EconTech

This is the type of software that should be implemented for the library, especially with books being increasingly locked away. Recreating the browsing experience is something that has been (somewhat) done with some music apps and the flipping interface with album art. That is the kind of thing I was looking for with books. It [...]

The Tree-Friendly Academic: Whither A Useful Free PDF Editor?
I’m a Linux user in need of a quality PDF reader with basic annotation tools, and I need it to be available for free. Think I’m asking for too much?
We’re at a point where the level of content available online dwarfs our ability to print it all [...]

The press release can be found here. And the homepage for the new library is here, with lots of information, most of it locked up for only the University of Chicago community (however, I cannot access it through the proxy; aka, this community member does not have access). My commentary then is based on less [...]

And I’m pretty sure he gets it all wrong:
Google: As Open and Neutral as It Wants to Be

I hope to return to blogging more regularly now that the college-hunting process is over for my high-school senior son—our family’s first time through what is an amazingly-daunting (and time-consuming) process—and I still have a backlog of other [...]

I get asked to do a occasional data recovery. I was going to make a user-friendly post, but that was taking too much effort. Consider these notes for myself that I want to be able to access easily. Thus, the beginning will be much more verbose and user-friendly, then it will get terse and RTFM. [...]

Game Designers Desperately Need Economics
I’ve been playing some Rise of Nations lately—think Age of Empires if you don’t know it. I like it but playing an Absolute Planner gets tired and frustrating at some point.
The production side is quite complex for a game of this type: resource extraction is done via linear production function augmented by [...]

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

Edit: I will continue to update this post as I find issues
I am having all kinds of problems.

I just tried updating the very popular Python uniq(sequence) post, only to find out that the Wordpress editor is stripping whitespace from the preformatted text. GENIUS GUYS. Really. Great way to COMPLETELY KILL THE POINT OF PREFORMATTED TEXT.
Not [...]

First of all, whoever decided that naming anything with less than 3 or 4 characters had a serious lack of foresight in terms of database searching. If it wasn’t for the popularity of C/C++, finding resources on learning it would be nigh impossible. Well, slightly easier than R, one of the most commonly used letters [...]

I just encountered the third time that I wanted to comment on a blog on blogger.com, and was unable to. Why? The Captcha. What about it? It never shows up for me. I see the tag text “Visual Verification” but there is no picture there. I look at the document source, I see that there [...]

There has been an ongoing benchmark battle between Webkit/KHTML, Firefox, and Opera. The Firefox devs, after seeing their browser lose (anyone surprised by that?), suggest “turn off extensions.” Well, yes, that ends up improving performance. But the point is, they forked from and then shot in the back the Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey, which implemented tons of [...]

Hopefully transitivity fails here!
So, apparently this guy, Guy Kawasaki came up with YABRI (Yet Another Blog Reading Interface): Alltop. It is pretty cool, I suppose. An interesting idea, though I doubt that I would use the interface much. It is a very mousy interface, and I’m very keyboard oriented (probably why I hate web-apps [...]

I haven’t had a chance to check any of this stuff out in any kind of detail. But someone was kind enough to forward this post that gives a quick review of many of the linux-native (aka not web browser based) solutions. As I move to using LaTeX more, BibTex is looking like it may [...]

People are getting all excited because Opera and Webkit are passing the Acid3 tests. This is similar to the hype for the past couple of years over Acid2. These tests largely get their backing due to the fact that the original Acid test was included as a reference test in the CSS1 specification. The same [...]

Well, basically he does. With the way textbook prices are these days, it is hard to disagree. However, I have a few comments on his recommendation for DjVu over CHM over PDF.
Let’s discuss CHM for a moment. All it is is a compilation of HTML data (images and html text) into a proprietary, hard to [...]