Category: Ramblings

Last year, MIT announced that they’d be putting their course materials up on the web, freely available for anyone to use. Yesterday, they went live with the pilot.

“The idea behind OpenCourseWare is to make the MIT course materials used in almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. The hope is that OCW will advance technology-enhanced education at MIT, and will serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.”

The OpenCourseWare Site.

This is quite a significant event in the world of education. The cost of drawing all this information together on a web site must be substantial. But it is a strong acknowledgement of intellectual principles: education enriches us all.

MIT isn’t going to lose fee income because of this. No-one (or at least, vanishingly few people) will decide to just read the stuff on the web rather than spending four years on campus. Nor will it probably lead to increased tuition fee revenue. Again, few people will look at the materials on the web and say, “that’s great; I want more, so I’d better attend MIT.

It’s neither a loss leader, nor a profit source. It’s a charitable donation to the Internet, and a gift to the public domain. People all over the world will benefit massively from this resource. Bravo.

Just a quick note to parents and other users of the brilliant AnyWayUp cups (“the world’s only totally non-spill cup”): don’t use them with fizzy drinks.

The cups rely on a slight pressure imbalance to keep the liquid from leaking out. You take a few sucks, the pressure inside the cup drops, and this is enough to keep the rubber valve nicely closed. But as soon as you put a carbonated beverage in the cup, the CO2 escaping from the drink creates an overpressure in the cup. If you hold it upside-down, this overpressure is enough to force liquid out through the valve, and also out through the rim of the cup. Messy.

Apple juice, yes. Appletise, no.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden: “Haven’t the East Timorese already suffered enough?”

Wil Wheaton is always interesting and entertaining. Last week he wrote a pair of articles (here and here) about his relationship with Star Trek conventions. He feels ambivalent about them because on the one side he wants to leave Trek behind him, and move on as an actor and writer; but on the other hand they bring in decent money for him and his family.

Judging by the phenomenal number of comments people left for him, these articles touched a lot of people. They resonated with me because I recognize his feelings as a father and provider for his family. Earlier this year I turned down a job that I really wanted because it would have been too much of a step down in salary. Wil talks about jobs he feels that he can’t turn down, even though he doesn’t want to take them.

Wil is a celebrity. He is also an ordinary person, with a family, commitments, desires, and worries. His weblog allows him to show this side of himself to his fans. Does that make him any less of a celebrity? Does that deflate the image the public has of him? No. Exactly the opposite.

It is very easy to fawn over, envy, or even love celebrities. It is much harder to respect them. Wil pricks his own bubble too often to allow you to build him up too much. He is modest. He loves his family, and he loves what he does. He has been through some rough times, and he has emerged as stronger person–a good person. He cares. And in return, his fans really do care about him.

Wil, you rule.

I think I’ve been using the Opera browser for about a year now. I tried it out because that’s what you do, but I stuck with it because of what it could do. I have really found that, for my purposes and surfing habits, Opera is the best web browser of the current bunch (IE, Mozilla, Opera). IE is a better application platform, but that’s not quite the same as a browser.

The web is exactly that: a web. Hyperlinks weave disparate sites together into a rich tapestry of information, and I like being able to look at multiple parts of that tapestry at the same time. If I’m reading a site, or a story, I usually find several links I want to visit, so I click on them. In Opera (and in Mozilla now, as well), I can open these new pages up in separate windows (or tabs) within a single application space.

Right now, for example, I have 20 windows open in my Opera session. I’ve been snuffling about a variety of weblogs, and more than any other kind of site blogs are just full of interesting hyperlinks. Opera opens up these new windows quickly, and in the background. That way the flow of my reading isn’t interrupted.

When I exit Opera, it saves the list of windows that were open. So, when I start it up again, it re-opens them all, and I can carry on browsing where I left off. This is just so nice, I want more of it!

The feature I would really like to see in Opera (and Opera 7 is just round the corner, so fingers crossed) is the ability to save these sets of window setups.

For example, these 20 windows I now have open are mostly related to blogs and blogging. It would be great to save these to a file (say “bloggin.sav”), and then start with a clean slate. I could go back to this list of saved windows whenever I wanted to.

You can sort of do this now already in Opera 6, but it’s not exactly slick: you can create a new bookmarks folder, and stick the URLs of all the current windows into that folder. You can then use the “open all folder items” feature to open up all the URLs in one go. But you have to do the work of putting all those sites into the bookmarks folder yourself. Even a function to put all current windows into a bookmarks folder at once would be pretty cool.