Jeff's Pretend Life : the Game of Life in Javascript

This is my implementation of John Conway's (Game of) Life, written entirely in Javascript (or ECMAScript, if you will), titled Jeff's Pretend Life

includes source code, under the GNU General Public License, and links to other resources.

also under the Computing/better mousetrap category is a javascript library to makes writing a Javascript application easier.

A great Job! Someone should hire this guy, fast!

email Your Local Candidates.

I missed it the first time but Ray Slakinski posed the some questions via an email to Local Halton MP Candidates.

WE should all be doing this

CentrSource and Procter & Gamble

Check it Out : Procter & Gamble

Taking Stock of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty

It's tough to find information about the WIPO, but Cory posted on Boing Boing a great resource inculding a first time peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published. As he wrote when it started

There's no transparency into this process for most of the world. The doors are locked, the minutes are sealed, and you need to be accredited just to sit in the room.

So I'll quote from Cory's post on why is very important and very scary:

WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes
The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way,
this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror),
trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!

see copies of the transcript at either Union for the Public Domain or Electronic Frontier Foundation, or as a Local PDF I made : Taking Stock of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty.pdf (~220 Kb compressed PDF using OpenOffice)

NDP supports bad Internet treaties

Cory points out that NDP supports bad Internet treaties as reported in the The Star and by CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) in it's look at Election 2004: Internet Issues

In particular :

The NDP endorsed the Committee's recommendations on swift ratification of the controversial WIPO Internet treaties, and even more surprisingly, it gave its approval to an extended licensing scheme for educational materials, despite the heated opposition from the education community.

It it a ignorance , incompetentance or irrelevancy? How can we educate Jack, Olivia and there happy band? Cory would be a great go to person, with his background.

I brought this up earlier and we have responses from 4 (major) Parties but NOT the Conservatives.

And it's not looking good. Can any of them "Get a Clue"?

Here's another good source Digital Copyright Canada

Jakarta Struts De-Mystified Part 1 - John Topley's Weblog

Jakarta Struts De-Mystified Part 1 - John Topley's Weblog

no power in the 'verse can stop us now

Serenity: The Official Movie Website

Browncoats rejoice!

Lotus Formula Language > Developer tool: read/set document fields from view

Andre Guirard submitted a great idea to the SearchDomino tool shed, a way to read/set document fields from view without writing a agent for each field you what to change.

He has code for R5 and R6, however I found I small boo boo in the R5 code in that


REM "Formula for R5";
choices := @DocFields;
fieldName := @Prompt([OkCancelEditCombo]; "Field Name"; "Enter Field
Name."; ""; choices);
FIELD DUID := @text(@DocumentUniqueID);
oldValue := @GetDocField (DUID;fieldname);

newValue := @Explode(@Prompt([OkCancelEdit]; "New Field Value"; "Please
enter new value (use ";" for multivalues -- don't put space after ;)."; @Implode
(@Text(oldvalue); ";")); ";");

adjValue :=
@If(@IsNumber(oldValue); @TextToNumber(newValue);
@IsTime(oldValue); @TextToTime(newValue);
newValue);

@If(!@IsError(adjValue);
@SetField(fieldName ; adjValue);
@Prompt([YesNo]; "Change field value"; "New value not of same type as
old value. Set field to text?");
@SetField(fieldName ; newValue);
""
)


He had done oldValue := @GetField(fieldname); ,but there is no @getField function in R5.0X. So I've attempted to correct this by using
FIELD DUID := @text(@DocumentUniqueID);
oldValue := @GetDocField (DUID;fieldname);

Which now complies.

But I'm still not out of woods yet, Still not "working as expected", since I'm not getting the old value.

On investigation I'm getting a "@SetDocField and @GetDocField cannot access the document currently being computed". Frell!

It is a slick generic development tool, just needs some more work.

Iron Sunrise's a comming

Via: Charlie's Diary comes word that Mr. Stross has advance copies of the hard cover of his new and soon to be published novel Iron Sunrise, the sequel to his great Singularity Sky novel.

Charlie quotes the June 28'Th issue of Publisher's Weekly which ran a starred advance review. It goes like this:

Best known for his short fiction, Stross shows that he's a master of the novel form as well in this exciting sequel to 2003's acclaimed Singularity Sky, serving up compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire. In the 24th century, a McWorld ("bland, comfortable, tolerant ... boring") called New Moscow apparently has been destroyed by trade rival New Dresden -- but not before New Moscow launched its own Slower-Than-Light (STL) counterstrike: a massive ship accelerated to 80% the speed of light. The U.N., now central Earth government, knows New Dresden was set up. They need the STL's recall code, now known only to a handful of New Moscow's ambassadors -- but someone has been systematically assassinating them. U.N. special operative Rachel Mansour and her husband, engineer Martin Springfield, must protect the last living ambassador and find out who's really responsible for the whole mess. Stross skillfully balances suspense and humor throughout, offering readers -- especially fans of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod -- a fascinating future that seems more than possible.

and his take on the review :

Which is not bad, for a summary that completely omits the major characters and main subplot ... not to mention the talking cat sidekick.

I've advanced ordered the novel and I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

Singularity Sky made for compelling reading with 2 great characters, an inventive brew and mashup of technologies, and a fast moving plot line that kept you on your toes.

I particular like his solution to the problem of writing fiction placed beyond the Singularity. I think it was Vernor Vinge, who said it is impossible to write about what happens after the singularity. I see Charlie's Stross solution to this is by applying William Gibson's "The future is here…it's just unevenly distributed" quote, and to explore the edges of that unevenly disturbed future narrative.

Okay, I've used up my quota of big words for the day.

And so while I - impatiently - wait for Iron Sunrise and then Accelerando, read this older interview for all of us who are overdosing on /.

This will put a differnet light on the Holidays...

Via vowe dot net comes word of
A tracker, a marker, and a sniper. Professional hunters, feared for their astonishing skills. Their target is a very special one...