Erehwon Notebook

9:25:25 PM I've always thought that Project Gutenberg has to be one of the best ideas I've ever come across, and certainly one of the most worthwhile projects on the Internet today. I love the idea of having a huge library of books at my disposal for free, and I love knowing that virtually everyone else can access this same library on the Internet for free, as well. Unfortunately, this library can be a bit difficult to access and browse, and the books, while universally accessible to every computing device as ASCII files, can be sort of tough to deal with. Along comes Gutenbook, a Perl/GTK+ reader for Project Gutenberg e-texts. Gutenbook not only makes reading e-texts easier by providing a very "book-like" display of the text, but allows you to browser the Project Gutenberg index and easily retrieve those texts you want to read. Definitely a must-have tool for anyone doing research, or if you just like to have easy access to the classics!
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9:03:15 PM XCruise is a really cool file system viewer for X, which depicts the contents of your filesystem as a universe full of galaxies (directories) and stars (files). You can browse the entire filesystem by using the mouse to fly through the various galaxies and around the stars. I love alternate methods for conceptualizing filesystems beyond the old standard tree-file folder-file metaphor! I can't say that XCruise is particularly useful, but it's good eye-candy, and at least provokes some thought about new metaphors for visualizing and manipulating information.
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The company I work for does data conversion for Geographic Information Systems (GIS). MapServer is a "poor man's GIS" that's interesting not for what it can do (commercial GIS systems are far more sophisticated), but because it's representative of the GPL and freeware GIS efforts that are appearing. We are very, very close to the birth of the "digital earth," i.e. the day when virtually the entire globe is digitally mapped in great detail, and accessible to anyone through simple, easy-to-use tools. THere are some pretty amazing implications to this, even if you aren't all that into maps.
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E-mail's a wonderous thing - until it comes back in court to haunt us. Even with high profile cases like the recent MS case as examples, I suspect few of us really stop and think about what we include in our e-mail, and what the implications are of that mail falling into the wrong hands months or even years later. E-mail seems so ephemeral, and we tend to treat it like speech, not written communication.

Digital records are a paradox, ephemeral on the one hand, but shockingly permanent on the other. I find myself uncomfortable with the idea that my casual communications can be mined for incriminating evidence years after the fact, but I'm just as uncomfortable with self-censorship. Nor am I terribly comfortable with software that "expires" e-mail after a given time. More and more, good, strong, easy-to-use encryption seems like the netizen's best friend.
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Or is it? Granted, this is the opinion of a recent Nobel Prize winner, and therefore, ought to carry some weight by virtue of the man's accomplishments alone. Mr. Grass is not only an eminent author, but a man with a rich history of activism and engagement with the world around him. Strangely enough, however, his very words reveal a facet of today's world he's remained disengaged from - the Internet. I would concede that it's possible that computers and the Internet have changed writing as an art for the worst as Grass contends, though I think it's just more likely that less capable authors are being published these days. What I disagree with most, however, is Grass' contention that the Internet is fueling a culture of disengagement. My experience is quite the opposite. It just may be that today's Internet culture is less interested in being engaged over Grass' WWII-era issues.
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10:57:59 PM The K Desktop Environment is now my window manager/desktop environment of choice. I switched over to it from Gnome/Enlightenment last weekend, primarily to check it out pending trying to convince my wife to switch to Linux. KDE seems a tad faster than Gnome/Enlightenment, and the applications seem better integrated to me than Gnome's. Don't get me wrong, Gnome is nice, and looks great, better by far than KDE. Either is a viable choice, but I'd have to agree with the many surveys that indicate KDE as having an edge.
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10:51:09 PM Linuxguiden An interesting article from a Norwegian Linux site detailing the experiences of a self-professed "non-geek" in switching from Windows to Linux. I'd have to say his experience parallels mine a great deal, right down to the applications he uses. He seems pretty computer-literate; I'm not sure how well his experience would map to a "typical corporate user" like I have to support, however.
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GeoURL

Saturday, February 12, 2000

Monday, February 7, 2000

Sunday, February 6, 2000