Category: Closed Course

Posted on

Nice to know my problem has a name. Meet Extract-Transform-Load.

From ETL for America https://civicquarterly.com/article/etl-for-america/

Many of the problems governments confront with technology are fundamentally about data integration: taking the disparate data sets living in a variety of locations and formats (SQL Server databases, exports from ancient ERP systems and Excel spreadsheets on people’s desktops, for example) and getting them into a place and shape where they’re actually usable.

Among backend software engineers, these are generically referred to as ETL problems, or extract-transform-load operations.

In the case of court opinions the ETL problem is complicated by the fact that the data that comes from the courts is in PDF format and the courts do little beyond dumping it on websites and declaring it sort of published. I’m going to be taking a long look at the handling of the ETL problem in the other branches of government to see what’s going on there.

Posted on

Location, Location, Location! Now I get it.

I’ll admit that for the longest time I didn’t get the mobile world’s fascination with location. It seemed like one of those things that mobile developers did to push ads on me while I was in a grocery store or alert people I vaguely knew to my presence in a museum. Most implementations left me feeling underwhelmed. OK, so my phone knows where I’m at. Then what?

I’m coming around on location-based tech now as I’ve been working with a bit of it for a side project I’ve got going. The light bulb came on while writing a little web app that can tell me where I am and give me some basic info about that place. Turns out that once you peel off the veneer of constant ad generation using location in web apps (and, by extension, mobile apps) is fascinating from the developers point of view. Knowing where someone is provides a hook for offering up a lot of useful data that isn’t about selling things or letting near strangers know where you are.

And it isn’t that hard to do.

A good place to start is with the Google Maps JavaScript API. The developer site provides everything you need to get going with adding interesting location-based features to your apps. I tend to use JQuery when I have to deal with JavaScript and there is an excellent demo page of JQuery Mobile integrations with the Google Maps API with many useful examples.

I’ve put together a little example page for you to try. You’ll need to give it access to your browser location data and then you’ll get some basic location information. I find it interesting that in testing the most accurate location comes from mobile devices. The location data returned by laptop and desktop browsers is a lot less accurate, seemingly giving more weight to your IP address than other factors.

 

Posted on

My general impression is that the trend is toward law schools losing control over websites and servers as more of that infrastructure gets centralized by the University. I think law schools have failed to adequately institutionalize a need for a strong law school tech presence by marginalizing professional IT staff into relatively weak support roles. The result of this marginalization is a lack of strategic tech leadership in law schools making it relatively easy for the Dean to cede control of tech over to a central parent organization. Of course once that control is lost, it is very difficult to get back.

In the long run central control may work out better for law schools anyway since there is a lot more innovation in the use of tech to support scholarship and teaching at the University level than there ever was in the law school and centralized control makes it more likely that  this innovation will actual come to the law school.

Said I, because someone asked.

Posted on

So here’s my weird social media trend for the month: over the past couple of weeks I’ve picked up followers, suggestions, connections, etc from a number of real estate agents in Silicon Valley, L.A., and Vegas. Makes me wonder if they know something I don’t.

Posted on

For future reference.
If someone says something like “How about if I could click this and check that and then _voilà!_ it works” that _voilà!_ translates into approximately 496 lines of code and a new table in the database. :ghost:

But it is probably a cool new feature that is totally worth the work.

Posted on

I’ve developed a bit of a form letter for IT recruiters who “cold call” me via email. I let them know about my current excellent package and how much I enjoy working in academia/non-profits. Then I let them know that what it would take to think about moving on. I close with an invitation to continue the discussion if they have anything that fits the bill.

Mostly I never hear back. Occasionally I’ll get a reply thanking me for being forthright and letting me know they’ll get back to me if they get anything I might be interested in. I haven’t gotten that third email yet.

Posted on

Fargo Brings An Outliner to Your Browser

The following article was originally published as Dave Winer’s Outliner, Fargo on April 24, 2014 on the Slaw blog.

With his latest project Fargo, Dave Winer puts outliners where they belong, everywhere.  Fargo runs in your web browser and stores your data in your Dropbox folder. This combination of browser and cloud puts the outliner everywhere making it a good choice for anyone looking for ubiquitous note taking and writing capabilities.

