26 Oct 2003 raph   » (Master)

Groklaw

I'm finding that the SCO case is a far more compelling drama than any of the law TV shows I've indulged in watching over the years. It doesn't hurt, of course, that I find the outcome important.

And what better way to watch this drama than by reading newspapers and articles in the technology press? I'm very impressed by their probing investigative reporting, and very reassured that their professional objectivity is giving me a clear, unbiased view of the story.

Not!

If you want to really follow the SCO case, the only game in town is Groklaw. Investigative journalism may well be dead in the corporate media, but it is alive and well, nay thriving, at Groklaw. Over there, they actually do the "shoe-leather journalism" that the traditional press claims as their domain but has largely forsaken. When a document is filed at the courthouse in Utah or Delaware, somebody (for example, Frank Sorenson in Utah) goes and scans it. A deep analysis, with plenty of links and citations, is posted by the next day. Any flaws or weak spots in the analysis are pointed out by thorough readers. Pamela Jones, the editor of Groklaw, picks through these reader comments, and includes the best of them in the next posting. I don't know if judges are supposed to read outside sources, but if so they'll certainly find Groklaw to be a treasure trove.

By contrast, coverage in respected newspapers is quite lame. John Markoff ran a piece in the NYT a couple of weeks ago, in which he makes numerous important (as well as trivial) errors. And the scoop he got, while real (a company formerly affiliated with SCO settled a GPL infringement lawsuit, claiming that they shouldn't pay damages because the infringement was unintentional), is thin gruel compared with the hearty meals served up almost daily at Groklaw.

And the so-called "trade press" is barely worthy of our derision. They're just as likely to cite a scumbag shill such as Rob Enderle as an authoritative source such as Groklaw, and they invariably get their facts wrong, sometimes painfully so. But I need hardly bad-mouth the trade press in this community. We get our news from good outlets such as LWN.

Groklaw shows off what a distributed, open-source news gathering and reporting community, with a strong editor, can do. There are many, many more such news stories, possibly too many for an amateur community to be able to handle. SCO is surely a special case. They have provoked the collective anger of the free software community; a unique accomplishment, with a unique result. Whether that result can generalize up to news-gathering on a wider scale, I have no idea, but if it can, that would be hugely exciting.

Epson 2200

I've been writing a high quality inkjet driver for Ghostscript, and I've been doing my testing on an Epson Stylus Photo 2200. I'm passionate about printing, but this is the first time I've really fallen in love with a device in a long time. As far as I'm concerned, this device has solved essentially all of the problems of making high quality digital prints except for the cost of the materials.

First, the photo quality is stunning, truly comparable to real photographic prints. It accomplishes this by using ridiculously tiny (4 picoliter) dots, real 1440x720 resolution, and 7 colors: the usual CMYK plus light cyan, magenta, and black. I find the light black ink to be an especially significant improvement - on 6-color devices, whenever the black starts phasing in, you really see those big, ugly black dots against the colored-dot background. The light black ink makes a nice gray, blending beautifully with the other colors. You simply cannot see the dither patterns with your naked eye. Under a magnifier, you do see them, but they look more like film grain than the kind of halftoning usually associated with inkjets.

The second problem they've solved is the colorfastness of the inks. The 2200 is pigment-based, while the consumer devices (such as the 870) use dyes. Dye-based prints are simply not suitable if you plan on keeping them around for any period of time. Further, if you expose them to any kind of sunlight, the fading and color shifts become noticeable within days.

The specs say that the new pigment inks are a lot more stable than the dyes, but there were a few reasons to be skeptical. The previous generation printer, the 2000, also had pigment inks, but they were far from archival, exhibiting a serious orange shift. Also, they sell an "Archival Matte" paper that, as far as I can tell, has the equivalent of sunscreen on its surface, so that the paper will absorb as much of the UV as possible before it gets to the inks. Are they engaging in heroic measures to make up for weak longevity of the inks themselves?

I'm never really satisfied with such questions until I do an experiment myself. So, I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more brittle-feeling texture.

So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able to enjoy them. Highly recommended.

[Full disclosure: Epson generously donated the 2200 I used, but has not provided any additional funding. Hey, I'm a programmer and blogger, not a journalist, and I love getting toys! Let this be a notice that sending me toys can result in excellent publicity. I could ues, hmmm, let's see: a high-res handheld with WiFi, a mini-ITX box for media playback at the house, and of course a digital camera.]

GE optical mini-mouse

Another piece of gear is the $15 GE HO98094 USB optical mini-mouse I bought at Target lsat week. It tracks well, works flawlessly under RH 9, and feels good in my hand (the full size Mitsumi on my desktop, which I've always been happy with, now feels clunky). Recommended, and kudos to the people responsible for making the multiplexing between built-in and USB mouse so seamless.

By the way, about a year ago I made the transition from focus-follows-mouse to click-to-focus, based on what appeared to me to be a consensus that the latter was becoming the default. It's ok, but I do miss being able to change focus just by moving the mouse. On the other hand, I wasn't using Alt-Tab much, and obviously that's a huge convenience with click-to-focus. So I was somewhat pleasantly surprised to find that the scroll wheel has (mostly) focus-follows-mouse semantics even when the window manager is set to click-to-focus. The one annoying exception seems to be emacs, which always scrolls the buffer with the keyboard focus.

I'm still not totally happy with the way focus works overall. By far my biggest annoyance is the way that Mozilla tends to arbitrarily grab focus when I'm in the middle of typing, based on

Correspondence

I'm having a number of fascinating correspondences in email now. For one, I decided to follow up by email to Berend De Boer's recommendation of a piece criticizing a recent op-ed by Krugman, and I'm glad of it. I think there's a good chance we'll both learn something from the discourse -- something that seems to be happening more rarely as the public debate between "liberals" and "conservatives" seems to be getting more polarized.

Also, I'm corresponding with both Freek Wiedijk and Norman Megill (of Metamath fame) about proof systems, in particular my nutty idea to design a proof format much like Metamath, but with sound definitions and good support for modular, portable proofs. Freek is urging me to take a closer look at Mizar. I don't care for their closed-source approach (including the centralization of the theorem library), and there doesn't seem to be much good documentation for beginners, but I agree; it seems to have a lot going for it. With luck, I can rip off, uhm, I mean adapt their best ideas. :)

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