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Luis Villa's Home Page

Ramblings on law school in New York, free software, and the spaces in between.
By Luis Villa

Post Frequency: 1.5/day

Last Entry: February 26, 2020 at 00:21:04

new altlaw feature

Posted on May 06, 2008
Altlaw, the restoring-caselaw-to-the-public-domain-where-it-belongs project I’ve been involved with on and off since last year, just got a new feature; it now parses the cases that are cited and shows them as sidebar links. It hasn’t propagated to all cases yet, but you can see an example here...

duke polisci majors actually can do something useful with their lives

Posted on April 30, 2008
Go us.

sometimes a number hits you like a baseball bat to the head

Posted on April 27, 2008
Televisions from days gone by by Neil Anderson. License: Clay Shirky on how small wikipedia is, relative to the way we’ve spent our culture’s free time for the past fifty years: So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of [...

RHEL-izing Wikipedia

Posted on April 23, 2008
I’ve been waiting for this. (It isn’t the first time; see wikitravel, but it appears to be a higher-profile publisher.) It is obvious that to some people and institutions, stable and vetted is good. It is true in software, and in specific areas (textbooks, guidebooks, possibly encyclopedias) it is probably true in written books as [...

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new headshot

Posted on April 16, 2008
I got interviewed last week for a linux.com piece. I also got LASIK over spring break, after 22 years of glasses. (It’s been a month without them and I’m still pretty psyched.) The result of the above two facts is a new headshot, in best chinposin style: Next necessary step: new hackergotchi, possibly from this picture [...

second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade

Posted on April 11, 2008
This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and [...

I love the smell of a fascist state in the morning

Posted on April 09, 2008
Suspending the protection of the laws in favor of executive power: it makes the trains run on time gets fences built on time. Brought to you by the people who decided we didn’t need that pesky fourth amendment anyway. (Why yes, this did provoke me to finally renew my ACLU membership...

good news/bad news, journal edition

Posted on April 07, 2008
Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next...

couple quick quotes

Posted on April 07, 2008
“I think [defining BSD as ‘free because it has no restrictions’ and GPL as ‘not free because it has restrictions’] confuses freedom with anarchy.” –James Vasile. As concise and correct a refutation of this position as I’ve seen...

spring ?08 new york diary

Posted on April 06, 2008
For a whole variety of reasons (birthdays, my brother’s extended visit, decision to leave NY post-graduation) Krissa and I have been making a serious effort to enjoy New York over the past few months. I’ll take the liberty of treating the blog as a personal diary (sorry casual readers), and put here a list of [...

post-April Fool?s note

Posted on April 02, 2008
For future reference: if you’re in an organization with a lawyer, this is how you do April Fool’s.

openjdk trademark license

Posted on April 02, 2008
Sun has posted a new draft of their openjdk trademark license. If I read it correctly, it basically says you’re OK to use it as long as it is the ‘vast majority’ of the code is the same as the official codebase. The ‘vast majority’ language seems like a reasonable compromise, allowing the copyright license [...

tracks 1.5 released!

Posted on March 30, 2008
As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Tracks, a web-based Getting Things Done-like tool. For quite a while I’ve been living out of the unreleased preview version, because of the load of new features in there, like the ability to hide actions that don’t need to be seen yet and the rough-but-functional mobile view...

Microsoft Technology Summit- mts08

Posted on March 30, 2008
So… I spent most of last week in Redmond, on the Microsoft campus, attending the fourth ‘Microsoft Tech Summit.’ The name is sort of misleading. It does describe the subject matter fairly well- the presentations were mostly pretty technical, and they were very much about Microsoft...

brief ?CC-licensed specification? rant

Posted on March 27, 2008
The next time I hear “we’ve licensed the specification under Creative Commons so anyone can implement the spec”, I’m going to scream at someone.1 To take a list from a Microsoft license I read yesterday, implementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark [...

