DYLAN TWENEY
Rough Drafts

Rough Drafts

Essays and blog posts I've written that haven't been published elsewhere yet

813 posts
Rough Drafts

Parallel P2P.

Kazaa and Altnet are creating a secure P2P network [http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1011827.html] that will operate in parallel with the public Kazaa network — and will pay users to host files on the new network.
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Books on the floor.

The Internet is like a huge library with all the books dumped on the floor. What’s the origin of this once-useful phrase? This page [http://info.org.il/english/books_on_the_floor.html] has an interesting discussion.
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
Rough Drafts

Starting to get it.

Technology companies are waking up to the opportunities opened by the music industry’s steadfast refusal to embrace online distribution of music files.
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
Rough Drafts

RSS Explained.

Here’s a nontechnical introduction to RSS [http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml] from Michael Fagan. For a more technical introduction to RSS, see Mark Pilgrim’s explanation [http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html].
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Bartleby beats Encarta.

On a whim, I decided to pit MSN’s online version of the Encarta “encyclopedia” (part of MSN Learning and Research) against the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia available through Bartleby. The differences couldn’t be more stark.
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Google cache lookup.

Jonathan Rentzsch wrote a little JavaScript utility to help recover from 404:Page Not Found errors. It takes the current URL in your browser, and uses it to retrieve the archived version of that page from Google’s cache. Here’s Rentzsch’s discussion on Google cache hacking. Another blogger, Fuse, de
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
Rough Drafts

Linux is Theft?

A press release by Unix publisher SCO Group claims that “Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and that legal liability for the use of Linux may extend to commercial users. SCO issued this alert based on its findings of illegal inclusions of SCO UNIX intellectual property in Linux.” Apparently
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

How students Google.

A survey by Microdoc News shows that the most successful (and prolific) users of Google take an “experimental” approach to searching, first trying simple one-word or multi-word queries, then trying other, more complicated queries until they find what they’re looking for.
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
Rough Drafts

Freedom to Read.

Rep. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has introduced a “Freedom to Read” bill [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.1157:] that would restore privacy to the patrons of bookstores and libraries. The ACLU supports it [http://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=12607&c=110], and you sh
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
Rough Drafts

Anarchist in the Library.

From a blogjournal called eyeteeth run by Paul Schmelzer comes this interesting interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan [http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2003_04_20_eyeteeth_archive.html#92977561], intellectual property expert and communications professor at NYU.
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Microdoc news.

A nifty site called Microdoc News [http://microdocs-news.info/] picked up my piece about file recovery using the Google cache today, as part of a short piece about the cache’s pros and cons [http://www.microdocs-news.info/newsGoogle/2003/04/22.html#a544].
Dylan Tweney

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