October 16, 2008
ongoing
Join the Conversation
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>If your business is hurting and money is tight, I have an idea: How’d you like to deploy an application that lets you get closer to your customers, hear about trouble before it gets serious, and doesn’t cost much? <i>[This is part of the <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/11/Tough-Times">Tough Times</a> series.]</i></p> <p>It’s like this: if you work for an organization of any size (company, government department, church, rock band, whatever) you know perfectly well that your clients are discussing you online: praising you when you’re good, flaming you when you’re lame. Wouldn’t you rather be part of that conversation?</p> <p>Whenever I become anyone’s customer—a bank, a TV company, a phone company—they should give me an online account where I can talk to the other customers about how things really work and how to use the service.</p> <p>I don’t think it’ll be hard to compete with the elephants, Facebook and so on. It looks to me like the world’s online social networks are partitioning themselves and becoming more vertical; there are going to be lots of them, and I don’t see why anyone with lots of online customers wouldn’t have one as a matter of course.</p> <p>The good news is that these are pretty easy to set up using cheap-as-in-free Open Source software, and there are already operators out there who’ll offer you a pre-built one as a service. Furthermore, they don’t burn that many cycles, so you’re not talking about a lot of hardware. At the most basic level, <a href="http://blogs.sun.com">turning everyone in your company loose</a> to blog is a really good, really low-rent way to get into the conversation.</p> <p>The bad news is that it’s probably just not going to happen, because of the ranks of attorneys and marketers saying “But we can’t just let our employees and customers say <em>anything</em>, they might get in trouble or say something bad!”</p> <p>They’ll say bad things all right, and I’d think you’d want that happening close to home, so to speak. As for getting in trouble, we’ve got approximately fifteen thousand blogger-years of experience under our belts here at Sun and the number of problems has been tiny; the number of <em>serious</em> problems, zero.</p> <p>But anyhow, it won’t happen unless a smart and well-tuned-in CEO tells the antibodies to shut up and Make It So.</p> </div></content>
icanhascheezburger
I’m at your party…
by ichctcf at October 16, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 16 Oct 2008 is...
a misplaced curly bracket
October 15, 2008
creative commons weblog
Help us build a shared culture: CC’s annual fundraising campaign launched
Creative Commons has now officially launched its 2008 fundraising effort – our Build the Commons Campaign. Many skeptics think this is a precarious time to launch our major fundraising initiative; we disagree. This is an opportunity. An opportunity to call our community members to action – to help us make sure that the Commons continues to grow and be supported. These times demand creative problem solving and innovation on a global level – innovation that stems from collaboration and knowledge exchange, both of which are facilitated through access and sharing, and all of which are made possible by the Commons.
Since I started at CC, I’ve made sure that our annual campaigns (I can’t believe this is my third!) have always had two goals. The first is to raise a large sum of money from our community members (this year’s goal is $500,000) by the end of the year. The second, and in my opinion more important of the two, is to build awareness and community. The Commons is only as strong as the community behind it, and only by working together can we build a Commons that withstands the challenges of this generation and those to come. With this campaign, we’re asking that you help us Build the Commons by using CC licensed works and CC licensing your own work, educating others about the value of the CC approach to openness and access, and lastly – by joining the CC Network.
We are launching several cool things in conjunction with the campaign, and at the top of the list is the chance for you to join the CC Network. By joining, you will become part of a worldwide community dedicated to building the Commons and bringing open content to all corners of the globe. When you join you receive several benefits: a profile page where you can list your CC licensed works; an OpenID you can use at many different sites; and a button you can put on your work’s page to show you’re part of the CC Network. The button shows your support Creative Commons and allows us to add provenance information to the deed when people click through from your work.
We’re also launching the CC Video Project, where we’re asking you to produce a 90-second video that explains why you’re a Creative Commons supporter. So get creative and let the world know why you think what CC does is important. As the commons continues to grow, it’s important that we capture the stories of the community responsible for building it. Creative Commons has only succeeded because of the incredible work that you do. We want to hear and share your stories. How CC has helped you create, access, and collaborate?
This project happily coincides with the release of Jesse Dylan’s new video “A Shared Culture” which is an incredible short that features members of the Creative Commons board talking about the work we do and why we do it. Maybe you’ll choose to use Jesse’s video for inspiration. Maybe you’ll even take some of what he’s done and remix it, mash it up, or sample it in your own video. Whatever you make, be sure to let us know about it - we want to highlight all of the interesting people and stories out there. Check out the CC Video Project page for details on how to participate.
In addition to joining the CC Network and participating in our video project, there are many ways to support CC. Our financial goal is to raise $500,000 – a lot of money, I know, especially now; but any amount you can give makes a difference. You may even be able to double the value of your contribution by taking advantage of your company’s corporate matching gifts program. When you give to CC, you play a central role in helping to sustain the CC infrastructure, enabling us to continue our work maintaining and improving the existing tools and resources that millions of people use and rely upon.
As I said before, CC is around and important thanks to you and what you do with it. The livelihood of the Commons relies upon its community members – the builders, users, and supporters of the open web. If we don’t come together, and if CC is not sustained, the Commons runs the risk of stagnation and restriction – the antithesis of innovation, and innovation is so desperately needed right now. Help us make sure the Commons remains strong and continues to grow by taking part in the campaign today!
Stay involved and informed by signing up for our bi-monthly e-newsletter and by checking out upcoming CC events.
Check out the press releases for the CC Network and Jesse Dylan’s new video “A Shared Culture” for more information.
by Melissa Reeder at October 15, 2008 11:56 PM
warrenellis.com
Ben Templesmith Does DOCTOR WHO
Or at least the cover for an IDW comics series for same.
Funny, really: my old AUTHORITY mucker Bryan Hitch was the concept artist on the first season of the new series.
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 11:23 PM
Your Doomed World
* Bluefin tuna is being pushed to extinction in the Med.
* According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, twelve states in India have "alarming" levels of hunger and a thirteenth has its nutrition problems likened to those in Ethiopia and Chad. India now contains more malnourished people within its borders than any other country in the world. The number is given as "above 200 million."
* A two degrees Celsius change in average temperature will kill all kangaroos.
* Google’s Larry Brilliant is organizing a project designed to detect early signs of emerging global health crises, called the International Networked System for Total Early Disease Protection. What do you get out of that? INSTEDP? You’d think he’d arrange the words to get SPECTRE out of it.
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 10:00 PM
icanhascheezburger
Wai u mad??
by ichctcf at October 15, 2008 10:00 PM
an eternal thought in the mind of godzilla
Curry Snack Gon
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053585017a970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Nipponia1300" border="0" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053585017a970b" src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053585017a970b-800wi" title="Nipponia1300"></a> </p><p>Nipponia is a free magazine published in multiple languages by Heibonsha given away at Japanese embassies around the globe. Inside the new issue (46, for those of you counting) is a profile piece in which I am formally charged with the heinous crime of...<br><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358ce21d970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Making" border="0" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358ce21d970c" src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358ce21d970c-800wi" title="Making"></a> <br><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535850564970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Nipponia5300" border="0" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535850564970b" src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535850564970b-800wi" title="Nipponia5300"></a> </p><p>Surely there are <a href="http://animeworldorder.blogspot.com/2008/09/bonus-interview-with-old-farts-of-anime.html" target="_blank">others more worthy of the blame</a>, but here is my mug shot taken in my preferred seating spot in Nakano Broadway, playing "monsters" with a vintage Marusan Kanegon and something limited-edition from Godzilla Final Wars. But I'd give it all up to be Baolimo Lombo (below), who was born in the Congo, who now gets to work at the LaOX Duty Free in the AKB...</p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358ce84b970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="LAOX" border="0" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358ce84b970c" src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358ce84b970c-800wi" title="LAOX"></a></p></div> </content>
by Patrick Macias at October 15, 2008 09:44 PM
ongoing
Lockin-Free Cloud?
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>Google’s <a href="http://unto.net/">DeWitt Clinton</a>, in <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/14/Cloudy-Times#c1224084071.570560">a comment</a> on my <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/14/Cloudy-Times">Get In the Cloud</a> piece, asserts that both Google App Engine and Amazon EC2/S3 are already lockin-free by my definition. That’s not quite consistent with the word I’m hearing on the street. I’d appreciate testimony and pointers from others, because this is a really important issue.</p> <p>Reproducing DeWitt for convenience:</p> <blockquote> <p>...you can already do that in both the case of Amazon’s services and App Engine. Sure, in the case of EC2 and S3 you'll need to find a new place to host the image and a new backend for the data, but Amazon isn't trying to stop you from doing that. (Actually not sure about the AMI format licensing, but I assumed it was supposed to be open.) </p> <p>In App Engine’s case people can run the open source userland stack (which exposes the API you code to) on other providers any time they want, and there are plenty of open source bigtable implementations to chose from. Granted, bulk export of data is still a bit of a manual process, but it is doable even today and we’re working to make it even easier.</p> <p>Are you saying that lock-in is avoided only once the alternative hosts exist?</p> <p>But how does Amazon or Google facilitate that, beyond getting licensing correct and open sourcing as much code as they can? Obviously we can't be the ones setting up the alternative instances. (Though we can cheer for them, like we did when we saw the App Engine API implemented on top of EC2 and S3.)</p> </blockquote> <p>To address one of his points: Yes, I think that being lockin-free in theory is much less interesting than having actual concrete commercial alternatives.</p> <p>But in principle, is DeWitt correct? Would either of Google or Amazon like to say so, officially?</p> </div></content>
cafe con leche
Mulberry Technologies has announced the second annual Balisage: The Markup Conference, to take place in Montreal August 11-14, 2009.
