Worus

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this past.
Ours is less and less a free society.

I just finished watching Lawrence Lessig’s presentation on free culture at OSCON in 2002. I’ve read transcripts, and it echoes the same ideas as a lot of his other writings, but watching the presentation and listening to Professor Lessig speak is truly amazing. I would reccommend this to anyone. It’s a very simple and effective presentation. I now know why some have termed it as using the “Lessig Method.” I can’t say enough good about this presentation. It really brings together the important parts of having what Lessig terms as a free culture (where we need to go) over a permission culture (where we’re headed).

Interestingly enough, I just saw that Professor Lessig wrote an article for the Financial Times about anime music videos. He writes about a talk he was giving and says that at the end he even showed some anime music videos to his audience! Talk about un-stuffy!

I learn new things in Windows all the time! I recently was having some trouble connecting USB Mass Storage devices, such as my flash drive to Windows XP. Windows would tell me that it had found the device, and it would recognize it and everything. However, when looking for it using Windows Explorer, I was shown that the drive was not available for use. Further digging showed that Windows was mapping the drives to already mapped drives. Why would Windows do that? I got very frustrated when I couldn’t figure out how to fix this.

I thought, “It’s easier in Linux. By far. As a matter of fact, you don’t have these problems in Linux because you must specify the mount point by default.” Without modifying /etc/fstab, it still would have been as simple as mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash. I was pissed, because the only solution I could come up with on Windows was to plug in the device, look at it’s properties and figure out where it was trying to mount the drive to and disconnect that drive and plug the device back in. How could this be so difficult?

Apparently, Windows has this functionality available if you choose “Manage” from the context menu of My Computer in Windows Explorer. It’s really easy to set up after that. My next big question is why isn’t this in the Device Manager, where I would think to go if I’m having issues with a device? Also, why does the Add New Hardware wizard provide no help even though it clearly sees the device? Finally, why couldn’t I find any documentation for changing drive mappings?

This whole process took me about an hour. An hour to mount a USB drive. However, I guess I still did learn something new.