Månad: oktober 2004

Publicerat

Lagen.nu is now public

Finally, after many a late nights of coding, lagen.nu is now usable enough for me to
make it public. For new viewers, this is the hobby project I’ve been
working on during weekends and evenings for the last few months, and
it’s basically the entire body of swedish law, nicely formatted,
hyperreferences and linkable.

As an example, take a look at the official online edition of the swedish copyright law, (or the more nicely formatted version at Notisum) and contrast it with the one at lagen.nu

Things to notice:

  • The table of contents, simplifying navigation in large law
    texts.
  • The lenght and simplicity of the URL, making it feasible to input from memory, as long as you know the ID of the law (later on I will add some nice vhosting magic so you can input http://upphovsrätts.lagen.nu/, but that’s not finished yet).
  • The ”changelog” for each section, detailing when that law was
    changed, with links to transitional regulations and the preparation
    documents that led up to the law.
  • Links to prejudical verdicts for each section, where such are
    available. This is particularly important, since many parts of law are
    hard to interpret without the knowledge of legal practice.
  • The fact that each and every paragraph and section is directly
    linkable. For example, to refer to the second paragraph in section 26
    g of the copyright law, just use the URL http://lagen.nu/1960:729#P26gS2. Purple
    numbers     are used to make it easier to discover and create such
    direct links.
  • (This is my favorite part). Wherever there are inline references
    in the text to another paragraph or another law, direct links are
    created, so that you quickly can click around and find out the exact
    text of the referenced paragraphs. Or, for even quicker access, just
    hover with the pointer over the link to get a tooltip containing the
    first ten words or so.

Also, there’s of course RSS feeds. One for news about new features on the site,
and one that contains all new and changed laws, as
that information becomes public. I hope that the latter one in
particular will become useful for anyone that wants to keep up to date
on Swedish law.

Now, if don’t have an interest in Swedish law, lagen.nu won’t be of
much interest to you, but if you do, I hope that you will take a look
at it, and if you have any feedback at all (feature suggestions, bug
reports, lavish praise), please do mail it to me.

I have really no idea of what will become of the project, but since
I’m planning on starting law school at the start of next year, I will
probably add whatever features that could be usable for a student of
Swedish law.

Publicerat

I’m not dead yet!

Not much activity on the blog as of recently, but this is mainly
because I’ve been working evenings and weekends putting lagen.nu in shape. I’ve only got three
TODO items left (and they’re really minor) before I can let the site
go public in an alpha version.

Lagen.nu won’t be of much use to you unless you speak swedish and is
interested in swedish law, but if you do, it will be THE reference
site for you. I’m real happy about how it’s shaping up, in
particularly how fun it is to hack on it. I think a key aspect of it
is the total feature-driven approach I’ve been taking. Basically, I’ve
just completely disregarded everything I’ve learned about planning
ahead, writing maintainable code, finding out the Right Way to do
things, and just coded away with no plan in sight.

And yet, I’ve still learned a few interesting lessons. I hope to find
the time and energy to write some of them down here, but the main
lesson is the one outlined above.

Publicerat

Now with linkblog!

After hearing about them all over the place, I finally checked out
del.icio.us, and liked it so much that I
started a linkblog: here!. I’ll probably
post interesting links over there, instead of rounding them up in
”quickies of the day” style posts, at least as long as I don’t have
anything significant to say about them.

The links should be auto-included on my front page through some blosxom
plugin, but it will have to wait.

Of course, it’s much more preferable just to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Publicerat

Most music sites do not suck (anymore)

Almost a year ago, I ranted about how few
music sites have adopted RSS. Well, yesterday I got a mail from Kal at dagensskiva.com, telling me that they have a multitude of RSS feeds now. Cool!

And they’re not alone. Out of my list of six favourite music sites, all but one now has RSS feeds:

While I’m at it, let me plug three other music sites that I read:

2004 has indeed been the year of RSS. Why, we now even have uninformed
opionion pieces against it, can a mass market breakthrough be far
away?

Publicerat

Passed the history test!

As previously reported,
I’ve studied for a history exam. The examination was split in two
parts, one written and one oral, and this wednesday I did the last
part.

I’m happy to report that I passed the test with a ”MVG”
grade. That’s the highest possible grade for these kinds of test,
although I don’t know how many percent achieve it. Neverthless, this
was the last real obstacle in the way for a successful law school
application, and so it’s a big load off my shoulders. Now I can spend
way more time working on lagen.nu.

As part of my preparations, I summarized the entire history of the
world in a 100+ page document. I was planning to put it up on the web
under some suitable
license, but it needs some polishing and some restructuring (right
now it has the exact same structure as the book I read, Människan
genom tiderna), which I’m not really inclined to do right
now. However, if someone’s interested, drop me a mail.