Mulberry Technologies has announced the second annual Balisage: The Markup Conference, to take place in Montreal August 11-14, 2009. "Balisage: The Markup Conference is designed for markup theoreticians and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the field. It's all about the markup: how to create it; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; and performance. In short, it's a technical XML Conference; it's an XSL Conference; it's a conference about XQuery, RDF, XSD, SGML, LMNL, XSL-FO, XTM, micro-formats, SVG, MathML, OWL, TexMECS, RNG, UBL, and a lot more. Balisage welcomes papers about topic maps, document modeling, archival markup, ontologies and vocabulary development, metadata, content management, versioning, and other markup-related topics." This is the successor to the popular and fun Extreme Markup Languages Conference: same organizers (good), same hotel (bad), but no longer under the auspices of the GCA.
creative commons weblog
Geograph British Isles Releases 1 Millionth Image
The Geograph British Isles project, which aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland, announced today that they have recieved their 1 millionth image submission. All images are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, meaning the images can be shared and reused as long as the author(s) are properly attributed and any derivative works are shared under the same license.
The White Lyne | David Liddle, CC BY-SA
Just three months ago, we were praising the GBI project’s effort to release torrents of their image database, which then totaled 860,000 images. Congrats to the GBI project on this huge milestone - read more about their project here, including their well articulated points on the benefits of remaining free and open.
by Cameron Parkins at October 15, 2008 09:09 PM
icanhascheezburger
Geek Squad
Geek Squad iz equal opportunity employer!
do u gotz any warrantee on dis still?
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: pjimypow50
by ichctcf at October 15, 2008 07:00 PM
warrenellis.com
Talvin Singh: OK
You ever have those days when you just can’t wake up? I’m having one of those. Blood isn’t moving, can’t stop yawning, shit isn’t happening. There are some CDs I always save for the days when I can’t wake up. Flipping this one over in my hands just now, I realised that I’ve had it for ten years. 1998. Really doesn’t seem that long.
Talvin Singh’s ’OK’ was, in my head, the soundtrack for my comics miniseries TWO-STEP (illustrated so brilliantly by Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti). I’ve got something like four different mixes of this, but this is the one that unscabs my head, the "Heavy Rotation Radio Refixx". It may only be available on the "OK" CD-single. Play loud.
Download audio file (01-OK%20(Heavy%20Rotation%20Radio%20Refixx).mp3)
(Usual standards apply: mp3 is live for seven days only and provided for review purposes only, contact degaussing at googlemail com if you need it taken down immediately)
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 05:34 PM
@network 15octo8
* D’Is:
(also, his Oct/Nov appearance schedule)
* Susannah has a short, eye-opening piece on the Extreme Associates trial that could easily go under the Your Doomed World header.
* A lovely little Paul Pope sketch. (fullsize version here)
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 04:02 PM
icanhascheezburger
i haz fud on mah mind
by ichctcf at October 15, 2008 04:00 PM
warrenellis.com
T-Shirt Of The Day
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 02:30 PM
Links for 2008-10-14
- BBC NEWS | Health | Earliest confirmed TB case found
The 9,000-year-old remains of a mother and her baby discovered off the coast of Israel provide the earliest concrete evidence of human TB
(tags:med history ) - BBC NEWS | England | West Midlands | Kebabs made as corpse lay nearby
"A fast food shop owner was found preparing food while an employee's corpse lay nearby."
(tags:crime weird unhealthy probably+not+delicious ) - SKorea’s dancing robot can also tackle the chores - Yahoo! News
South Korean researchers said Monday they have developed a robot which can dance and get emotional when it's not tackling the chores. Mahru can move its lips, eyebrows and even pupils freely to make faces and can emit two kinds of fragrances to match its emotions
(tags:robot sci tech a+bit+creepy robots+that+fart+fear ) - Giant Cyclones At Saturn’s Poles Create A Swirl Of Mystery
New images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal a giant cyclone at Saturn's north pole, and show that a similarly monstrous cyclone churning at Saturn's south pole is powered by Earth-like storm patterns.
(tags:space ) - Vicar accused of threatening herself - UPI.com
British authorities say a vicar stands accused of allegedly sending herself a dead hedgehog and dog feces to prove herself a crime victim.
(tags:crime mad )
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 02:00 PM
the old new thing
Possessed: A documentary about hoarding
I found Possessed, a short documentary on hoarders, fascinating because I teeter on the brink of hoarding myself and have to fight it. Some days I am more successful than others. Notice how coherently the subjects talk about their obsession. They know it's pathological, but they can't stop themselves.
I was able to beat my hoarding of cardboard boxes ("Hey, it'd be a waste to toss these cardboard boxes into the recycle bin; I could re-use it someday, like maybe if I have to mail a package or something") when a friend of mine was moving and needed cardboard boxes to pack up his things. I gladly handed over my stash of cardboard boxes, with the instructions that when he was finished, the cardboard boxes were his problem. That solved two problems. I was able to get rid of my cardboard boxes with a clear conscience, and my friend got a bunch of moving boxes.
by oldnewthing at October 15, 2008 02:00 PM
Disable your wireless network card to speed up VPN'ing
As a follow-up to my tip on speeding up connecting via RAS and a SmartCard, I've been told that another trick you can do is to disable your wireless networking card before initiating the VPN connection. Wireless networking cards are a huge attack surface, and the VPN software spends a lot of time trying to secure it.
I don't have a wireless networking card on the machine I use at home to connect to the work network, so I haven't tried it, but who knows, maybe it'll work for you.
by oldnewthing at October 15, 2008 02:00 PM
icanhascheezburger
cheezburger
by ichctcf at October 15, 2008 01:00 PM
2 much free tiem
by ichctcf at October 15, 2008 10:00 AM
the risks digest
Thomas Crown escape, revisited
Re: Sydney NS vs. Sydney NSW
Oyster card hack details revealed
Re: Remarkable -- United Airlines Stock
Investigator: Computer likely caused Qantas plunge
Qantas A330 accident
B-2 crash on takeoff
Illinois high-speed trains
D10T: National Debt Clock is out of digits
Passport RFID attack: missing validation
Missing hard drive "not encrypted" because it was "secure"
Russian researchers achieve 100-fold increase in WPA2 cracking speed
Defective news submission website
Risks of a new laptop
Researcher Liuba Belkin: Workers more prone to lie in e-mail
ongoing
Get In the Cloud
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>When times are tough, money is tight. Which means, you’d think, that the golden era of Cloud Computing, as in pay-as-you-go infrastructure, is upon us. It should be, but we’re not there yet. <i>[This is part of the <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/11/Tough-Times">Tough Times</a> series.]</i></p> <p>As I noted <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/13/Open-Source-Now">last time</a>, the current economic climate is going to get in the way of anything that requires laying out capital. In this light, cloud computing starts to look good for the same reason that Open Source looks good: low up-front costs. So, just like everyone else, I think technology providers and consumers need to be looking really hard in this direction.</p> <h2 id="p-2">Tech Issue</h2> <p>But there are two problems. The small problem is that we haven’t quite figured out the architectural sweet spot for cloud platforms. Is it Amazon’s EC2/S3 “Naked virtual whitebox” model? Is it a Platform-as-a-service flavor like Google App Engine? We just don’t know yet; stay tuned.</p> <h2 id="p-3">Big Issue</h2> <p>I mean a <em>really</em> big issue: if cloud computing is going to take off, it absolutely, totally, must be lockin-free. What that means if that I’m deploying my app on Vendor X’s platform, there have to be other vendors Y and Z such that I can pull my app and its data off X and it’ll all run with minimal tweaks on either Y or Z.</p> <p>At the moment, I don’t think either the Amazon or Google offerings qualify.</p> <p>Are we so deranged here in the twenty-first century that we’re going to re-enact, wide-eyed, the twin tragedies of the great desktop-suite lock-in and the great proprietary-SQL lock-in? You know, the ones where you give a platform vendor control over your IT budget? Gimme a break.</p> <p>I’m simply not interested in any cloud offering at any level unless it offers zero barrier-to-exit.</p> <h2 id="p-4">PHP</h2> <p>You know, there is already sort of a cloud ecosystem out there in the world of PHP. There are a whole bunch of competitive vendors where you can upload a bunch of <code>.php</code> files and database dumps and with only a moderate amount of twiddling, get your app running.</p> <p>I don’t think that PHP is the best way to build Web apps. But increasingly, I’m developing an appreciation for its ecosystem.</p> </div></content>
London
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>I spent four days there last week and enjoyed it. Herewith words and pictures.</p> <p>I stayed at the <a href="http://www.londonbridgehotel.com/">London Bridge Hotel</a>, a perfectly decent place just at the south end of that bridge. Since <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2007/05/04/London">my visit last May</a>, they’ve upgraded the WiFi and made it free; good on ’em; plus the breakfast is excellent.</p> <h2 id="p-2">The City</h2> <p>Mornings, I walked northward across the river and considered The City, which is the part of the city at the north end of the bridge. It’s under construction.</p> <img src="PS082152.png" alt="Cranes over the City of London"> <p>Well, for the moment anyhow. Times are troubled, obviously; the newspaper headlines scream crisis and panic every morning and afternoon. I spent time talking to finance people, Sun customers, worried people but not the names you’re seeing in those panicky headlines.</p> <p>London is about money and it’s been about money for a long time; three and a half centuries if <a href="http://www.pepysdiary.com/">Sam Pepys</a> is any guide.</p> <p>Still, I like the City for its raw energy, its remarkably sharp-dressed women, its compactness, and the unselfconscious higgledy-piggle.</p> <img src="R0010800.png" alt="Construction in the City of London"> <h2 id="p-3">FOWA</h2> <p>That’d be, in full, <a href="http://london2008.futureofwebapps.com/">Future of Web Apps London 2008</a>, something over a thousand Webfolk gathered in a thing called “ExCel”, a charmless conference center that’s near, well, nothing, and has the atmosphere of a second-rate venue in a random US suburb. Well, it’s big I guess, if that’s good. Did I mention it was remote? Depending on traffic, you can get to some parts of France quicker than to some parts of London.</p> <p>We weren’t alone there. Across the hall was the Fruits and Vegetables association, but that and the other features of the location were mostly obscured behind a solid phalanx of beaming young faces—mostly female—whose crimson shirts proclaimed “I love my church”. They smiled at everyone, including the fruit-and-vegetable people and web geeks.</p> <p>Here are a couple of people I photographed at the event. Todd Fast was there to talk about <a href="http://zembly.com/">Zembly</a>, a new Sun thingie that is general-purpose under the covers but currently positioned as a social-network (i.e. Facebook) app builder. Facebook is dead to me personally, but a ton of developers want to build apps for it, and I have to say the Zembly buzz around that was very positive.</p> <img src="PS082165.png" alt="Todd Fast demonstrates Zembly at FOWA London 2008"> <p>This is <a href="http://blog.whatfettle.com/">Paul Downey</a> (AKA <a href="http://twitter.com/psd">@psd</a>), who does the coolio Web Architecture, um, pictures. I’d like to call them “mandalas” except for they’re neither round nor spiritual, but I would anyhow. This picture came out sort of grainy and satanic-looking; I have another in which Paul’s just this bloke with a smile, but grainy and satanic is way more fun.</p> <img src="PS082167.png" alt="Paul Downy at FOWA London 2008"> <p>I had the most charming dinner with Paul and <a href="http://kontrawize.blogs.com/">Tony Coates</a> and <a href="http://www.jenitennison.com/">Jeni Tenison</a> (AKA <a href="https://twitter.com/JeniT">@JeniT</a>) and <a href="http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/">Chris Dent</a> and a couple of others whose URIs I can’t bring to mind; thanks, guys.</p> <h2 id="p-4">Travel Advice</h2> <p>Specifically:</p> <ul> <li><p>Don’t attend any events at ExCel unless you have to.</p></li> <li><p>If you do, don’t stay at the <a href="http://www.ramadadocklands.co.uk/">Ramada Docklands</a>, which is a <em>long</em> walk from the venue, where the thunderous air conditioning doesn’t switch off, and where Internet costs £15/night and varies between slow and stopped.</p></li> <li><p>If you are stuck out in the ExCel neighborhood, my condolences, but do go grab dinner at the “Fox@Connaught”, a pleasantly quiet and uncrowded roadhouse by the hotels with decent food and beer.</p></li> <li><p>If you’re traveling from the Distant East back to Heathrow, take the Docklands railway to the Jubilee Line to the Piccadilly line and just stay with it all the way to the end. Unless it’s rush hour you’ll get a seat most of the way, and in terms of convenience and speed this matches or maybe beats both a cab and the extra transfer over to the fast train from Paddington.</p></li> </ul> <p>Oh, and by the way, Heathrow’s new Terminal Five, <em>if</em> you’re proceeding straight through it without trying to transfer, sucks somewhat less than the rest of the airport, but <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2007/07/03/Avoid-Heathrow">that’s not saying much</a>.</p> <img src="R0010803.png" alt="Heathrow Terminal 5 scene"> </div></content>
