Computing

I have been playing with Microsoft’s OneNote (guessed at URL) software. It’s huge for what is for me just a Notepad replacement! At the moment I am just using one of the many possible screens to record notes and URLs I might want to visit in the future. It certainly offers a bit more flexibility than good old Notepad and makes a very useful scratchpad. Will post further should I actually do anything more with it…

Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons:

Creative Commons offers free copyright licenses to artists and creators. The purpose of the license is to enable the artist or creator to mark his or her copyrighted work with the freedom he or she intends the work to carry. Those “freedoms” are the exclusive rights that copyright grants the copyright holder which the law permits the copyright holder to waive. The design of the system is to be automatic. No contract, or meeting of the minds, is intended. It is simply a license that says “if you use my copyrighted work in ways that would otherwise infringe my exclusive rights, I won’t sue you if you have abided by this license.” (The law makes everything ugly, but anyway, that’s what it does.)

Good in depth article here. Link from OS News.

I started using .NET when it was in technical preview at the beginning of 2000; at that time it was called COM+2 and the main language was something called Cool. The framework briefly became Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) before some marketing wonk came up with a term that really would confuse Internet search engines: .NET. How many times have you been asked what .NET means and what relationship it has to .COM and .ORG? Of course, Cool faired no better. Some bright spark decided to call it C#, which initially confused search engines and users alike. The search engines did not like the # character and the users did not know how to pronounce it (C-pound? Or for those of us on the eastern side of the Atlantic, C-hash?). Almost the first thing I posted on the technical preview newsgroups was a simple console application in Cool, and its equivalent in Java with the rhetoric question to spot the difference. That solicited a robust response from the Visual Studio Product Manager who didn’t really see the point that I was making.

I am really getting settled down now with the various systems I have put together. I really like using gmail for, duh, my email, and the Yahoo! calender is coming in very handy. I am pretty confident, having thought about it, that I am going to put the webmail notes hack into place, and of course I really like WordPress as a blog engine, and am settled into Bloglines for my RSS feeds for now.

The only difficulty with all of this is the fact that none of it is available without a PC. I really need to get some sort of handheld device, if only to take notes and things whilst offline. But even better would be if I could email, access my calender and post to here from an online PDA type device. Is this possible? I don’t know much about them. Plus, I haven’t any money for this kind of thing. Perhaps I should just forget about it all…