Through Jean-Pierre Cloutier’s blog, I got to this post by Daniel Dreszner, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who was recently denied tenure. It would seem he suspects his blogging activities have something to do with his dismissal, but I like his analysis:

That said, if one assumes that the opportunity cost of blogging (e.g., better or more scholarship) was the difference between tenure and no tenure – an unclear assertion at best – then it’s a tough call. From a strict cost-benefit analysis, one could argue that the doors that blogging opened could have been deferred for a few years in return for the annuity of a tenured position at Chicago. That said, if I did things only for the money, I never would have entered the academy in the first place. And I’ve enjoyed the psychic rewards of blogging way too much to regret my choice.

I think he has the right attitude.

Update: Annie Patenaude correctly points out she is the one who pointed me to Jean-Pierre Cloutier’s blog.

Here’s an interesting interview with Louis Suarez-Potts, “community manager” of OpenOffice.org. I really like the point she is making: free software is all about communities, it is all about politics. Free software is, in part, politically motivated which is an important difference with the typical small software motivated by financial gains. Of course, OpenOffice.org is backed by Sun Microsystems which, I hope, is in it for the money, but many of the contributors around them are there for political reasons: they want OpenOffice to support such a langage, such an operating system or such a technology. A company like Microsoft is mostly cut out from such support.

We see an understanding of this dynamic in Brazil, where the government is behind OpenOffice.org and open source in general. We see this in India and elsewhere, where governments understand that they can support OpenOffice.org and they can support open source, and the people who are benefiting are the localities. It is a politically inexpensive but valuable logic.

A nameless university is using Oracle’s jinitiator applets on some management web sites. Jinitiator is just Oracle’s version of the Java JVM, but you can use any recent JVM and be happy. The trick under Linux is to fool the browser into interpreting the mime-type “application/x-jinit-applet” (specific to Oracle) as just an ordinary applet. As it turns out, you just have to edit a small text file called pluginreg.dat.

Reference: Oracle Apps on Linux – AVallark.

See also my posts Oracle buys Hyperion, JOLAP versus the Oracle Java API, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft freeing their databases and Oracle and MySQL — is MySQL in a weak position?

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Some nameless university has some management web site requiring Internet Explorer. If you ask me, that’s a lot like requiring GM cars on some highways. Such a web site is no longer a web site, but an Internet Explorer site.

You can often get around these problems by using a Firefox extension called “User Agent Switcher”. It adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. In effect, the web site will be fooled into thinking it is dealing with Internet Explorer.

My only regret is that unlike Konqueror, it seems Firefox cannot spoof only specific web sites. You switch your user agent for all sites at once.

Spam bots killed my server. I had fancy spam filtering code in place, but it was taking too much juice to filter all the crap being sent at me. This blog is now read-only. There are just too many people buying penis enhancers and falling for get-rich-quick scams. Stop wasting your money.