warrenellis.com
Night Music: Grouper
Grouper’s DRAGGING A DEAD DEER UP A HILL is a collection of songs and instrumentals that all seem to come from unknown fields in the dawn hours. Thick with mist and the white noise of strange nature. I was torn between this and the howling of "Wind And Snow," but I started to hear a detourned and distorted echo of Fleetwood Mac’s "Albatross in the middle of it. So I’m playing "When We Fall," because it’s just perfectly dark jewelled night music.
You can buy the CD from a ton of places, just stick it into Google and be amazed. Mp3 purchase can be had at eMusic.
G’night.
Download audio file (Grouper_Dragging%20A%20Dead%20Deer%20Up%20A%20Hill_04_When%20We%20Fall.mp3)
(Usual standards apply: mp3 is live for seven days only and provided for review purposes only, contact degaussing at googlemail com if you need it taken down immediately)
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 01:28 AM
Some Cover Previews
by Warren Ellis at October 15, 2008 12:07 AM
icanhascheezburger
If yurz gettin up, I’d luv anudder beer.
If yurz gettin up, I’d luv anudder beer.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: james
by ichctcf at October 15, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 15 Oct 2008 is...
an abnormally low dewpoint
October 14, 2008
icanhascheezburger
You don’t understand!
» Want moar loldog pix? Visit I Has A Hotdog!
You don’t understand!
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: Winnie-Wonka
by ichctcf at October 14, 2008 10:00 PM
warrenellis.com
Kwaidan
Thorsten at Highpoint Lowlife kindly dropped off their new release the other day. Kwaidan is a project by Mat Ranson, better known as Fisk Industries. Kwaidan’s two pieces, each almost twelve minutes long, will cause most people to name Burial as a touchstone. I’m going to steal a term from Anthony Braxton to describe them: Ghost Trance. Braxton, in talking around his Ghost Trance Music, described it in part (interviews with Braxton about Ghost Trance are like watching a guy trying to screw fog) as "a sound that doesn’t begin and doesn’t end." And that’s an apt way to describe an often beatless techno-derived electronic music haunted by old Japanese films and the clatter of strange primitive instruments bubbling up through the floor of a contemporary studio.
The release page, where you can buy the lovely mp3s, is here. And below is an excerpt from the second piece, "Masaki."
Excellent latenight work music, Thorsten. Cheers, mate.
Download audio file (masaki_excerpt.mp3)
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 09:56 PM
an eternal thought in the mind of godzilla
A shitload of pics from Superfest 2008
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053589f00c970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Sufes_logo0" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053589f00c970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053589f00c970c-800wi" title="Sufes_logo0" border="0"></a> <br>Ok, here are some pix from Superfest 2008. The Hot Tears of Shame podcast of Tokyo's 47th grand old bi-annual "Get the Toy" event is <a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2008/09/podcast-hot-tea.html" target="_blank">here. </a></p><p></p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581b8fa970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Goten" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581b8fa970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581b8fa970b-800wi" title="Goten" border="0"></a></p> <p>Our buddies at Aoshima hit us hard out of the starting gate where it counts with a new die-cast Goten-go (AKA Atragon) from that Tohoscope spectacular Kaitei Gundan. The killer app here is the battery-operated rotating drill in front.&nbsp; </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581b9d2970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Emeraldus" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581b9d2970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581b9d2970b-800wi" title="Emeraldus" border="0"></a></p><p>Aoshima is also pumping out a sweet light-up die-cast Queen Emeraldus to match their line of Captain Harlock spaceships bound to make Steve Harrison weep.</p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358208ac970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Deslership" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358208ac970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef0105358208ac970b-800wi" title="Deslership" border="0"></a> </p><p>If that doesn't do the trick for graduates of the School of '78, maybe this will: a die-cast Deslar flagship from the nutty bunch at Marmit. The box helpfully points out "From Space Battleship Yamato." Like, no DURRRR!<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581bb99970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Bullmark1" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581bb99970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581bb99970b-800wi" title="Bullmark1" border="0"></a></p><p>Superfest rules because it's all about old toys and funky kaijyu soft vinyl. If the wares on display at the M-1 table don't make your inner 5-year-old-in-short-pants froth at the mouth, then best venture elsewhere for moe figures and endless Gundam mobile suits.</p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899117970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Godman1" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899117970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899117970c-800wi" title="Godman1" border="0"></a></p><p>M-1 celebrates the landmark, epoch-making release of the Godman and Greenman DVD box (at right) with a new Godman figure, yours for the low, low price of around US$60.00. <br> </p><p> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899253970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Bullmark2" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899253970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899253970c-800wi" title="Bullmark2" border="0"></a></p><p>Only at Superfest does the X-From Outer Space share the same cheap card table with the likes of honorable Jet Jaguar samma.<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581c276970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Kanegon" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581c276970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581c276970b-800wi" title="Kanegon" border="0"></a></p><p>More M-1 madness: the DX Kanegon (sunglasses not included). Yours for around US$150.00, after which, your kane-be-gone.<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053589940c970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Pocketmonsters" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053589940c970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053589940c970c-800wi" title="Pocketmonsters" border="0"></a></p><p>I was so high on the scent of sofbi that I forgot the name of the guy hawking this line of pocket-sized monsters along with mini-buildings for them to menace. <br> </p><p></p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899a2e970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Superjeeg" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899a2e970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899a2e970c-800wi" title="Superjeeg" border="0"></a></p><p>Most of Superfest is made up of an Octagon of Misfit Toys destined to haunt subsequent cons to come. Because everyone needs a rumpy Superman soft vinyl, a trio of Toei robot heroes, and Kotetsu Jeeg figures that cost a million dollars. <br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581c66d970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Bikes" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581c66d970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581c66d970b-800wi" title="Bikes" border="0"></a></p><p>Tricycle savages with hot steel between their legs roaring through the streets on chopped down hogs! From right, Tatsunoko's Pinocchio, Silver Kamen, and Mirror Man.<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899c70970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Marusan1" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899c70970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899c70970c-800wi" title="Marusan1" border="0"></a></p><p>Marusan had the darnest booth where folks tossed softballs at sofbi matsuri-style to win free prizes. On display were some of the new hot ones from the factory, including a big-ass new Mecha Godzilla that nearly made <a href="http://altjapan.typepad.com/" target="_blank">Matt Alt</a> weep hot tears of Space Titanium. <br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899d89970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Adam" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899d89970c " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef010535899d89970c-800wi" title="Adam" border="0"></a></p><p>Samples of Adam from Evangelion (perhaps you've heard of it). Not sure what these were made out of, but it can't be wholesome...<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581ca41970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Thatman" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581ca41970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581ca41970b-800wi" title="Thatman" border="0"></a></p><p>The 36th Chamber of Superfest was Western Toy Hell presided over by an arch-fiend and firedrake known only as THAT MAN.<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581caf5970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Madballs" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581caf5970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581caf5970b-800wi" title="Madballs" border="0"></a></p><p>THAT MAN insisted that everyone consider playing and fondling his rare mint-in-package Madballs."Toss 'em! Bounce 'em! Catch 'em!" he demanded to no one in particular (except <a href="http://thejosephlusterreport.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Joey Coco</a>, who bolted upright in his sleep).<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cb49970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Bling" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cb49970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cb49970b-800wi" title="Bling" border="0"></a></p><p>My pick for Best of Show goes to CCP and their line of "artistic monsters." Behold the whole blingy line-up of their <a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2008/09/individual-fa-2.html" target="_blank">limited editon Hedorah figures!</a><br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cbaf970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Acekiller" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cbaf970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cbaf970b-800wi" title="Acekiller" border="0"></a></p><p>But CCP's masterpiece has got to be their Passion of the Ultra Brothers playset, suitable for inclusion in Christmas nativity scenes. Sound chip that plays Issao Sasaki's cover of "Always Looks on the Bright Side of Life" not included (sadly).<br> </p><p><a href="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cbf5970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Ratsand" class="at-xid-6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cbf5970b " src="http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef01053581cbf5970b-800wi" title="Ratsand" border="0"></a></p><p>The last thing I saw before I hit the floor and turned into a thousand scattered atoms was the elusive Rats&amp;Star figure...maybe next year?<br> </p></div> </content>
by Patrick Macias at October 14, 2008 09:44 PM
cafe au lait
Jan Bartel has ported the open source Jetty web server and servlet engine to the Android phone platform.
