coding

November 30, 2001 by Eric Richardson

Tonight is a code night. I have my Intershop contract to finish, and some stuff I want to do to eThreads. It's been a long time since I've been in a proper coding mood, but tonight I'm feeling it. I've got Massive Attack going, and in a few minutes I'm going to head over to Commons and stock up on the Arizona iced tea. Mmmm... Productivity...

gar sybase gar

November 29, 2001 by Eric Richardson

So I finally figure out that it's sp_help that should be my sybase "show fields from" equivalent, and what happens? It won't work for me. Sure, 'sp_help' lists all the tables, but 'sp_help tablename' does nothing for me. Please, someone, find me work on a fun db, on software where product ids that are numbers are defined as chars and have dashes in them for no apparent reason.

harvard debate

November 28, 2001 by Eric Richardson

I just watched/listened to the Lessig vs. Valenti debate from Harvard last year. Interesting, but it left me more unfulfilled than anything. Jack Valenti didn't really debate. To paraphrase Lessig, when you give an answer, you have to give a reason. Jack Valenti didn't give reasons. When asked why something was right, he'd say that it was right because the courts said so, or the current law says so. I know what the law says. I know what the courts have said. I don't agree. I think the DMCA is unconstitutional. I want to know why this should be the law.

Perhaps tomorrow will be a different story, but I doubt it. If nothing else, hopefully the Napster case won't be involved. The DMCA repercussions and repercussions of the deCSS case are far more fundamental than those of Napster.

Lessig vs. Valenti Debate

November 28, 2001 by Eric Richardson

Tomorrow night Annenberg is hosting a debate between Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA, and Lawrence Lessig, an IP lawyer, on the future of IP. This is apparently a long-running debate series, possibly originating with a debate at Harvard. It should be interesting. Yesterday I was helping someone write a paper on copyright and IP. It's a really interesting subject, and one that's actually made me think about going into law, though the chances of that happening are slim.

google and intercourse

November 27, 2001 by Eric Richardson

If you do a search for intercourse on Google, you'll find my verbal intercourse section as result number 111. That's not a high ranking. In fact, it's surrounded by several references talking about painful intercourse. Not exactly what you expect to be a high traffic area. And yet, people consistantly not only make that search and are that far down in the results, but click on my site. How can this be? Why? What do they hope to find down here?