Oren’s Weblog

Betsy Devine (who I just discovered, thanks to Joho) writes here about the liberating shock of coming from Java and C++ to scripting languages, in this case PHP:

“What a whole new world of freedom–it’s like being able to say, “Mom, I’m bringing a friend for dinner…” Then you show up with 7 friends, a puppy, plus (Scott adds) a parakeet and a goldfish–and Mom says, “Hey, no problem, who ever runs out of spaghetti?”

John Gruber reports that BBEdit 7.1 supports sftp for secure file transfers – that’s a good update by the Bare Bones folks!

Today I used a Creative Commons license for the first time for my own work. I received a request for the presentation slides from my Educause 2003 presentation and the message requesting them suggested that I include a copyright statement on the materials. Instead I decided to use a CC license called Attribution-ShareAlike, which allows anyone to make use of my work, as long as they attribute it to me and share any derivative work under the same terms.

The process of choosing which license to use was really easy, using the process set up on the CC web site, and they provided a complete code snippet to use on my web page to notify people of the license and link to the terms.

This is great stuff, and the folks at Creative Commons are doing really terrific work that points the way into usable forms of protecting intellectual property while allowing for sane reuse of the IP.

Here’s Dylan Evans, a psychologist, arguing that in the future it will be necessary for average folks to actually understand something about how computers work and a bit of coding, and that operating systems that make it visible and transparent are to be preferred to those that try to hide the guts behind a facade of user-friendliness. Interesting.

Thanks to Tim Bray for pointing this one out.

Back home again, trying desperately to catch up.

Our session on the Chandler project on Friday morning went very well – standing room only (that’s what happens when you have luminaries like Mitch Kapor on your panel) and great feedback from folks in the room. I remain really excited about the potential for both the Chandler software and the collaboration between higher ed computing types and the developers at OSAF.

My slides from the talk are available on the web at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/presentations/educause2003/ . There’s an html version of the outline as well as powerpoint slides.

I heard the closing session with Richard Clark was good, but I missed it as I was still talking to folks about Chandler.

I realized that I forgot to mention the interesting sesion I went to on Wednesday about how MIT and Stanford have been jointly benchmarking their help desk operations. I’ll post a link to their site when I retrieve it from my notes – I think I’ll want to use many of the measurement techniques here at the UW.

I closed out the week with a shrimp po’ boy and an Abita amber at Ralph Brennan’s in Downtown Disney along with my colleague Tom Lewis – the ersatz New Orleans atmosphere made me long for a real trip to the Big Easy…ahh well, maybe next year.

And kudos to the hard working Educause staff are definitely deserved – the largest Educause conference yet (6400 attendees!) went off very well, the program was terrific and rich, and the events, especially the night at California Adventure, were great!

Well, I’ve guess I’ve arrived if someone is posting spam as comments to my weblog…sigh.

Interestingly, all the entries are to a single (old) posting in the blog, which leads me to believe that url just got added to some automated process somewhere. I can’t believe anybody actually finds this an effective marketing strategy.

At the file sharing lovefest yesterday, Graham Spannier, President of Penn State University, announced that Penn State has reached an agreement with Roxio to offer unlimited access to the new Napster service to students on campus. The story is here. It will be interesting to see how students like it, and how other campuses either do or don’t follow suit. It will certainly be a good workout of Napster’s (and Microsoft’s) DRM technology.

Educause threw a terrific party last night at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. That California Screamin’ is one hell of a roller coaster ride, and the Soaring Over California is a terrific demonstration of just how good immersive virtual reality can be – there is none of that kind of cognitive dissonance that makes me get queasy on the older motion platform rides like Star Tours at Disneyland.

Fun was had by all, as near as I could see.

Yesterday’s general session on P2P file sharing issues in higher ed, which included luminaries Jack Valenti from the MPAA, Cary Sherman from the RIAA, Graham Spanier from Penn State, and Charles Phelps from University of Rocherster, produced none of the anticipated fireworks.

The panelists, along with moderator Mara Liasson from NPR, did a good job of congratulating each other on the work they’ve accomplished in educating students about the illegality of sharing copyrighted works and how they are open to moving to services which legally allow online distribution of music and film.

There was basically no discussion of any of the difficult issues such as price points, availability, digital rights management, fair use, or first sale doctrine.

While it’s good to know that at least the entertainment industry won’t hold higher ed institutions to blame for being uncooperative, it would’ve been nice to see more frank discussion of the places where we differ. Ah well…another time, perhaps.

I imagine that the video from the event will be made public at this site, though it’s not there as I write this:

http://www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2003/resources.asp