Positively Glorious!

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Rediviva Magazine on a special (somewhat secret) community project.  We’re getting closer to a possible launch and I’d like to get some more people involved so I thought I’d put the word out there to see whether there are any local programmers interested in working on it with me. Feel free to pass this around.

Overview

Ideally, I’d like to build a small team of programmers who are interested in building an Open Source Software web application that can hopefully become something bigger than what we at Rediviva want to start with. It’d be ideal if a couple high school hot shots are around who want to work up their resumes for later development jobs, eventually becoming a Project Manager on this one. Continue Reading »

This is a quick write-up on an error I’ve been having with my MacBook and a drive connected to Airport Extreme. It’s really only here so that Google will index it and the info will hopefully be one step in a solution for others with the same problem.

The issue is with my Free Agent drive when connected to an Airport Extreme via USB and accessed with my MacBook Pro, running Snow Leopard, using an AFP connection. I used this drive for a while with no problems in Leopard, and then did a clean install to Snow Leopard without any problems. One day, I tried to access my drive and got the following error:

The server “MettaFi” is available on your computer. Access the volumes and files locally.

Continue Reading »

This is a bit of a rant centered around a piece of recent news that seriously bugs me.

Actually, it’s not the news itself that bugs me, it’s the truth that the news represents. The truth that the Web basically sucks.

The news was detailed in an Opinion column in Nature about a new “Massively collaborative mathematics” project. Called “The Polymath Project,” it’s a new technique whereby a mathematical problem would be solved in such a way that “anyone in the world could follow along and, if they wished, make a contribution.”

This new technique is being called Open Source Mathematics or some such thing:

The widespread adoption of such open-source techniques will require significant cultural changes in science, as well as the development of new online tools. We believe that this will lead to the widespread use of mass collaboration in many fields of science, and that mass collaboration will extend the limits of human problem-solving ability.

In a word: Bullshit. Continue Reading »

In the beginning of my 6th grade year, I had the worst experience ever.

I was having one of those long-term, knock-down, drag-out battles with another kid, Rocky Hill. It was the stereotypical school-yard battle, where each of us were evenly matched and it was a daily standoff between mutually respectable adversaries. And by “daily standoff between mutually respectable adversaries,” I mean, “Rocky Hill decided he could beat me up every day without ever getting so much as a girlish slap in return.”

I mean, come on. I didn’t stand a chance. Rocky. The kid’s name was Rocky. It was 1981, and every public staircase in existence was still swarming with little boys running to the top and jumping around– some even wore actual boxing gloves!

And not only that, his name was a pun! I mean, who the hell do you think is going to win “King of the Hill” when there’s a kid standing on top of it yelling “Try to climb this hill boys, but be careful! It’s a rocky hill! This is my hill!”

Jesus, he sucked.

Rocky Hill, was popular. He was so popular that he stole my skateboard in front of a crowd of witnesses and then convinced them all that I’d wronged him by asking for it back. He was popular, and he was smart.

Me? I was geeky, and unpopular, and– worst of all– I was completely clueless.

The only thing we had in common was our mutual hatred. We spent the early part of that school year trying to publicly humiliate each other in increasingly ingenious ways. During this battle of words, we pulled out our most fiendish verbal assault weapons and focused them squarely on our hated enemy.

For me, this amounted mostly to trying to convince the class that he smelled like poo, a tactic, I now realize, that is probably the sole reason that the rest of the class enjoyed watching him beat me up on a daily basis. Continue Reading »