Month: May 2013

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Opera 14 for Android, Built on Chromium 26, Released

Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!

via Opera Developer News – Opera 14 for Android is out!.

Great news for folks running older Android devices because Opera 14 supports Android 2.3 and higher. This means an alternative to whatever browse came bundled with your device.

Among other features this release includes support for HTML 5 including <audio> and a new UI.

Certainly worth a look.

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How About a Pastry Box Project For Legal Ed?

Every so often I find something on the Internet that is truly interesting and engaging. The Pastry Box Project is one of those things.

Each year, The Pastry Box Project gathers 30 people who are each influential in their field and asks them to share thoughts regarding what they do. Those thoughts are then published every day throughout the year at a rate of one per day, starting January 1st and ending December 31st. 2013’s topic is “Shaping The Web”

About – The Pastry Box Project

The result of this is a stream of daily posts on a given topic, this year it happens to “Shaping The Web” . Every morning there is something new. It might just be a 140 character thought, a single tweet. It may be 1000 words on some point of web design. Or it may be just about anything in between. No matter what the topic, it is one of those 30 voices, every morning. And the interesting thing to me is how those 30 voices merge to create a single tone for the blog. It’s that tone that brings me back every morning.

Of course it took just 2 or 3 days of reading for me to start thinking about the possibilities in this format. How great would it be to get 30 voices involved in legal education,a collection of deans, teachers, technologists, librarians, to participate in something like this? 30 individuals letting us know what they are thinking about, or doing, or tying to do on the topic of “Shaping Legal Education“. Everyday, one a day, for a year. I think that would be pretty cool.

The Pastry Box Project software is open source and is mostly a WordPress theme, which means it can be run just about anywhere, even added to CALI Classcaster. The editing interface is pretty straight forward and all posting is scheduled using the workflow tools baked into WordPress. The hard part is finding 30 voices.

I would suspect that a little leg work would turn up 30 folks interested in posting once a month for a year according to very fixed schedule. One of the great things about the Pastry Box from an editor’s point of view is that it is very predictable. The timing of (and deadlines for) posts from a specific person can be mapped out for the entire year. Everyone knows what is expected of them and when.

This time I’m just writing about the idea. I haven’t set up any software, just getting the idea out there (something I’m trying to more of).

What do you think? 30 individuals letting us know what they are thinking about, or doing, or tying to do on the topic of “Shaping Legal Education“. Everyday, one a day, for a year. Please use the comments to let me know if you’re interested in the idea, think I’m out of mind, etc.

 

 

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BYAR! Building Yet Another Reader!

With the looming demise of Google Reader (unless, of course, they change their minds) I’ve been casting about for a reader. For a number of years I ran my own aggregators, including UserLand Radio, Feed-on-Feeds, and currently Dave Winer’s River2 in the OPML Editor. Each had (or has) its own pros and cons that I’m not going to get into. I had moved to Google Reader because it had features I liked and it was available everywhere at any time. I don’t think it was perfect and there were things about it I found annoying (again not getting into that) but on the whole it was more useful than not.

What the choices for replacing Reader? Well, there are several, the best probably paid services that provide you with a host of features now tailored to remind you of Google Reader, good or bad. Interestingly the self hosted or desktop choices have not evolved much in the past 5 years, This is most likely due to to the ‘Google effect’. Once Google moves into a space the general sense is that that is it, Google wins and innovation tends to cease or at best slow to a crawl. So it seems to have been with news aggregators.

With Google now moving out of the space there is some sense of opportunity in the reader/aggregator space. The void left by Google Reader’s exit will no doubt spur some innovation as developers begin to look at RSS news feeds as a field worth exploring. I know I’m thinking about it.

What I’m thinking of is a system I can run from one of my Linux servers, that I can access from any device in a reasonable format and share the reader with friends. On the backend PHP using cURL and SimpleXML to access an OPML store of feeds, retrieve, parse, and archive items and display in a responsive frontend built on JavaScript and Bootstrap. Display options include a river of news format or various sorts. Items are marked to archive permanently or held for a certain number of days. Publishing features allow for the sharing of items via social nets like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Multiple personas allow for profiles setups that will let users create collections that can be handled separately. User management is handled internally or thorough various social net APIs.

Of course it all gets open sourced. Hey, watch for it on GIthub. The goal here is to create something that lets me read the info I’ve decided I want to see, and share it as I will. I guess we’ll see what happens.

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More In-Browser Content Editing, Now on GitHub, With Prose

Prose provides a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. It’s a web-based interface for managing content on GitHub. Use it to create, edit, and delete files, and save your changes directly to GitHub. Host your website on GitHub Pages for free, or set up your own GitHub webhook server.
Prose has advanced support for Jekyll sites and markdown content. Prose detects markdown posts in Jekyll sites and provides syntax highlighting, a formatting toolbar, and draft previews in the site’s full layout.
Developers can configure Jekyll sites to take advantage of these and many more features that customize the content editing experience.

via Prose · A Content Editor for GitHub.