Jan Bartel has ported the open source Jetty web server and servlet engine to the Android phone platform: More...
warrenellis.com
Your Doomed World
* This is what a sewage pipe failure looks like in Russia today:
* DoseNation: "Here’s something you really don’t want to hear your nurse say when you’re lying helpless in a nursing home: ’I can’t believe she’s still alive with all the morphine I’ve given her.’"
* You didn’t forget about the Shining Path, did you? Because they didn’t forget about anybody. Interestingly, their latest attack happened near coca-growing valleys — it’s believed by many that the Shining Path, once Maoist freedom fighters who dealt in cocaine trafficking for essential operating funds, now run drugs full-time.
* Enough heroin to supply the world’s demand for years has simply disappeared. Enough that shortages are now been recorded in Britain. And yet, for the past three years, production has been running at almost twice the level of global demand.
* The economic crisis, the forthcoming immolation of everyone in New Mexico, imminent mass suicides and the end of the world itself are apparently all down to God’s displeasure at the continuing criminal investigation into the life and hobbies of cult leader and alleged kiddie-fiddler Wayne Bent. According to Wayne Bent, anyway.
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 08:59 PM
jwz
Aim low
I think the service at the Pancho Villa on Embarcadero might actually be consistently worse than the service at the movie theatre snack bar at Metreon.
And that's a seriously low bar to duck under. We're talking contortionist levels of service industry limbo here.
icanhascheezburger
Element of Surprise Kitteh
Element of Surprise Kitteh gives your heart an attack
kittehz awlwayz fulla surprizes.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: Sadie
by ichctcf at October 14, 2008 07:00 PM
creative commons weblog
Nordic Cultural Commons Conference
In the wave of free culture gatherings this October, don’t miss out on the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference 2008, in Stockholm on October 22-23, organized by the Creative Commons Nordic network.
How is business created around open licensing? What benefits does the Creative Commons model provide for public broadcasting and archiving? How open licensing changes the production of cultural works? How does the common Nordic legal environment affect re-use of cultural works?
Nordic Cultural Commons Conference provides insight into these questions. Bringing together all Nordic Creative Commons scholars and practitioners, it is also a great opportunity to meet and discuss the latest open content practices and ideas.
Speakers include Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons), John Buckman (Magnatune), Nicklas Lundblad (Google) and Paul Gerhardt (BBC Creative Archive), as well as Creative Commons Project Leads Henrik Moltke (CC Denmark), Prodromos Tsiavos (CC England & Wales), and Herkko Hietanen (CC Finland).
For more information, please visit the conference web site: http://www.hiit.fi/nccc/.
by Michelle Thorne at October 14, 2008 05:23 PM
warrenellis.com
Edie Howe-Byrne
Some fantastic photography, mostly taken in and around American national forests and state parks, prints offered for sale.
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 04:52 PM
@network 14oct08
* Forthcoming from PS Publishing, a new collection by sf pop shaman Paul Di Filippo:
* Dave Walsh’s new book HAUNTED DUBLIN launches. Dave Walsh knows his shit. Excellent Xmas present, I suspect.
* Congratulations to my favourite girls at COILHOUSE on completing their first year.
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 04:44 PM
The Wave Pictures
Literate, off-kilter pop seems to have become the mainstay at Moshi Moshi Records these days. I’ve particularly enjoyed a couple of inventive, funny and slightly creepy pieces by Slow Club. Yesterday, I found an EP called PIGEON by The Wave Pictures, and over the last several hours have become particularly enamored of the opening piece, “Long Island”. It reminds me of something I haven’t quite put my finger on yet: that easy, loping shoutalong rhythm that just takes the stress out of my shoulders and has me rolling along with it. Cranked up loud, it’s soothing to these old bones first thing in the day.
You can buy the whole EP on download directly from Moshi Moshi themselves.
Download audio file (The%20Wave%20Pictures_Pigeon%20EP_01_Long%20Island.mp3)
(Usual standards apply: mp3 is live for seven days only and provided for review purposes only, contact degaussing at googlemail com if you need it taken down immediately)
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 04:10 PM
icanhascheezburger
u watch dis krap??
by ichctcf at October 14, 2008 04:00 PM
the old new thing
Raymond's PDC dress rehearsal (Microsoft employees only, sorry)
I'm scheduled to do a dress rehearsal of my PDC talk on Wednesday, October 15 at 3pm. Microsoft employees can come by the Sphinx room (what a strange name) in building 20 to heckle.
by oldnewthing at October 14, 2008 02:01 PM
warrenellis.com
Links for 2008-10-13
- 5th-graders charged with having sex - USATODAY.com
Two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year old boy were charged with obscenity, a felony. An 11-year-old boy, the alleged guard, was charged with being an accessory.
(tags:sex crime victorian+values back+in+the+19th+century+they+just+did+it+in+the+street ) - Fury over cat eating festival | The Sun |News
"The Gastronomical Festival of the Cat"!
(tags:weird food culture nom meow ) - WHO | New virus from Arenaviridae family in South Africa and Zambia - Update
"…preliminary evidence that the causative agent of the disease which has resulted in the recent deaths of 3 people from Zambia and South Africa, is a virus from the Arenaviridae family. Meanwhile, a new case has been confirmed…"
(tags:med doom )
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 02:00 PM
the old new thing
Why does Task Manager let me kill critical system processes?
Because you told it to.
If you run Task Manager, highlight a critical system process like Winlogon, click End Task, and confirm, then gosh darn it, you just killed Winlogon, and the system will reboot. (Assuming, of course, that you have sufficient privileges to terminate Winlogon in the first place.)
Task Manager in earlier versions of Windows would try to stop you from killing these critical system processes, but its algorithm for deciding which processes were critical wasn't very smart, and if you were sufficiently devious, you could fake it out and make your program seemingly unkillable.¹
To avoid being faked out, Task Manager simply stopped trying. Because if you don't do anything, then you can't do it wrong.
Footnotes
¹Of course,
it was no such thing.
You could still kill the program; you just had to use a program
other than Task Manager to do it.
(For example, you might try
taskkill.)
by oldnewthing at October 14, 2008 02:00 PM
icanhascheezburger
now take a deep, cleansing breath
now take a deep, cleansing breath and slowly slide your front paws forward
picture: Romeow. lol caption:
by ichctcf at October 14, 2008 01:00 PM
warrenellis.com
OVERCOMPENSATING Invites A Beating Once More
A guest edition of OVERCOMPENSATING by one John Keogh reveals that, yes, that IS what I look like under the coat.
Shut up.
