What’s Up with Paul Oppenheim

While researching “prior invention” documents I found an old ask slashdot article about prior inventions, and a great article on a horrible contract for consultants.

Here’s a gem:

A competent attorney would tell you that good agreements are designed to avoid disputes, and that their most important purpose is to avoid at all costs ever putting anything that you depend on from being left up to the discretion of a court.

I just found these links equal parts handy and hilarious.

NOTE: stale blog post, finally publishing (there are a lot chilling in my “to post” queue, expect blogorrhea)

Hi folks!

I don’t have a very good excuse for not updating earlier, but I got a job at Linden Lab makers of Second Life. A few of you know what that is, and the best way I’ve described it so far to folks is that it’s a 3D web browser where you can make and do anything. It’s a place to hang out like a chatroom (with bots, even), or its a place to play games, or it’s a place to listen to music, whatever you want. People even hold classes and meetings there.

There is a lot of hype (both positive and negative) about it, but regardless I am excited to be there.

All of this said, I do have to say this is my personal site and statements and material posted here do not necessarily reflect the position of my employer. I mostly pontificate about virtual worlds, etc. in private as not to bore my less technical readers, but if I do so here, it is not something I am doing professionally.

Also I should maybe get my alt name off of my front page? :\

meh.

Thanks for watching!

Unless you’re a security nerd (or paranoiac… wait, is there a difference?), you probably haven’t heard of Tor, The Onion-skin Router. Brought to us by the freedom-loving EFF, this program tries to do one-step better than a proxy: it actually randomly shuffles your packets around in its network so nobody can tell where they came from. It’s perfect for whistleblowing, government criticism, or keeping large corporations from building “psycographic profiles” of you. You can use it for more than web browsing as well - for instance, you can anonymize chat if you want to talk in a rape survivor chatroom.

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Hey! I’m on Second Life. I don’t have land, a cool avatar, or anything exciting just yet, but I’m on the grid. Check out my website for my avatar name, which I am proud of. I kinda wish I could just be Paul (and save the avatar for when I really need it). Anonymity by default doesn’t hurt too much, but it does tend to lead towards the greater internet fuckwad theory.

I had an IM conversation with a law student friend of mine to help her understand the GPL a little better. It focuses mostly on the economics of free / open software and a little on copyright. Well, it actually focuses primarily on shovels. Please pardon the typos and scary structure, I didn’t quite feel like editing :P

(19:56:30) friend: do you think the gpl undermines the
independent commercial software sector bc it effectively makes it
impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the
product rather than just the cost of distribution?
(19:56:47) me: not at all
(19:56:53) friend: why

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If you have used Mac OS (classic or X) you may not have used Startup Disk, but if you have ever have you know how essential it is. Well, Linux users are much more likely using multiple operating systems, but their bootloader, GRUB, is slightly… lacking.

There’re two parts to a bootloader: figuring out what can be booted, and letting the user select which of those bootable things to… boot. Startup Disk rocks at both of these. GRUB sucks at both of these.

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http://homepage.mac.com/ianrickard/wiimote/ (from slashdot )

I can’t wait to try this.

I’ve updated my website, pauloppenheim.com. Most notably, I have added a photo gallery which has the requisite cat picture:

Technobabble after the break…

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I recently beat Capcom’s “Killer7” on the Gamecube, and Nintendo’s “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening” on the original Gameboy. There’s a painful contrast between cliche existentialist storytelling and decent gameplay. Spoiler warning?

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I guess if you’re a robot, humans taste like bacon.

If you’ve ever tried to work remotely on a Windows machine from a Mac (whether or not you have the kind of job which lets you work at home) you know that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client for Mac sucks. Ahh, but I have found a solution!

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For those of you just tuning into my blog and/or my life, I “switched” my computing platform in a strange way - from Mac OS X to Linux. I have learned a lot in the past 9 months, and I would like to share some of my surprising discoveries.

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Yeesh. So here we are, year 2006, and I have no idea how to share contact data between several connected computers. Every major OS has an address book API, and almost all of them use VCard formatted data. Well, how do you keep them synchromized? This isn’t a new-fangled Web 2.0 problem, this is the kind of thing it’s embarrasing to realize is unsolved.

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I’m having account issues with my hosting / domain registration company, and I may be switching servers soon, so my blog (and websites!) may be offline in the near future. Just letting you all know! And a transcript for those of you who also host with Dreamhost (and I know there’s a few of you) follows…

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This is just a quick post, but many of you know I broke my Apple Powerbook 15″ laptop a few months back. It has been serving me well as a desktop, but I really need a laptop. Last night there was one of those special fire sales…

Dude, I’m getting a Dell.

This makes me a Switcher, or as some would have it, a reverse-switcher. However, I’m not planning on using Windows, I’m planning on using Linux.

I got it at $700 off, so it really was a one-time deal. That’s about all for now, more when I get it. Feel free to discuss my impropriety in the Comments.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3562391

Unfortunately this article doesn’t mention that Linksys did stop selling this unit. They sell a different unit (which does not run Linux) under the same name, and took the Linux version and renamed it the WRT54GL (the L is for Linux… GET IT?!?) and added $15 to the price. Because of this stupid maneuver I have to ship the one I bought back, and get the new one. Grrr. Hopefully the new firmware is as good as people say, because the WRT54G v5 that I bought (without Linux, with VxWorks) crashed every 4 hours for no reason.

bloody hell emusic,

iron = hot

all secure! (yeah, it took me that long after 0-day…)

I’m about to post, but there’s a security update for my blog software (Wordpress) and before I update, I’m backing up my DB. Because I’ve learned a lot about databases in the past few months, I thought I’d peek at the data. What do you know, this thing stores a lot of stuff! Most notably, it seems to save news posts from the wordpress site, which is weird, but I guess it reduces their network load. Sorry, Linux nerd rambling…