Prose, from Development Seed, is the latest in-browser content editor I’ve come across in the past few months. It’s been around for some time, but is just now beginning to catch on with the GitHub crowd. In a nutshell Prose lets you edit any file in your GitHub repos with a special focus on GitHub Pages, Jekyll, and Markdown.

Prose joins outliner Fargo and text editor Draft as part of growing group of in-browser editors that promise to alter forever the way we create content for the Internet and beyond. I’m just waiting for Word to die.

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AWS SDK Now Available For Node.js

The General Availability (GA) release of the AWS SDK for Node.js is now available and can be installed through npm as aws-sdk. We have added a number of features since the preview release including bound parameters, streams, IAM roles for EC2 instances, version locking, and proxies.

via Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS SDK for Node.js – Now Generally Available.

With the availability of the AWS SDK for node.js it is now possible to do things like add S3 storage functionality directly into your node.js app. Adding features of AWS to the real time interactivity of node.js will just make it more attractive as a platform.

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Topics in Contract Law

1. Introduction

  • 1.1. Overview and Sources of Contract Law

2. Formation

  • 2.1. Offer and Acceptance
    • 2.1.1 Mutual Assent
    • 2.1.2 Invitations to Negotiate and other Expressions that are not Offers
    • 2.1.3 Written Agreement Contemplated v. Written Memorialization
    • 2.1.4 Letters of Intent and Other Formal Preliminary Agreements
    • 2.1.5 Express and Implied Contracts
    • 2.1.6 Bilateral and Unilateral Contracts
    • 2.1.7 Offer
    • 2.1.8 Duration of Offers
    • 2.1.9 Option Contracts and Firm Offers
    • 2.1.10 Acceptance
    • 2.1.11 Formation of Contracts under UCC Art. 2
    • 2.1.12 Battle of the Forms (UCC 2-207)
    • 2.1.13 Indefiniteness
    • 2.1.14 Mailbox Rule
  • 2.2. Consideration
    • 2.2.1. The Bargain Theory
      • 2.2.2.1 Gift Promises
      • 2.2.2.3 Past Consideration (Moral Obligation)
      • 2.2.3.1 Output and Requirement Contracts
      • 2.2.3.3 Commitment (Lady Duff-Gordon)
      • 2.2.3.4 Satisfaction Clauses
      • 2.2.4.2 Reliance (Promissory Estoppel)
  • 2.3. Defenses
    • 2.3.1. Void, Voidable, and Unenforceable Contracts
    • 2.3.2. Illegal Promises
    • 2.3.3. Lack of Capacity
    • 2.3.4. Duress and Undue Influence
    • 2.3.5. Unjust Terms (Unconscionability)
    • 2.3.6. Fraud and Misrepresentation
    • 2.3.7. Misunderstanding and Mistake
    • 2.3.8. Statute of Frauds

3. Performance and Breach

  • 3.1. What are the Obligations?
    • 3.1.1. Parol Evidence Rule
    • 3.1.2. Interpretation
    • 3.1.3. Implied Terms (Gap-fillers)
    • 3.1.4. Good Faith
    • 3.1.5. Promises
    • 3.1.6. Warranties
    • 3.1.7. Representations
  • 3.2. Have the Obligations been discharged?
    • 3.2.1. Modification
    • 3.2.2. Accord & Satisfaction
    • 3.2.3. Unanticipated Events
    • 3.2.4. Rescission
    • 3.2.5. Waiver
    • 3.2.6. Release
  • 3.3. Conditions: Does an event have to occur before an obligation is due?
    • 3.3.1. Definition and Classification
    • 3.3.2. Conditions and Promises Distinguished
    • 3.3.3. Excuse of the Effect of Conditions
  • 3.4. Breach
    • 3.4.1. Material and Immaterial Breach
    • 3.4.2. Perfect Tender Rule
    • 3.4.3. Installment Contracts (UCC 2-612)
    • 3.4.4. Breach by Anticipatory Repudiation
    • 3.4.5. Assurances (UCC 2-609)

4. Remedies

  • 4.1. Remedies for Breach of Contract
    • 4.1.1 Specific Performance
    • 4.1.2 Expectation Damages
    • 4.1.3 Certainty
    • 4.1.4 Foreseeability
    • 4.1.5 Mitigation
    • 4.1.6 Measuring Expectation: The Cost of Completion
    • 4.1.7 Substantial Performance
    • 4.1.8 Reliance
    • 4.1.9 Restitution
    • 4.1.10 Liquidated Damages
  • 4.2. UCC Remedies

5. Third Parties

  • 5.1. Third Party Beneficiaries
  • 5.2. Assignment and Delegation

6. Additional Topics

  • 6.1. UCC
  • 6.2. Drafting Contracts
  • 6.3 Choice of Law
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Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” Hits the Streets

After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code name Wheezy).

This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.

Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for Wheezy, will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically.

via Debian — News — Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” released.

Debian recommends using BitTorrent to do the download. A standard Debian install can be done with the first CD/DVD in the set. I’ll be running this up in VirtualBox when the ISOs finish.