Cory sets DRM strawmen ablaze
Some nice arguments from Doctorow on why consumer electronics device reviewers need to include information on DRM restrictions.
Get Album Art for your iTunes Songs.
Export list of songs from iTunes, upload here, drag images to iTunes. Nice.
The New York Times : Letter to the Editor : Are Google's New Libraries a Good Thing?
hahah ahahahah ahahah ahahaa! BBbwwwwhhahahahaaa! ha. hhhaaa. huuh…. ohhhhhh..
Shirky on Sanger on Wikipedia Anti-elitism
Classic Shirky retort to Sanger’s plea to pull the reign’s back on wikipedia. Clay reminds him that wikipedia starts with “wiki,” an oft forgotten fact at the present.
Ponarv (A Definition)
PONARV (PO narv) n. [acronym] A project of no apparent redeeming value. Hence, Ponarvian: one who pursues such projects.
The Command Line In 2004
Neil Stephenson’s “In the Beginning was the Command Line” updated and annotated by Some Guy.
CNN Lets 'Crossfire' Host Carlson Go
HA! The CNN exec who did the firing is quoted as saying “I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp”. Amazing!
CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode
Information on quirks vs. strict mode for HTML/CSS rendering: how to trigger, what DOCTYPEs do what, etc.
Young Prospective Artist Finds Herself in a 'No Sketch' Zone
Second grader is told she’s not allowed to sketch at museum because the works are protected by copyright.
GovTrack.us: Track Federal Legislation
Find out and track what’s going on in congress. We need more tools like this.
Quitting the Paint Factory - On the virtues of idleness
I would love to read this but I'm too busy doing work. Let me know if it’s interesting. Work, work, work! ;)
Comic Sans Anti Fucking Piracy
A nice rant against the Movie Picture Association’s recent inclusion of scary anti-piracy propoganda in DVD and cinema reels.
Old People
Gabe from Penny Arcade let’s the geezers in on this little secret the whipper-snappers have been hoarding to themselves called “The Internet.” Check it out at your local library!
Watching people watch stuff at the Magic Kingdom
One of the many interesting anecdotes waiting for you in Neil Stephenson’s “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”
Commons-based Peer Production
Ted Leung generalizes his involvement w/ free and open source software as being a simple contribution to the societal commons. Interesting viewpoint.
New Voices
$12,000 grants for people who want to take on building community based micro-local news projects.
Knowledge and Power
They have more in common than I thought.
REST Intro and Overview
Paul James wrote this nice technical summary on REST and competing technologies back in September 2004 and I missed it somehow.
Kid 0.4
On changing from GPL to MIT, going after web-framework support, and simplifying as much as possible.
Ross' Taint.. I mean, Tate.. I mean, Rawke!
Ross Burton builds the first real-world application using Kid Templates.
Mac mini As A Home Media Server
Some discussion on turning the new Mac Mini into a Media PC for the living room.
Jailed for a Song
“Congress isn’t listening to the public, and we need to be loud if we want to be heard over the Hollywood lobbyists and record label flunkies.”
ElementTree on the come-up
Why I prefer ElementTree to “standard” DOM APIs and why it’s sometimes better than libxml2.
Experimental del.icio.us Posting Interface Thing Generator
Bringing gems from the del.icio.us mailing list to the masses.
Iocaine Powder Explained (How to win Paper, Rock, Scissors)
Doesn’t this qualify as a genetic algorithm?
CNet: Red Hat tries again with Linux enthusiasts
Decent coverage of recent Fedora activity. Things should start kicking up here now that Fedora Extras CVS is available and Seth Vital is taking a more active role.
Gizmodo Gates Interview Part Four: Communists and DRM
Gates backpetals on the previous “creative communist” remarks and talks about DRM as a speedbump… caugh strawman caugh
Darth Tater & Wookiee Soaker: New Star Wars Toys
Check out the new Star War’s themed Mr. Potatohead lineup.
CBS Tries DRM to Block Criticism of Rathergate Report
You will now need to go to jail to cite a report released by CBS. Yet another unfair and unintended use of the DMCA.
MilkMint GTK2 Theme (for GNOME)
A nice and simple theme for GTK2/GNOME desktop environments (click thumbnail image to see larger screenshot).
Clutter by Sprote Rsrch.
“Clutter is a small Mac OS X application that lets you put music CDs on your desktop. You can drag them anywhere. Line them up neatly or put them in piles, it’s your choice.”
MSFT refuses to give 15 XP licenses for tsunami relief related work
I almost puked when I read this. I hope there’s just been a mix up or something.
IBM to Free Java - Next Week?
Coverage of an odd mailing list thread suggesting that IBM is gearing up to slap an F/OSS license on their Java compiler and runtime.
Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers' friends?
Truly odd. What’s going on here?
