Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
For the first (and quite likely only) time, I’m going to be able to attend one of the local Weblogger’s Meetup events, as my training schedule for this Wednesday has me off work at 6pm. Once I start my 1pm-9:30pm schedule I’ll be missing them again, but at least I can make this month’s.
So, for any local Seattle bloggers, looks like I’ll be seeing some of you at Uptown Espresso, Wednesday evening at 7pm!
(via Anita)
Looks like there’s a major referrer spam attack going on at the moment. The sites in question look like real weblogs but aren’t — instead, many of them have similar (or the same) content, comment and trackback links just link back to the home page, they have a hidden graphic that leads to porn sites, and many (if not all) of them are stealing their designs from other weblogs. Ignore (or block, if you can) any and all referrer links you might see in your logs from:
http://www.a-b-l-o-g.com/
http://www.akksess.com/
http://www.bongohome.com/
http://jennifersblog.com/
http://kwlablog.com/
http://www.malixya.com/
http://mikesplace.com/
http://www.saulem.com/
http://www.teoras.com/
http://www.websearchde.com/
http://www.websearchus.com/
http://www.worldnewslog.com/
http://www.wr18.com/
More information on this at A Preponderance of Evidence, MetaFilter, idly.org, milov.nl, and probably more.
Silence in America:
Silence in Italy:
The sight was extraordinary, but less so than the sound, or rather the lack of it. Although thousands upon thousands of people filled one of this city’s most chaotic squares during the evening rush hour on Monday, the decibel level seldom rose above a whisper’s.
Silence was just one way in which those people sought to show their respect for 19 Italians killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another was to wait two to three hours, in the drizzle and dark, for a chance to walk past the victims’ coffins, arrayed inside a palace that towers over the square, Piazza Venezia.
Why can’t we as a nation honor our four hundred and twenty two dead as touchingly and honestly as the Italians do their nineteen? Of course, if behavior like that was sanctioned here — or, heaven forbid, encouraged — the public might just realize the extent of what’s happening in Iraq, to the US and to our allies. We can’t have that, now can we?
(To clarify, this is in no way meant to belittle the bombing of the Italian soldiers. Rather, it’s meant to belittle the lack of facts, knowledge, and questioning in the US media, who instead all too often seem to blindly accept the shameless posturing foisted upon us by our government.)
(via Atrios)
This caught my eye for two reasons.
(via Lane)
link rot n.
The natural decay of web links as the sites they’re connected to change or die.
Calpundit has an excellent summary posted on how to link to New York Times articles without having the links succumb to link rot. This should be required reading for all bloggers, IMNSHO — citing sources is important, and it’s best if the sources don’t later disappear.
Update: Even better than Calpundit’s method (as good as it is) is the New York Times Link Generator! Just feed it the URL of a NYT story, and it will generate the link rot proof version of the URL for use in your weblog. Thanks to Aaron Swartz for providing this, and to Jason Kottke for pointing it out in Calpundit’s comment thread.
Calpundit also breaks down the most archive-friendly (i.e., least susceptible to link rot) sources:
Prompted by the Localfeeds Seattle service (which gives me an RSS feed of weblog posts from people close to me in the real world), I’ve just added my GeoURL location identification to my main page — I had it on my old Long Letter blog, but hadn’t thought to put it in here on Eclecticism yet. Silly me.
This post is mostly here to give me an excuse to post the GeoURL button, which allows me to see who’s near me in the real world.
Finally — I can talk about this!
Every so often during my time working on the Microsoft campus, I’d see something that really caught my interest. However, I couldn’t ever talk about it — NDAs and the like — so I’ve never mentioned any of them. However, the one that was always at the top of the “I really wish I had this” list was just announced at Comdex (and was apparently briefly mentioned back in April, too).
A prototype application called “Stuff I’ve Seen,” for instance, will store every screen that has popped up on a given computer monitor for a year. (from the April article)
The chairman also showed off a research project known as “Stuff I’ve Seen,” which catalogs any place a computer user has gone. As previously reported, Stuff I’ve Seen is designed to make it easier to find a previously visited Web site or an old e-mail, as well as other files that have become increasingly hard to find among the myriad folders on a typical PC’s hard drive. (from yesterday’s article)
Right now, it’s not uncommon for me to remember (or half-remember) reading something, somewhere, that I’d like to reference back to later on. Unfortunately, it can be a royal pain in the butt to track that down. Where did I see it? Was it in an e-mail someone sent me? An IM session? Something I stumbled across on the web? If it was on the web, how easy will it be for me to find it? As wonderful as Google is, when you’re a little iffy on the details of what you’re looking for, it can be almost impossible to find a specific reference or citation without being buried in false hits because your search terms are too vague.
SIS attempts to solve that problem by creating a database that stores the text of virtually any information displayed on your screen in the past year (I’d assume the default time period could be adjusted), along with references to the source of that information (URLs, files, etc.). Then, when searching for a phrase or subject, rather than limiting your search to whatever is stored on your drive, or expanding your search to everything on the Internet, you can confine the scope of your search to items that you have looked at, and likely increase the chances of finding the correct result by leaps and bounds.
I want this. And I want it on my Mac. ;)
Apple? Mac shareware programmers? You listening?
For more information on SIS, this Google search is turning up a lot of hits, including research papers and PowerPoint presentations directly from Microsoft Research (in fact, this Google search is the only reason I continued this post beyond the pull quotes — if I hadn’t turned up this amount of already freely-available information, I’d have stopped with what C|Net reported just to be on the safe side).
(via Scoble)
Knocking the stuffing out of each other may also set a record if Oregon State University students are recognized for what they hope was the largest pillow fight in history.
Unofficially, 766 people showed up at Oregon State on Friday to take part in the jumbo pillow fight in hopes of topping the Guinness Book of Records mark set by 645 people who staged a mass pillow brawl in Garnett, Kan., last June.
That sounds like so much fun!
(via Prairie)
Remember the Policy Awareness Market? It was a DARPA-backed plan to establish a “futures” market wagering on the likelihood of terrorist attacks, assassinations, and the like that almost slipped under the radar until being outed and subsequently shut down last July.
The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.
[…]
The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a potential futures trading market in which speculators would wager on the Internet on the likelihood of a future terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a particular leader. A website promoting the plan already is available.
When the plan was disclosed by two Democratic senators Monday, the Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists’ plans.
Earlier, Warner had said that his staff was looking into the program and would report on it later Tuesday. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), said she was appalled to hear of plans to set up “a futures market in death.”
Other Democrats expressed similar alarm.
“The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), one of two lawmakers who disclosed the plan Monday.
Well, guess what? It’s back! Apparently it’s now being run without government involvement, but the idea is still incredibly sick and wrong.
(via Daily Kos)
Incredible. Among the list of concessions that the US wanted from Britain in preparation for Bush’s upcoming visit were Tube closures, minigun battlefield weaponry to use against rioters, and diplomatic immunity for American agents in case protesters are shot.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush’s entourage this week.
In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush’s protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor, the Home Office has confirmed.
The issue of immunity is one of a series of extraordinary US demands turned down by Ministers and Downing Street during preparations for the Bush visit.
These included the closure of the Tube network, the use of US air force planes and helicopters and the shipping in of battlefield weaponry to use against rioters.
While these outrageous requests were turned down, the UK has agreed to create a ‘sterile zone’ extending for blocks around the President’s travel plan to keep people away.
What’s more disturbing? The fact that we have an administration with the unmitigated gall to make such requests in the first place? Or the fact that we have a President who is so mistrusted, disliked, and outright hated by so many people that they feel the need for that level of security?
(via Atrios)