Why an outliner? The short answer is that you can reduce most writing to an outline, a series of expandable points or topics. If you think about it for a minute it is easy to see most legal writing as an outline. Many of those course outlines we wrote in law school as help learning the law and getting through final exams are exactly the sort of outlines that a tool like Fargo excels at. Outlining is a basic form of writing that lets the author get ideas down with an opportunity to rearrange points and expand on concepts as necessary. For me outlining most closely resembles my thought process, so an outliner is a great way for me to write.

Dave Winer knows outliners. Dave is a smart guy who creates really useful software (and much more). His history with outliners goes back over 30 years. With Fargo he brings all that experience into a cutting edge product that redefines what you can do in a browser while retaining complete control over your data. Dave has long embraced the idea that you should have the ultimate control over your data. Your data should not be locked into a closed, proprietary silo, held hostage to licensing fees and developer whims.  The use of Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) as the format that Fargo uses to store data supports this idea.

All the ouliner features!Fargo is a full featured outliner. In a simple browser window or tab Fargo gives you a powerful outliner. You can use it to create the most simple or complex outlines with multiple levels. The editor supports copy, cut, and paste, and basic text markup like bold and italics. Content is rearranged by dragging and dropping or using keyboard shortcuts. Whole paragraphs or sections of an outline can be moved allowing you to rearrange your writing as you see fit. The outline can be expanded or collapsed as needed. Outlines can contain links out to external resources making Fargo a good choice for keeping track of links to interesting sites.

Fargo is a virtual machine in your browser. Fargo runs in your web browser and saves your data to your Dropbox account. It is a full featured outliner, but it has some secrets. Fargo runs a blog editor and content management system in your browser. The CMS includes support for Markdown and a lengthy list of macros to make the content more dynamic. You can create an outline that is a presentation. It has the beginnings of a scripting language written in JavaScript with verbs you can call. You can run your own JavaScript when an outline is accessed. All running in your web browser, using Dropbox for storage and serving of pages. In short you can run a pretty nice web server with Fargo using your web browser as the engine to put your data on the Internet.  Your browser and Dropbox account effectively replace a physical or virtual server and a bundle of software to put your data on the Internet.

Fun things to do with Fargo. For me the coolest thing about Fargo is all the things it lets you do with an outline. For law students and lawyers having a versatile outliner is a very good thing. Being able to share outlines and turn them into blogs or websites or presentations makes Fargo an excellent choice for an outliner. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do with it.

  • View an outline. http://elide.us/4c is the CALI Topics in Contract Law outline. This is just a static display of the outline, but it gives you some idea of how an outline could work.
  • Create an outline of your own. Visit http://fargo.io to get started (note that you will need to have a Dropbox account to create outlines).
  • Open your own copy of the CALI Contracts Outline. In Fargo click on the File menu and select “Import OPML…”. In the dialog that opens enter http://outlines.cali.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ContractsTopics.opml in the box and click OK. This should retrieve a copy of the contracts outline and open it on your system. You now have your very own copy to work with. You can add links and citations to relevant court opinions or class notes to it. It’s yours, feel free to experiment.
  • Turn an outline into a presentation. It’s pretty easy, just follow the directions at http://fargo.io/docs/presentations.html (yes, the documentation for Fargo is written in Fargo). For an example see http://propertyoutline.smallpict.com/caliTopics.html which also serves a s a reminder to not get to wordy with your slides.
  • Set up a note/link blog to track interesting things you find on the Internet. I’ve run one at http://teknoids.smallpict.com/ since late in March. It is a great way of noting things that I need/want to remember during the course of the day. There’s even an RSS feed so you can follow along, http://teknoids.smallpict.com/rss.xml. You can get started with your own blog by clicking on the last 2 links on http://teknoids.smallpict.com/2014/03/25/ and following the instructions.
  • Connect Fargo to your WordPress (or Classcaster) blog and use Fargo to create blog posts that are sent to WordPress. This is one of the cooler features of Fargo. It allows you to send stuff from your outline to your WordPress blog which can be pretty handy. The first draft of this article was written in Fargo and sent along to my WordPress blog. Learn how to connect Fargo to WordPress at http://docs.fargo.io/fargo/usingFargoWithWordpress/.

Are you ready to start outlining? I hope so. Outlining is a great way to organize your thoughts and information and get things written down. Fargo is an excellent tool for outlining that requires nothing beyond a web browser and a Dropbox account to get started. Once you get started Fargo provides with a host of options for making your outlines useful. Give it a try at http://fargo.io and share you thoughts and outlines below.