Dan Gillmor Interview on IT Conversations
I've been waiting for this one. Dan talks about blogs and his new startup, Grassroots Media, Inc.
Iraq war bites into US business
US product boycots in EU and CA due to Iraq war. Maybe people will start paying attention now that we’re losing money instead of just lives.
Disproving Backward Time Travel (kind of)
If it is ever discovered, we would have known about it a long time ago.
Getters/Setters/Fuxors
Python’s attributes are not Java’s getters/setters and why that’s a good thing.
What You'll Wish You'd Known
Paul Graham takes the honest route with High School kids and tells them what they should really be worried about. Great quote: “Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience.”
Why is the president's daughter throwing signs?
“Is it me, or is Jenna Bush holding up the sign of Satan next to her father’s face?”
Social Security: There Is No Crisis
Awesome looking grassroots blog-based initiative to respond to the dismantling of social security by the Bush administration and republican congress..
Open Source Radio
“A space for you to help contribute to a forthcoming CBC radio column about the open-source movement.” This is a great example of blog-as-collaboration-tool.
Social Security For Dummies
Understand how Social Security works and why Bush is saying there’s a “crisis”.
The Emerging Economics of Open Source Software
Finally got a chance to read through this massive piece. It’s worth the time if you have it.
NY Times: Few but Organized, Iraq Veterans Turn War Critics
People would just come up to me and say, ‘How'd you lose your arm?’ “ Mr. Acosta said. "And I'd say, ‘In the war.’ And they would be like, ‘What war?’ ”
How to ambush Fox News
Vanity Fair’s Judy Bachrach disturbs Fox’s plans of a nice afternoon of inauguration coverage. Note that lying about what you’re going to talk about and being on Live are requirements for getting an honest opinion onto the TV.
WS-Who's-on-First
Oh, this is brilliant. Look at the bright side, Mark, at least it’s horribly useless in a way that’s interoperable!
Web Antipatterns Strikes Again
Video on the web stick sucks.
No Rails for Python?
What does Ruby on Rails have that we don’t and why?
Java get/set - not that harmful
Bill de hÓra challenges some of the points I made in Getters/Setters/Fuxors. Specifically, the getter/setter bloat and IDE comparisons. Some good points here.
Open-Source Java Under Consideration
Hmmm.. Maybe the confirmed “three letter part” referred to: “S” “U” “N”?
Cory Doctorow: "Copyright vs Community" (MOV, MPEG)
Feature length lecture by Cory Doctorow on copyright, DRM, and other digital rights issues. CC share-alike licensed.
How Groovy Lost its Groove Thang
Interesting look at how Groovy has been floundering for quite some time now under the JSR process. I wasn’t aware of any of this..
Kid by Example
Kid 0.5 announcement with a couple of page fulls of example usage.
Eclipse Java-GNOME Demo
Demo of 100% free Java/Eclipse natively compiled with gcj. This is slated for Fedora Core 4.
PBS FRONTLINE: Watch online
Full video library of PBS' Frontline. I've never heard of Frontline but they've covered some interesting topics. All available through the web.
PlaysMaybe
Finally, CE manufacturers will be placing a badge on their crippled-with-DRM devices to inform the consumer that said devices suck and should be considered broken. Oddly enough, the badge reads: PlaysForSure.
JHymn - Removing DRM from iTunes
Excellent O'Reilly article describing Apple’s DRM apparatus in detail and pointers to tools for curing your crippled music..
Gilberto Gil's extraordinary engagement with Brazilians
Wow! You mean the political figures talk to the people in this backward country? That’s never going to work!
Cats
What the War In Iraq is really about.
My Experiences With Subversion
Nice look at moving to subversion. Go into migrating from CVS, subversion idioms, gotchas, etc.
cluetrain/hughtrain
Cluetrain Manifesto: “This is why we hate you.” Hughtrain Manifesto: “This is how we’re going to fuck you up.”
Linux in Government: Another Look at Linux in the MS Infrastructure
Samba eating Microsoft’s lunch. I smell a patent infingement case…
Plame Leaked by Fake News Source? Part VI
Wow. These guys are really organizing now around this distributed journalism. Please take a look and see if you can help out. I have someone in Ft. Hood that might be able to give general info…
New York Times Link Generator
Generates non-expiring links to New York Times content. Bookmarklet included.
Tools for Democracy / Distributed Journalism
On using the web to co-ordinate massive grass-roots efforts quickly.
LA city councilman says open source = more cops
Next time someone asks you “why?” tell them you’re all about putting more cops on the street.. That doesn’t have value?
Rumsfeld cancels trip after accusations (of war crimes)
Rumy won’t be visiting germany any time soon..
Gizoogle - Fo all you beotches who wanna find shiznit
All yo resizzle is shizzilated and shizzle, nizzle..