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 12:27 PM
icanhascheezburger
i can waits
i can waits
kittehs r patient wen waitin 4 fud.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: JessicaE
by ichctcf at October 14, 2008 10:00 AM
ongoing
Free Software Now
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>I’m talking, <i>sans</i> ideology, about “free” as in no-money-up-front. When business is already hurting, up-front software license fees hurt especially hard, and I just don’t believe that Enterprise Software, as currently priced, has much future, in the near term anyhow. <i>[This is part of the <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/11/Tough-Times">Tough Times</a> series.]</i></p> <h2 id="p-1">Capex and Other Endangered Species</h2> <p>When times are tough, cash is king. “Capital” is cash; accountants pretend otherwise, but real businesspeople know better. And the reality we have to face is that the axe is gonna fall—in fact, it’s already falling—on capital expenditures. There are a lot of middle managers all over the world who, when they see capital-outlay requests come across their desks, won’t even take the issue up the management chain because they know what the answer’s gonna be.</p> <p>In that environment, imagine what happens when you walk in with a project proposal and the up-front Oracle or Tibco or CA licensing costs are pushing six figures. You’ll be walking right back out again. The drum that <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/">Jonathan</a> has been pounding on ever since I got here about “Monetization at the point of value” is just getting louder and louder and it’s not going away.</p> <p>Technology adoption <em>has to be free</em>. Technology deployment <em>has to be real cheap</em>. When you scale a system up and you’re getting business value for it, that’s when you can actually write a proposal for infrastructure and support that won’t get turfed by the nearest corporate-finance person.</p> <h2 id="p-2">Take-Ways</h2> <p>Two seem obvious: First, use Open Source. Second, if you’re doing a startup, and you were thinking of the Enterprise Software business model, think again. Because nobody’s going to be cutting those big software-license POs.</p> </div></content>
recycled knowledge
Converting Restricted XML to Good-Quality JSON
Here's some ideas for converting restricted forms of XML to good-quality JSON. The restrictions are as follows: <ul><li>The XML can't contain mixed content (elements with both children/attributes and text).</li> <li>The XML cannot depend on the order of child elements.</li> <li>There can't be any attributes with the same name as child elements.</li> <li>There can't be any elements or attributes that differ only in their namespace names.</li></ul> You also need to know the following things for each child element: <ul><li>Whether it <small>MUST</small> appear at most once (a singleton element) or <small>MAY</small> appear more than once (a multiplex element).</li> <li>Whether it only contains text (an element with simple type) or child elements and/or attributes (an element with complex-type).</li></ul> Now, to convert the XML to JSON, apply these rules recursively: <ul><li>A singleton element of simple type, and likewise an attribute, is converted to a JSON simple value: a number or boolean if syntactically possible, otherwise a string.</li> <li>A multiplex object of simple type is converted to a JSON array of simple values.</li> <li>A singleton element of complex type is converted to a JSON object that maps the local names of child elements and attributes to their content. Namespace names are discarded.</li> <li>A multiplex element of complex type is mapped to a JSON array of JSON objects that map the local names of child elements and attributes to their content. Namespace names are discarded.</li></ul> Comments are very welcome.</content>
by John Cowan at October 14, 2008 08:44 AM
warrenellis.com
HAIR EXTENSIONS
Sarah’s been going on about this film for a couple of days, so I finally broke down and watched the trailer.
Now you must watch it too. If only to confirm that I really saw it.
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 01:19 AM
Out This Week - DOKTOR SLEEPLESS Vol 1: ENGINES OF DESIRE
Collecting the first eight issues. Available from better comics stores and bookshops from this Wednesday in North America, and from Thursday in the UK and elsewhere. Below, the cover for the paperback edition:
by Warren Ellis at October 14, 2008 01:01 AM
icanhascheezburger
PTHPBPBPBPPTHTHBP
by ichctcf at October 14, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 14 Oct 2008 is...
Ameritech
October 13, 2008
debian-administration.org
Certificate Authority (CA) with OpenSSL
When you need to run a website (https), mail (ssl/tls) or similar over an encrypted link - you need an SSL certificate. This article will explain some of the choices involved, and how to run your own certificate authority (CA).
icanhascheezburger
See no evil
See no evil
heer iz wun kitteh dat noes ebil.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: JMixx
by ichctcf at October 13, 2008 10:00 PM
creative commons weblog
IBM’s “Mastering the Creative Commons”
IBM, outside of their endeavors in personal computing and technology, is an active participant in the world of open source technology. It should come as no surprise then that IBM has an article on their website titled Mastering the Creative Commons. Filed in their “Web Development | Open Source” series, Uche Ogbuji does a nice job summing up what CC does:
Creative Commons (CC) is an organization of lawyers, technical experts, and managers, with a very broad community, whose goal is to “use private rights to create public goods”, by allowing creators to express degrees of licensing between the knee-jerk “all rights reserved” and public domain (in other words, “no rights reserved”). Creative Commons provides the legal framework and text of licenses that allow you to say that “some rights are reserved”, and allows this to be clearly discovered by others, so that they can determine whether their use is compatible with your reservations. The lawyers are involved when these reusable licenses are crafted and updated, with support and feedback from the community, with the idea that afterwards, the sharing can proceed on the Web with much less legal interference. In this article, learn how to express CC licenses for your work, how to use public services for finding work from others you can use, and how to identify such work yourself.
The article explains what our licenses do, how to license a work under CC, how to indicate that a work is CC-licensed (including a discussion of RDFa), and how to find CC-licensed works. While the article is available online and as a free PDF download, it is unfortunately not under a CC license. Regardless, it is great to see an organization like IBM support CC accurately and whole heartedly like this.
by Cameron Parkins at October 13, 2008 09:59 PM
ongoing
Meat-Grinder!
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>It’s days like these that make it fun working for Sun. The new server’s official name is the <a href="http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5440/">T5440</a>; they call it a “mid-range” box, but to me it looks like a monster; count the numbers for cores, threads, RAM, and so on. It’s astounding what you can fit into a 4U box these days.</p> <img src="T5440-top.png" alt="T5540, top view"> <img src="T5440-inside.png" alt="T5440, inside view"> <p>There’s an <a href="http://www.sun.com/launch/2008-1013/index.jsp">official launch event</a>, but if you want the real poop, you need to start at <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/allanp/entry/sun_s_4_chip_cmt">Allan Packer’s blog</a>, where he’s aggregating technical contributions from a bunch of the engineers who actually, you know, <em>built</em> this thing.<br>> <i>[Update: Oops, removed misleading RAM claim. Sorry.]<</br>i></p> </div></content>
I’m Voting Green
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>Canada’s <a href="http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=ele&dir=40ge&document=index&lang=e&textonly=false">40th General Election</a> is tomorrow. I’ll be voting <a href="http://www.greenparty.ca/">Green</a>; here’s why.</p> <h2 id="p-1">The Tories</h2> <p>The Conservative party has been running the country, as a minority government, for the past few years. They’re not very lovable but they’ve been mostly reasonably competent.</p> <p>On the other hand, they’re awful on environmental issues, they have a sprinkling of Republican clones who’d turn hard-right given the slightest chance, and Prime Minister Harper is a control freak whose Cabinet-level team isn’t that impressive.</p> <p>In our local riding, they’re irrelevant, there’s no chance a Tory could get elected here. In fact, we’ll represent a net loss for them, since the Liberal we elected last time crossed the floor to join the government.</p> <h2 id="p-2">The Liberals</h2> <p>I kind of like Liberal leader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Dion">Stéphane Dion</a>, and during their recent convention, I was left with the impression that a Liberal government would have a very strong front bench: Rae, Ignatieff, Dryden, and so on. Plus, their environmental policies are really strong. I think a Liberal government would be a not-bad outcome.</p> <p>On the other hand, local candidate <a href="http://www.wendyyuan.ca/">Wendy Yuan</a>, while polished and accomplished, really doesn’t seem very inspiring.</p> <h2 id="p-3">New Democrats</h2> <p>I’ve voted for the <a href="http://www.ndp.ca/">NDP</a> more than for any other party over my lifetime; local candidate <a href="http://dondavies.ndp.ca/en">Don Davies</a> is perfectly OK, and even has a chance of winning. But NDP leader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Layton">Jack Layton</a> seriously gets on my nerves, and they’re not as strong environmentally as the Liberals.</p> <h2 id="p-4">Greens</h2> <p>When I’m not panicking about our economic system, I’m 100% convinced that all other issues pale in the face of the very real possibility that we could fuck up our planet beyond the point of livability. Nothing else matters as much. I’m impressed by the <a href="http://www.greenparty.ca/">Green Party</a> and its leader Elizabeth May, and our local candidate <a href="http://www.greenparty.ca/en/campaign/59032">Doug Warkentin</a> isn’t bad either.</p> <p>It comes down to this: A Tory majority would be awful, but our riding isn’t in danger of being part of that problem, and I just can’t get excited about Wendy. So why not vote the way I really feel?</p> </div></content>
warrenellis.com
Your Doomed World
Ever had an operation? Ever worry about what might go wrong? You might not wake up again. The surgeon might slip with the knife. They might leave something inside you. You might get the wrong procedure. Standard stuff. How about having your throat set on fire? Ten-centimetre flames gushing out of your exposed trachea? Yeah, that’s a new one. Living in the 21C — never boring.
Remember hearing about Aiko, the robot that was being designed to "feel" pain and react to the threat of pain? Sure you do. An unconnected but equally helpful team are working to ensure that robots can also be equipped with reactive skin ready to be slashed open. Presumably with a blunt butter knife or rusty tuna can lid. Luckily, Aiko will probably be too encrusted with its creator’s semen for most edged weapons to cut through.
No such worries for the US Army, though. Its Active Denial System of truck-mounted microwave sprayers will likely be in the field by the end of 2009. The "pain ray," having a range of 250 metres in the version being ordered, is a "non-lethal weapon" (a field that’s been producing fascinating reading for me since the early 1990s, when people like the peculiar sf novelist Janet Morris were involved) — like plastic bullets. And, like the plastic bullet, it’s not exactly a guaranteed non-lethal device. In fact, without a limiting device that currently doesn’t exist, there appears to be a high possibility of simply frying the targets where they stand.
