘n’, pgdown ‘p’, etc.), ideally from a script (so that I can easily turn it off and on) or perhaps from a hotplug event. Still need to figure out how to do that; any pointers welcome.
• firefox: for a while I’ve been using Kiwi Cloak to modify my web-surfing habits (Greg, you might want to check it out) I’ve spent a tiny bit of time modifying it; it is now an XPI (so I can activate/deactivate it separately from the rest of greasemonkey) and forwards to my tasklist when I try to enter a verboten site.
• Tracks: I installed Tracks trunk on my server. I’ve been using the last stable release since some time before law school, and like it a lot. Trunk is more of the same goodness, now with a tickler, which is spectacularly awesome. (Reminder: if you’re working on an alternative file manager, you should really read Getting Things Done and build something that works like that.)
• opensearch: spent a couple hours (during the Clemson-UNC game) yesterday figuring out how to add opensearch to altlaw.org. Still not very discoverable, even in FFox 3, but hopefully will be a nice touch for altlaw when it goes live.
• apple: I went to apple store yesterday to buy a new computer for my mom. The store was packed. It is mindblowing how good their industrial hardware design is- the new keyboard will probably end up following other Ives work into MOMA’s design collection. How is it that no other PC manufacturer has figured out that people want good design and are willing to pay a premium for it? Are they really all that margin obssessed that they can’t figure out that there is a luxury business out there waiting to be seized? (Leopard was unimpressive, other than Time Machine; have already had to hard reboot once in less than a day’s use.)

Back to law a week from today, after (with?) a one-day stop at the Princeton Cloud Computing Workshop. Schedule for the semester looks to be Corporations, E-Commerce, Privacy, Advanced Copyrights, and Telecommunications, but I may tweak it.

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on January 07, 2008 (boomark / email).