The open source monopoly
Nice look at how companies are releasing new products under F/OSS licenses but missing much of the spirit.
Bootstrapping a Corporate Wiki
Best practices for creating and managing an internal Wiki in a large company.
TheyWorkForYou.com
Track whether your MP is working for you in the UK Parliament.. Really cool looking piece of civic software.
How To Write Unmaintainable Code
“In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the si
Neal Stephenson?'s Past, Present, and Future
The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America
Why Craigslist Works, by Craig
The whole PDF requirement at ChangeThis sucks but this looks like a good read anyway..
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain
Really interesting concept. Tags can be combined to form “tagwebs”
North Korea admits having nuclear weapons
Say they need the weapons “as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.” — IMO, this is the first of many such announcements. I imagine the so-called “terrorist states” are especially wanting to start nuke programs.
Who did MPAA rip off "You can click but you can't hide" from?
Some dogfood for the MPAA. This kind of theft is obviously unacceptable. I'm sure they will be contacting Barlow and Joe Lewis' successors to work out a royalty program.
Gartner urges caution before downloading Firefox
Redefining the concept of making sense: “some of the factors that make Firefox more appealing than Internet Explorer are likely to go away as the browser gets to be more popular”
The sad state of SOAP interoperability
Complexity is kryptonite to interoperability. It’s that simple.
del.icio.us/popular/sparkline
del.icio.us/popular with nifty sparkline graphs for tracking popularity over time (via Simon Willison)
The false promise of template languages
David Hansson (of Ruby on Rails fame) on why codeless template languages don’t work.
SOAP is boring, wake up Big Vendors or get niched
More reports of shrinking WS-* mindshare and cries for tools for building REST based architecture.
Politics-Oriented Software Development
“Someone who points out a problem early is a troublemaker; someone who fixes a problem at the last minute is a hero.”
SHA-1 "Broken"
Sam Ruby with one of the better write-ups on the impact of the SHA-1 break. Short and accurate.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the command line, part 1.
Introduction to being a complete bad-ass.
Web Dominated by J2EE?
The web as currently imagined by the tech. industry is quite different from the web that actually exists.
Malcolm Gladwell - Tech Nation
Nice. Gladwell talks about his new book “Blink” on IT Conversations. I haven’t listened yet but it’s impossible for Gladwell to say anything that is uninteresting.
The Tool Vendor's Dilemma
A theory on why big vendors, big analyst houses, and the tech press want to sell you the worst possible solutions to your problems.
To Evil! Feb '05 Edition
Tales of cruftiness in Sun’s Hotspot JVM code and a nice look at some of crap attached to their SCSL license (like not being able to talk about the cruft JVM code).
The HotSpot source code is a bad joke
Oh, my. 3 Millions lines of C++, awk, sed, and scheme! “lets make everything OOP and add 100 layers” style. This is an instant classic.
SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead!
Carlos Perez with a nice wrap up of recent WS-* vs. REST discussion around the blogosphere.
Fish, bad.
Just keep talking.
Emacs WebDev Environment
Information on setting up emacs for (X)HTML web development including nxml-mode, rng-validate-mode, etc.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures
When did I die and how the hell did I end up in heaven? Crazy!
Microsoft's first explicit anti-GNU/Linux ad
From Oct 23, 2000 issue of the German language magazine c’t
Broadcast Flag Oral Arguments
This guy is live-blogging the broadcast flag hearings. Looks like the good guys did pretty good in oral arguments.
Courts question anti-piracy rule
“You crossed the line,” Judge Harry Edwards told a FCC lawyer during arguments before a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.“Selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of.”
A Note to the FCC - Call their bluff…
Mark Cuban on why the FCC should tell CBS (and the MPAA) to go screw themselves.
IBM redemption
I humbly retract my previous negative statements about IBM.
Scary Rails vs Quixote Stats
Wherein we avoid a Python vs. Ruby flamewar by changing the subject to Object vs. RDMS persistence.
Web Building: Style Templates
Big list of sites that provide CC licensed CSS layouts and tools for generating layouts.
Microsoft to Demo at EclipseCon 2005!
wtf: “Visual Studio lead program manager Jason Weber to show how to build extensions for Microsoft’s IDE.”
Yahoo! Launches REST-based Web Services
Praise for Yahoo! as they launch an initial set of web style APIs.
WS-Sandwich
Some thoughts on AMQ, the latest solution to all your problems.
GartnerWatch
Weblog for watching and reporting shady Gartner activity. Those guys are crooked as a barrell of snakes if you ask me.
Show Me the Code
Joe Gregorio’s second installment in his series on building RESTful applications shows us how to build a bookmark service kind of like del.icio.us. He nailed this one really nicely.
