I realized I haven’t picked up a book in weeks, (non-academic book, that is), but I’ve read more than my fair share of blogs in that same time. I wonder if part of the reason is the longer time commitment required by a book. This prevents it from being read quickly and keeps it forever [...]

A buggy is like a car, but drawn by a horse. Radio is like TV, but with no picture, only sound. A letter is like email, but written on paper and delivered in days or weeks. The Encyclopedia Britannica is like Wikipedia, but printed in 26 volumes, and occupies half a room. A telegram is [...]

The availability of consumer software in this century has democratized the production of … well, everything. Parts of the current creative landscape seem no different than Marxist philosophies of workers owning the means of production, with one exception: the workers aren’t doing it for money, they’re doing it for fun. I recently watched Be Kind, [...]

The entire idea behind this blog post has been summed up in the title, so all I need to do now is to explain why I think email should have expiration dates, and how that would make personal information management better. Email, as we all know, started off as a way of sending short messages [...]

When most professors have closed-door policies and need weeks of lead time before being able to schedule a meeting, here’s why I love working here!

This is a quick snippet I put together for an academic project. To be able to write this, I had to go through several documentation resources, for what is essentially a single web service method call. I figured it would help if I shared my PHP code.

Setting up WebDAV on Leopard The good news is that all the bits and pieces of software that you need to run a WebDAV server on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard are already installed. You only need to configure them correctly and turn them on. Some experience with Terminal is preferred, and you should be [...]

I received a request today in the mail about one of my projects that is available under a free software license. It’s a web template system that I wrote to scratch a personal itch. Its hallmark feature is that it has no features, at least none that contribute to the bloat that’s rampant in Drupal [...]

After spending about an hour configuring what should, in theory, be a simple matter, I figured I’d write a blog post that might one day save another soul an hour or so from his or her life. So, for good karma, basically. In the past, I have set up port forwarding on Linux, Mac OS [...]