The same article reports that there is interest in procuring rifle-sized versions for American law enforcement.
by Warren Ellis at October 13, 2008 09:19 PM
@network 13oct08
* Marie Javins appears at Bookculture in NYC on Nov 15 in support of her children’s book 3D WORLD ATLAS AND TOUR.
* Billy Gray, late of the Meltdowns, releases a demo piece.
by Warren Ellis at October 13, 2008 08:29 PM
icanhascheezburger
shuffling w/out thumbs
by ichctcf at October 13, 2008 07:00 PM
warrenellis.com
Emma Vieceli’s Halloween Pants Of Shrieking Fear
Okay, so I made the title up.
by Warren Ellis at October 13, 2008 04:51 PM
icanhascheezburger
Nom Nom Nom Ding Ziiiip
Nom Nom Nom Ding Ziiiip Nom Nom Nom Ding Ziiiip Nom Nom Nom Ding Ziiiip
can u turn it 2 da udder side?
picture: DeVilio. lol caption: ef
by ichctcf at October 13, 2008 04:00 PM
warrenellis.com
Buildings That Blog
I’ve been kicking this idea around for a few years, and have never really gotten it to settle. Answers on a postcard to degaussing at googlemail com if you have an informed opinion as to its technological solution (or even extant reality).
It once occurred to me that buildings could cast a digital shadow. Imagine an old building still in use, or an old shop location recently renovated or reactivated. Imagine walking past this place, and, say, the place finds a bluetooth connection on your phone and pings you a message inviting you to activate a proffered weblink. Which leads to, for example, a history of the building you’re just passing, structured in blog format. Or maybe it’s a residential building, or a building being used as offices for several start-ups, and they all contribute to a groupblog for the building.
Less invasively (but less interestingly) perhaps the building sprays free wifi, and the landing page for the wifi connection is that blog.
This actually occurred to me on a walk through/past Brick Lane years ago, where lots of old buildings were being re-rented as start-up digs. And I was looking up at one of them and trying to remember what it’d been before it’d gotten an infection of Nathan Barley nethipsterfailures and goofy plastic signs. And I got to thinking — why aren’t I being pinged a link to the history of this structure? Why isn’t there a Semacode in the window for me to shoot (the least invasive option, but also probably the least distributed solution)?
Can you imagine what a walk through the deep history of central London would be like, if almost every building you saw was capable of talking to your internet device?
EDITED TO ADD: As ever, Matt Jones is ahead of me, albeit from the DIY earliest-possible-adoption perspective. Just looking at geotags gives me maths-fear. Also reminds me I need to catch up with Adam Greenfield’s most recent stuff.
by Warren Ellis at October 13, 2008 03:25 PM
T-Shirt Of The Day
Corey Lewis at Design By Humans:
by Warren Ellis at October 13, 2008 03:04 PM
Links for 2008-10-12
- WHO probing deaths from mystery disease in SAfrica - Yahoo! News
The U.N. health agency says it is investigating a mystery disease that killed three people in the South African city of Johannesburg. The World Health Organization says the disease appears to be a form of hemorrhagic fever.
(tags:med doom )
by Warren Ellis at October 13, 2008 03:00 PM
the old new thing
Why does killing Winlogon take down the entire system?
Commenter Demeli asks, "Why does Winlogon take down the entire system when you attach a debugger to it? (drwtsn32 -p <pid of Winlogon>)"
This question already has a mistaken in it.
Running drwtsn32 on a process isn't attaching a debugger to it.
Attaching a debugger would be something like
ntsd -p <pid of Winlogon>,
and this does work,
assuming you have the necessary privileges, of course.
(Indeed, this is how the Windows team debugs problems with Winlogon.)
In other words, the literal answer to the question is
"No, Winlogon does not take down the entire system when you
attach a debugger to it."
What drwtsn32 does is take a crash dump of the process
and then kills the target process.
And it is killing Winlogon that crashes the system.
Winlogon is what is known as a "critical system process", the death of which forces a system restart. And you can probably guess why the system considers Winlogon critical to its functioning. For example, Winlogon is responsible for handling the secure attention sequence, also known as Ctrl+Alt+Del. If Winlogon were to die, then the secure attention sequence would stop working. That's kind of bad.
by oldnewthing at October 13, 2008 02:00 PM
clusterfuck nation
The Nausea Express
The G-7 world, the club of "developed" western nations plus Japan, has commenced an ordeal of suddenly waking up much poorer. All the desperate work-arounds being engineered by governments and central banks on an al fresco basis are intended to overcome this stunning basic fact, and none of them will. The benchmarks of everything are in flux -- stocks, bond values and yields, commodity prices, most especially currencies -- but these tend to disguise the basic fact of growing and spreading impoverishment. Is oil priced at $80 a barrel this morning? That's nice. Except if the company that employs you is about to fold up and you face a holiday season of driving frantically around Atlanta in search of another job, which the odds are against you find finding. Or if you're living on a retirement fund that's just lost 37 percent of its value and it's time to fill the heating oil tank.
Iceland is the poster-child du jour for this. The little island nation of about 320,000 souls (roughly half of Vermont's population) lately grew a banking sector that thrived on something-for-nothing finance. In little more than a month, its banks have imploded like mini death stars, leaving Iceland with a pariah currency. Since it has to import just about everything, and it suddenly finds itself unable to pay for imports, the people are stripping the grocery markets of whatever remains there now. You wonder what they will do in two weeks. Ten years from now there may be 32,000 of them left, subsisting on blubber sandwiches.
I exaggerate perhaps a little, but who really knows where all this leads? Here in the USA, the Treasury, enjoying new and seemingly limitless powers of discretionary spending, has begun shoveling dollars into every truck that backs up to the loading dock. The numbers are staggering. In ten days it's reached into the trillions in loans and handouts. Most of this money is getting sucked directly into the black hole of debt and margin calls of one kind or another. This is previously-presumed wealth that is now un-presumed. It's leaving the system, never to be seen again. One useful way of thinking about it is to regard it as our society's previous borrowings against our own future. Thus, we are seeing our future vanish into a black hole -- our future comfort, health, and basic nourishment.
This is the kind of fiasco that brings down governments, propels societies into revolutions, and starts wars. In a few months, America will be full of angry economic losers. We're not the same nation that crowded around the old radio consoles for Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats. Back then, we were mostly a highly-disciplined, regimented, industrial society full of citizens who mostly did what they were told to do, and mostly trusted in authority. Today we're a nation of tattooed barbarian "consumers" with no impulse control, a swollen sense of entitlement, ruled by a set of authorities ranging from one G.W. Bush to the grifter-billionaire pantheon of Wall Street CEOs -- now heading into secret bunkers with their stashes of krugerrands, freeze-dried veal Milanese, and private security squads armed with XM-8 carbines.
I go along with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea -- read "The Black Swan" -- that nobody really knows anything. We construct our narratives to try and explain circumstances that are unraveling non-linearly before us, and some narratives are more plausible than others, depending on your vantage point. There are infinite narratives. This is nothing more than my narrative. The circumstances we're entering appear, for the moment, to take the shape of a compressive deflationary depression with the cherry-on-top add-on of a hyper-inflation further down the road -- meaning initially that jobs, incomes, and pensions are lost, but that later on even the little money that people manage to get -- perhaps mostly from government hand-outs of one kind or another -- steadily loses its value. Every way you jigger things, it just ends up meaning the same thing: a much poorer society. It certainly won't be a society of recreational shoppers plying the Target store aisles for scented candles and home accents. Hyper-inflation could make old debts meaningless, but it would also make credit meaningless and spending absurd.
Given the way our society has evolved to operate -- as an endless upward spiral of borrowings -- you can see an awful lot of things not working anymore, and an awful lot of people not working in them or at them. Maybe the governments of the G-7 will get lending unstuck at the upper levels, but who, exactly, is able to borrow now besides companies on the verge of bankruptcy -- and why continue to lend to them? (Except to maintain the pretense that "something is being done.") Besides, there's much too much previously borrowed money that won't ever paid back, and the "work-out" of all that debt only implies the continued distress sale of any-and-all assets -- so that the USA in effect becomes yard-sale nation.
Personally, I think all the rejiggering in the world of numbers and indexes will not solve anything, and really only represents a kind obsessive-compulsive neurosis related to numerology that will do nothing to readjust our daily activities toward the production of things that have real and enduring value. In my narrative, the fate of industrial nations really depends on energy resources. The price of oil may be going down for the moment -- perhaps due to the deleveraging of hedge funds, banks, and invested individuals, perhaps combined with a perception of "demand destruction" -- but the geology and geopolitics of oil have not changed since June of this year when oil was at $147. Let's say US oil consumption is down one million barrels of oil a day. Within the next two years, we're liable to lose more than that in import declines from Mexico and Venezuela alone. The International Energy Agency's latest estimate is for only slightly less of an increase in worldwide oil demand than was previously posted. It's still a net demand increase. World oil consumption still exceeds world production now, perhaps permanently so. Finally, the current plunge of oil prices has suddenly halted the very capital ventures in exploration and development that were hoped to increase the worldwide supply of oil. All this portends an aggravation of oil supply and allocation problems in the five years ahead, and ultimately much more expensive, harder-to-get oil.