Word-of-mouth is why authors succeed
Doctorow explains that the way to be successful in a distributed culture is to exploit long-tailisms like word of mouth…
NS8, part 1: I need closure
Blake Ross tearing into Netscape/AOL on Netscape 8. Can’t wait for part 2.
Netscape 8 - Setting the browser back two years
How to not understand the value of a web browser.
Kid 0.6
Template Inheritence, Match Templates (kind of like XSLT’s), cElementTree support, a refined Python API, documentation…
Jonathon Schwartz on WS-Mess
The loyal opposition is growing in weird ways.
NASA using BitTorrent
Need more stuff like this to keep the RIAA/MPAA lunies from illegalizing our technology…
The Ever-Worsening Curse of the Cog
Nice little “People who make up new rules continue to be in very short supply.”
The on-demand blogosphere
An Udell screencast on the future of the blogosphere. del.icio.us as a shared brain.. all great stuff. watch it.
AMERICA - ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN
Simon Willison showed me this scan of a Newspaper from April 14, 1865. It looks like a blog.
Joshua's Rule
On the growing importance of del.icio.us.
Abstractions vs Patterns
Sam Ruby trying to put a definition to the word “simple”. Seriously, it’s not as easy to define as you think.
I *heart* Rails
Author of “Better, Faster, Lighter Java” compares building MVC webapps in Java to building them in Rails. I wish I could say I was surprised at the results but I'm not…
Bill sets?fine for low-riding pants
$50 fines for anyone who displays his or her… wait for it… no. now.. wait for it…. UNDERPANTS! AHHHHHHH!
The unspoken language of the office
How to properly use body language to convey your negative feelings at the office…
Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate
Paul Prescod gives some background and opinion on the REST/SOAP debate.
What WS-* got wrong
It has nothing to do with the web.
The Selfish Class
How programs adhere to the basic laws of Darwinian evolution.. Seems to gel with everything I've learned.
The del.icio.us Screencast
Jon Udell runs through some of the potential of del.icio.us in a screencast. rockin…
Tim Bandits - What were Einstein and Gödel talking about?
Yea, this is the coolest thing I've read in a long time. Tim: let me borrow that “Gödel, Escher, Bach” book – I’ll tear that shit up in a night, I swear…
Yahoo! Buzz Game
Interesting prediction market that uses buzz around different technologies. I split my starting cash between REST, delicious, and Python.
Reports of Java developers becoming addicted to Ruby programming
The line forms to the left people..
Lesson's learned launching a web service
Google reflects on some of the decisions made for the AdWords API.
Web Services: what is "success" and how do we get there?
What I think success means with regards to “Web Services”.
"Closed Open Source"
Superb rant against Sun’s licensing tactics and especially Gosling’s cluelessness wrt what’s important in a license.
Who Will Free Fiona Apple?
Awesome look at how big music companies DON’T GET IT! Ugghh. This stuff drives me crazy.
MIT Backs Brazil's Free Software over Microsoft
I'm seriously considering considering moving to Brazil. That country is really starting to get their shit together and the gov seems close to the people.
DRM-free iTunes interface "PyMusique" (written in Python)
Looks like this let’s you use iTMS like normal but the files are stripped of DRM on the way down or something. And it’s written in python.
Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater
Udell wishes REST and WS-* could get along… The REST people did too – two or three years ago (e.g. Prescod, Baker).
Design patterns part I - Chain Of Responsibility
Pretty reusable implementation of the Chain Of Responsibility pattern in Python. Very clean.
Design patterns part II - State
This one is kind of weird but it shows another kick ass capability dynamic languages have: changing and object instance’s class (behavior) at runtime.
The Battle of the Less Clueless
IronPython vs. JPython: who cares?
Fred Von Lohmann (EFF) vs. Theodore Olson (RIAA/MPA) on CSPAN
The RIAA/MPA lawyer is a complete tool, yo…
[delicious-discuss] big news
Joshua gets some funding for del.icio.us so that he can work it full time. Congrats!
Two Is An Impossible Number
Wow, this may be the most serendipitous page I've come across on the c2 wiki. It starts with strategies for when generalization is okay, leads into caveman number systems, how many objects the brain can recognize without counting, God as Lisp programmer,
Stupid (c) laws block me from publishing own work online
Clay Shirky on how he doesn’t have access to his own copyrighted works.
TheServerSide changing focus
HARDYFUCKINGHARHAR! Laugh it up you dumb shits. This might have been funny were Ruby and PHP not eating your lunch.
Insects and Entropy
How complexity killed the best bug ever created in the whole world.
Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend
Brazil gets it. They could be the international version of Silicon Valley in the next five years…
Emacs as Cargo
Came across this odd section in a “leaving Emacs for vi” document and it has a really interesting description of the history of FSF/GNU, Linux, and the evolution of Free Software. Seems out of place in this document but is worth reading.