Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

An article on the Register about the proliferation of blogs, and an excellent (if badly spelled) Wired article about Hacktivism and the Cult of the Dead Cow.

With 8000 new bloggers every day, and almost half of the blogs out there being idle for the last three months, what does that say about blogging as a "phenomenon"? I know that I've started about three or four blogs myself - this current one being the most successful attempt so far. I suppose time will tell?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/13/8000_bloggers_per_day/

The Cult of the Dead Cow recently turned 20 years old, and have managed to turn themselves from a l33t bunch of hax0rs who churn out scriptkiddie tools into a well-respected grass-roots activism organisation. Restecp:
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64193-2,00.html

Well, I finished my paper.

And Alf liked it so much that now he wants me to change my thesis topic?!


My paper was about a user interface I wrote for Jason's software PBX.  I used Flash as the main frontend, but it needed a number of ways to communicate with the actual PBX - it needed to do database lookups, and all sorts of things.  Since Flash is not that powerful a language, I used what it had, and plugged it into my own scripts, written in more powerful languages - PHP, Python, Perl, and so on.

Apparently, when I write about my open source languages, and their benefits, and why I chose them, and the scripts I wrote in them, my writing is "much more mature" and "focussed". Possibly because I actually give a damn about it.  Anyway, because of this, Alfredo wants me to do my thesis on something like "wrapping a core system in user-friendly interfaces using open source tools", or some similar topic.  Frankly, it doesn't sound much like a Masters thesis to me, but we'll have to see.

Anyway, the paper is completed.  It was way too long, and now I have to slim it down substantially before I submit it, but the main slog is over.