What we can't face is the prospect that we might become something other than an industrial "consumer" society. My narrative includes the conviction that we will have trouble producing food for ourselves as petro-agriculture fails, and since society can't go on without food production, I see this activity coming back much closer to the center of our daily lives. We're not ready to think about that. The downside of our unreadiness may be that a lot of Americans will go hungry in the decade ahead.
None of this is an argument for despair, by the way, but it certainly invokes the need for steeply revised expectations and serious attention to a national "to-do" list. We're on our way to becoming another nation, whether we like it or not. No amount of numerological augury or even hand-wringing will change that. The big question for, say, the 24 months ahead is: how disorderly will we allow this transition to be?
____________________________________
My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
by james howard kunstler at October 13, 2008 01:28 PM
icanhascheezburger
no, no, has z.
by ichctcf at October 13, 2008 01:00 PM
Mondays @ teh office…
by ichctcf at October 13, 2008 10:00 AM
ongoing
Shells
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>Being a photo of some jetsam on Vancouver’s Point Grey foreshore.</p> <img src="PS082178.png" alt="Seashells on a Vancouver beach"> <p>This morning the boy was snuffly and under the weather but the sun was out, a gift that in mid-October should not be disrespected. So I bundled the little girl into something warm and we visited the beach, she to splash (in gumboots) and climb, I to soak it in and take a few pictures.</p> </div></content>
jwz
dope nope pope hope grope hope
icanhascheezburger
This Valentine’s Day…
This Valentine’s Day… Say it with FERRETS!
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption:
by ichctcf at October 13, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 13 Oct 2008 is...
Congressional legislation
October 12, 2008
warrenellis.com
Chase Allgood
(tip for this received at degaussing at googlemail com, where I can be sent tips for the site, press releases, zeitgeist entrails, special information, dirty pictures etc)
by Warren Ellis at October 12, 2008 11:37 PM
I Fucking Love Julian Cope Part One Million
From a review of Scorces’ new album in this month’s Address Drudion:
…a riotous feast of banshee vocals and glassy glissando guitars that evoke the image of 10,000 radio controlled robot flamingos attempting in vain to achieve lift off from an icy lake at the top of the world.
by Warren Ellis at October 12, 2008 11:14 PM
Collecting Stray Thoughts - 2008-10-12
- My internet goes out every time a sparrow farts outside. #
by Warren Ellis at October 12, 2008 10:59 PM
icanhascheezburger
cheap
cheap leg warmers
hao do i keep mah harbls warm tho?
picture: www.roflking.com. lol caption: edsporty
by ichctcf at October 12, 2008 10:00 PM
ongoing
A Good Time for Agility
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>When business is lousy, getting projects approved and budgeted is challenging. Which means, tough times are good times to be agile. <i>[This is part of the <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/11/Tough-Times">Tough Times</a> series.]</i></p> <p>There was a time when you could propose a project that called for so many months of requirements evaluation, so many months of design, and then development and eventually deployment sometime next year. No longer. Anything even faintly smelling of the waterfall model is increasingly DOA.</p> <p>Because when money’s tight and the future’s cloudy, most executives are going to be focused on surviving the next quarter, not some big win a year down the road. On top of which, the savvy ones know that kind of project is rarely delivered on time.</p> <p>But just because times are tough doesn’t mean we’re going to stop developing projects. It just means we have to be agile about it.</p> <p>The classic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development">Agile</a> approach, where you pick two or three key features, spec ’em out with test suites that involve the business side, build ’em and test ’em, and then think about maybe going back for the next two or three, well, that’s starting to look awfully attractive.</p> <p>By the way, I just ran across Richard Gabriel’s <a href="http://www.dreamsongs.com/LessonsFromNothing.html">Lessons From The Science of Nothing At All</a>, which gives a good philosophical overview of Agile thinking, aimed mostly at the non-geek. It might be helpful in making some points to your management chain.</p> <p>You know who this is probably going to hurt? The big-system “blue-suit” system integrators: Accenture, BearingPoint, and their ilk. They, and their customers, have typically lived and died by the big-up-front-requirements paradigm.</p> <p>Someone needs to figure out some good contract structures to support outsourced agile development.</p> <p>And for heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.</p> </div></content>
icanhascheezburger
coffee cup left on the bench too
coffee cup left on the bench too long…
ur coffee haz becum bad. very very bad.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: sdg
by ichctcf at October 12, 2008 06:00 PM
jwz
mixtape 052
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 052.
Fifty-two! That means I've been doing this for a year now. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to keep up the pace, but it's been easier than I thought.
To close out the year, here's a very old one: as far as I can tell, I actually made this mixtape in late 1985. On a cassette. From records. The tape itself has long since decayed into unplayability, but I still have the track listing, so I reconstructed it (and the map becomes the territory).
Apparently I made this tape right around the time that DNA Lounge first opened!
warrenellis.com
Apologies, Server Farted
Apparently the host server wigged out overnight and while I was out with my family today. The main result of this seems to have been some weirdness in the RSS service, and it turns out some of you may have gotten up to two dozen repeat posts. Here on the main website, the Twitter feed repeated itself twenty times, and on the LiveJournal feed at http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/ there are eight repeats of the most recent del.icio.us dump (and god knows why that happened). The latter, I’m afraid, I can’t clean up, because there’s no instantiation of it on the main site. Sorry about that.
In other news, I have a joint of pork from a rarebreed-pig/boar cross. Much darker than ordinary pork. It is in fact Dark Pork. Which will probably soon be a series from DC Comics. This will go well with the bottles of beer I bought from the Felstar Brewery out of Felsted, an hour north of here. One’s called Dark Knight and I swear the other is called Spooky Chick. Spooky Chick is in the refrigerator.
by Warren Ellis at October 12, 2008 04:18 PM
Links for 2008-10-12
by Warren Ellis at October 12, 2008 02:33 PM
icanhascheezburger
Dis gonna confuse me
Dis gonna confuse me later in life
iz ok. u wil jus lern 2 recycle.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: ballen83
by ichctcf at October 12, 2008 02:00 PM
Crouching dragn sleepin kitteh
Crouching dragn sleepin kitteh
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: jewelkitty
by ichctcf at October 12, 2008 10:00 AM
jwz
Unicode Snowman
icanhascheezburger
wut u means, tacky?
by ichctcf at October 12, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 12 Oct 2008 is...
bad hair day
October 11, 2008
warrenellis.com
Collecting Stray Thoughts - 2008-10-11
- @brianwood ha! And the stack of photocopies too, I bet! #
- Palin found guilty of abuse of power - but will anyone care? http://tinyurl.com/3vct2o #
by Warren Ellis at October 11, 2008 10:59 PM
icanhascheezburger
No really….
by ichctcf at October 11, 2008 10:00 PM
ongoing
On Tough Times
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>As the clock ticked toward my Friday-morning keynote at <a href="http://london2008.futureofwebapps.com/">FOWA London 2008</a> I was seriously tense, because late Thursday I’d torn up my nearly-cooked speech. What I gave instead was a dark-hued scary message entitled <cite>Getting Through the Tough Times</cite>. Because, you know, I’m scared.</p> <p>You can <a href="http://fowa.phreadz.com/v/3RUDOQM3UOCH/">watch the whole speech</a> (damn quick production work, whoever got that on the air so fast) but I’m going to reproduce the message here as a series of posts over the next few days, which (if you care about this stuff) will probably be more efficient than watching a 35-minute video. Here are the parts:</p> <ul> <li><p><a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/12/Tough-Times-Agility">A Good Time for Agility</a>.</p></li> <li><p><a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/13/Open-Source-Now">Free Software Now</a>.</p></li> <li><p><a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/14/Cloudy-Times">Get In the Cloud</a>.</p></li> <li><p><a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/15/Conversation">Join the Conversation</a>.</p></li> </ul> <h2 id="p-1">Back Story</h2> <p>What happened was, I’d sketched out most of a breezy light-hearted feel-good keynote along the lines of “Rails now, PHP arrgh, testing essential, marketing voice bad, human voice good, Flash doomed”; entertaining while not entirely vacant, I’d hoped. But then I spent Tuesday through Thursday in London talking to bankers, watching TV, and trying to understand the financial meltdown.</p> <p>As a result, I got more and more convinced that we in the developed world are in for a pretty severely shitty period; short and deep or long and shallow; let me just say that I <em>hope</em> it’s one of those two. Then when I got to the show, it was jam-packed with starry-eyed young geeks high as a kite about how they were gonna build the next mega-viral social-networking stream-aggregating tag-driven microformat-rich video-focused Facebook-beating Kozmick Web Nexus, and I was thinking “Yeah, well actually some of you are gonna be looking for work pretty soon.” So, since these people are my tribe and I care about them, I just had to rewrite the talk.</p> <p>It was a big room with big lights and I couldn’t actually see the crowd, so I really had no idea how it’d gone over. The <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=tim+bray">Twitter buzz</a> was mostly pretty positive, and so since I put quite a bit of work into this thang, I thought I should write it down and toss it into the global discussion pool.</p> <p>Which I started doing on the ten-hour flight home. Trouble was, I realized at one point that I wasn’t nearly done but already had over two thousand words. So I think the practical thing is to turn it into a series.</p> <h2 id="p-2">Why I’m Scared</h2> <p>Through the miracle of credit, civilization actually gets to run on the illusion that there are several times more money available than we all actually have. This has worked mostly pretty well for several hundred years now. But as of this week, it’s all locked up, and even the <em>good</em> outcomes envisage a contraction of the credit universe and thus the necessity to get along on less money. I just don’t see any way it doesn’t cause some severe distortion and breakage in the economy. As of today, even IBM is having <a href="http://acrossthecurve.com/?p=1830">trouble getting the credit</a> they need to run their business; God help the rest of us.</p> <p>Right now it feels to me like the day after Katrina hit New Orleans. We’re all beat up and battered, but mostly still alive and starting to think about maybe rebuilding. But in the background, the waters are rising and the levee is failing.</p> <p>But hey, <em>I could be wrong</em>. Maybe things will blow over in ten or twenty months, nothing more than a mild downturn. We’ll see. In the meantime, a conversation about getting by in tough times can’t be a bad thing.</p> </div></content>
warrenellis.com
Links for 2008-10-11
- BBC NEWS | England | Manchester | Man charged over key fob weapon
The miniature firearm is small enough to clip a key ring and capable of firing two .22 bullets at close range.