twittering for a change

Posted on March 26, 2008
The idea of blogging for 2 1/2 days sounded brutal; so I decided I’d experiment with ‘blogging with constraints’, aka ‘resisting my urge to write paragraphs by forcing myself to only write 140 characters at a time.’ Only tool I have for that (unfortunately) is twitter, which is imperfect, but I’m giving it a go…

week in redmond

Posted on March 23, 2008
I’ll be in Redmond this week for the Microsoft Technology Summit; thanks for the invite go to Brian Hitney, who I met at Raleigh Bar Camp over the summer. Samir, Pia, and Jeff seemed to think it was a decent idea after their (admittedly mixed) experience last year...

good news/bad news, journal blogging edition

Posted on March 23, 2008
good news: a post from my journal’s blog team made it all the way to slashdot. bad news: slashdot (more specifically, the blog we’re nominally affiliated with) called our writing ’surprisingly readable.’ It’s sad that lawyers are supposed to be excellent communicators, and yet our training typically stilts our writing so much that it is surprising [...

I miss/hate/etc. miami sometimes

Posted on March 20, 2008
This led the evening news on both local CBS and ABC affiliates, including interviews with workers at the local aquarium who were asked (seriously) if boaters should be “afraid” of repeat occurences. I remain speechless. stiltsville by sam garza...

spring break link blogging

Posted on March 18, 2008
Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader: shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ?Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!? So true. Via. I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since [...

amazon mp3 payments to artists?

Posted on March 05, 2008
I’ve been scouring the internet for this information, but no luck so far, so I’ll ask here in hopes something will come of it. Amazon is charging less (in some cases significantly less) for their mp3 music service than the same album in physical media...

reason for more flickr pictures

Posted on February 28, 2008
BTW, people may have noticed that I’m using a lot more flickr pictures of late; the reason is that I found (and modified to my taste) Patrick Mueller’s ‘get flickr with attribution (gfwa)‘ greasemonkey script, and it makes posting cc-licensed flickr pictures easy...

self-explanatory

Posted on February 26, 2008
Now I am 30! by Dan Morelle. License: Trying not to be too reflective today. Ungodly drilling noise in apartment below mine is helping with that. :) Thanks to everyone who made the last 30 years so interesting and fun; hope for more of the same in the next 30.

shaver asks some interesting questions about Microsoft and legal liability

Posted on February 25, 2008
First off, I Am Not A Lawyer And This Is Not Legal Advice. If you go to Microsoft (or to anyone) and say ‘but this law student on a blog told me so’ then you will be laughed out of the room, or sued, or both, and you’ll deserve it. :) Mike Shaver blogged early [...

considering Lessig

Posted on February 21, 2008
So Lessig isn’t saying no to Congress quite yet. This really should excite me; to call Lessig one of my heroes is not a stretch at all. Lawrence Lessig 1 by Mario Carvajal. License: My initial response was, I think, pretty solid: Lessig would make a very good Congressman...

good news/bad news, Mozilla Messenger edition

Posted on February 20, 2008
We could communicate by Bill Stilwell. License: bad news (in my mind): lots of focus on ‘email’ rather than ‘communication’ in the recent discussion of the renaming/rebirth of Mozilla MailCo as Mozilla Messaging, and even some comments that could be read as negative on the idea of integrating various communications technologies into a competent whole...

Sara White Welsh, 1911-2008

Posted on February 19, 2008
We’ll miss you, Aunt Sara. I’d say ‘Rest in Peace’, but I hope you’re dancing or driving fast, not resting…

document sharing/commenting on the web

Posted on February 17, 2008
Two document-centric sites came across my radar last week; some quick thoughts on each: docstoc.com: sharing-focused document site- you upload, they publish to the world so that anyone can read it. Founded by law school students, so, among other things, has lots and lots of law school outlines, which is a nice resource...

why the writers demands shares of revenues instead of profits

Posted on February 16, 2008
After I casually mentioned my support of the writer’s strike, a good friend told me that he thought that the strike was bad, in part because the writers should be getting a share of the profits and not of revenue (and since there were no profits in internet video yet, they should be getting nothing [...

Lessig for Congress?

Posted on February 15, 2008
Wowza. As I just submitted to /.: With the unfortunate passing of Congressman Tom Lantos parts of Silicon Valley and San Francisco will be having a special election in June to send a replacement to Congress. Given the area, it would be great to have someone who is both tech and policy-aware fill the seat- and [...

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