(tags:guns crime )
by Warren Ellis at October 11, 2008 07:00 PM
icanhascheezburger
Iz in ur hair
by ichctcf at October 11, 2008 06:00 PM
jwz
A penis ocean. Yes, a penis ocean.
masquerading as a condom PSA:
The one for the other team is marginally less bizarre:
icanhascheezburger
NOM
by ichctcf at October 11, 2008 02:00 PM
u sed u wouldnt b mad.
u sed u wouldnt b mad. u lied.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: roselover28
by ichctcf at October 11, 2008 10:00 AM
K.
K. Box need sum graond ruls.
mebbeh iz tiem 2 git a bigger boks.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption:
by ichctcf at October 11, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 11 Oct 2008 is...
the CIA
October 10, 2008
creative commons weblog
Netwaves Bytes: Electro 1
Netwaves Records, a netlabel that focuses on genre-oriented compilations, just released their first album, Electro 1. Focusing on music that ranges from “electro-pop” to “electro-clash”, Electro 1 has been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. this means it can be freely shared and remixed as long as proper attribution is given, the resulting and original works are not sold, and any derivative works are shared under the same license. Download it here for weekend listening.
by Cameron Parkins at October 10, 2008 11:21 PM
flickrleech
flickrleech is a great tool for those looking to search a large number of flickr photos at once - by utilizing Flickr’s API, flickrleech is able to display 200 images per page rather than the standard 10. As pointed out by Alvin Trusty, it simply “makes scanning for a picture much quicker.”
While flickrleech has been around for a while, a new update has added the ability to search for photos by CC license. For those who scour Flickr searching for the perfect CC-licensed image, this functionality should mean less time spent searching and an immediately wider selection to choose from. Check it out for yourself here.
by Cameron Parkins at October 10, 2008 10:17 PM
icanhascheezburger
Catscade
Catscade Fer teh tuf stainz
kittehs gud at kleenin everyfing.
picture: Pam W.. lol caption: JeannieLino
by ichctcf at October 10, 2008 10:00 PM
first evr lolcat
first evr lolcat want frunt teefs
wut do i gitz frum da toof farey?
picture: Walter Chandoha. lol caption: miniboon
by ichctcf at October 10, 2008 07:00 PM
jwz
"Licking Valley High School"? Seriously?
Girl labeled sex offender for nude phone pics of herself
NEWARK -- A 15-year-old girl is accused of distributing nude photos of herself to other minors, and one state legislator is questioning whether she should be labeled a sex offender.The Licking Valley High School student was arrested Friday after school officials discovered the materials and brought in the school's resource officer for a police investigation. After spending the weekend incarcerated, she pleaded deny Monday to both charges: illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.
I'm guessing that by "criminal tools" they mean "cell phone"?
Licking County Assistant Prosecutor Erin Welch said Monday the investigation into the incident remains open, including exploring whether charges will be filed against the minors who received the photos. If the prosecutor's office elects to bring those teens into court, they could be facing a different section of the same charge pending against the sender of the pictures and classification as sex offenders, as well.
If the girl charged Monday is classified as a sexual offender, Brindisi said as a juvenile in this instance she would not be subject to publication on the public Web sites maintained by the Licking County Sheriff's Office or the state but would have to register for 20 years as the law states.
creative commons weblog
Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone
A long-standing provider of open courseware, MITOpenCourseWare reached a million visit milestone yesterday for two of their online courses: 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics and 18.06 Linear Algebra. The courses are two of MIT’s most popular to date, taught by renowned professors Walter Lewin and Gilbert Strang. From MIT’s media coverage on Lewin:
“Professor Lewin is an international webstar. He is well-known at MIT and beyond for his dynamic, inspiring and engaging lecture style. His courses are also among the most downloaded at iTunes U. 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics explains the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, and kinetic gas theory, and a variety of interesting topics such as binary stars, neutron stars, and black holes.”
On Strang:
“Strang is a 50-year mathematics veteran whose teaching style is recognized internationally. Linear Algebra introduces mathematical concepts that include matrix theory, systems of equations, vector spaces, and positive definite matrices. “Everyone has the capacity to learn mathematics,” says Strang. “If you can offer a little guidance, and some examples, viewers discover that a whole world is open.”
8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics offers lecture notes, exams with solutions, complete videotaped lectures and their accompanying transcripts under CC BY-NC-SA. 18.06 Linear Algebra offers (interactive) Java applets with sound in addition to video lectures and translations into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, also under CC BY-NC-SA. CC BY-NC-SA allows for these kinds of adaptations and derivations of material—and translation is a crucial step in broadening access to a global audience.
There are other and more interesting ways to adapt material, however, and we are curious to know how the visitors constituting the 1,000,000+ hits of these two courses (and others) have actually used the materials. Since educational needs vary contextually, it would be beneficial to know what types of adaptations are being made beyond translation. Of the 600 visits per day that these courses average, how many of them result in derivations? These, and other questions (such as visitor demographic, global reach, etc.) are things to consider as the OCW project continues to expand and evolve. The future impact of OER lie in the ways information is conceptualized, organized, and related; simply offering up free content on the web is no longer enough—remember David Wiley’s quote from OpenEd 08: “If my students can Google it, I don’t have to teach it.” As progressive models of OER develop and evolve, it will be interesting to see how OCW’s scope and impact also grows.
by Jane Park at October 10, 2008 06:48 PM
icanhascheezburger
Spycat
by ichctcf at October 10, 2008 04:00 PM
the old new thing
How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?
One of the features added to version 6 of the shell common controls is a warning balloon that appears if CapsLock is on in a password control. Let's demonstrate. Take the scratch program, add a manifest that requests version 6 of the common controls (perhaps by using a Visual C++ extension), and add the following:
BOOL
OnCreate(HWND hwnd, LPCREATESTRUCT lpcs)
{
g_hwndChild = CreateWindow(TEXT("edit"), NULL,
ES_PASSWORD | WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE, 0, 0,
0, 0, hwnd, NULL, g_hinst, 0);
if (!g_hwndChild) return FALSE;
return TRUE;
}
Run this program and hit the CapsLock key. The warning balloon should appear. (If it doesn't, then your manifest is probably not working.)
Suppose you want to suppress this warning balloon.
Why? I don't know. Maybe you want to confuse your user.
Maybe you think it looks ugly.
Whatever the reason, you can suppress the balloon by
subclassing the edit control and swallowing the
EM_SHOWBALLOONTIP message.
WNDPROC g_wpEdit;
LRESULT CALLBACK NoBalloonWndProc(HWND hwnd, UINT uMsg,
WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
switch (uMsg) {
case EM_SHOWBALLOONTIP: return FALSE;
}
return CallWindowProc(g_wpEdit, hwnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam);
}
BOOL
OnCreate(HWND hwnd, LPCREATESTRUCT lpcs)
{
g_hwndChild = CreateWindow(TEXT("edit"), NULL,
ES_PASSWORD | WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE, 0, 0,
0, 0, hwnd, NULL, g_hinst, 0);
if (!g_hwndChild) return FALSE;
g_wpEdit = SubclassWindow(g_hwndChild, NoBalloonWndProc);
return TRUE;
}
When you run this modified program, you'll see that the balloon tip no longer appears because the subclass procedure intercepts all the balloon tips before the default edit control window procedure can see them.
[Raymond is currently away; this message was pre-recorded.]
by oldnewthing at October 10, 2008 02:00 PM
icanhascheezburger
O hai.
O hai. iz praktisin mah CPR.
dis kitteh needz sum moar praktis.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: Emily
by ichctcf at October 10, 2008 01:00 PM
cacert news
CAcert Association board election
The CAcert Inc. association baord election will take place at the upcoming CAcert Association Annual General Meeting (AGM 2008) of the 7th of November 2008. If you are a CAcert Association Member and will become nominated for this election please get in touch with the CAcert board and have you nominated by at least two association members.
More details on the CAcert Inc. assocation can be found at the association wiki page
The upcoming AGM2008 agenda and references to reports can be found here
by teus at October 10, 2008 12:53 PM
icanhascheezburger
Writerz blox
by ichctcf at October 10, 2008 10:00 AM
“Thiz last tyme
“Thiz last tyme I helps you move!”
u shud call da movin compunee next tiem.
picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: sonic_cherry
by ichctcf at October 10, 2008 12:00 AM
the excuse of the day
The Excuse of the Day for 10 Oct 2008 is...
corporate welfare
October 14, 2007
welcome to the future
To my lazy blogging friends
Write something! It is up to you to stop Planet Botfu turning into Planet Safari_Al.
by triley at October 14, 2007 04:27 PM
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Last updated: October 16, 2008 08:45 AM