Category: blows against the empire

It’s good to know your role

Harpers.org:

[ . . . ] Powerful Republicans were said to be urging President Bush to get rid of Dick Cheney, who continued to insist, contrary to all evidence, that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein was allied with Al Qaeda. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” Cheney asked an interviewer. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”[ . . . ]

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wanna win a prize?

Crooked Timber: Punk the National Review :

“If you possess an email address and an eye-opening story, you’ve passed the rigorous fact-checking that has made National Review and the Penthouse Forum world-famous.

In honor of this editorial decision, I would like to propose my first contest ever:

Punk the National Review“

If you can concoct an outrageous tale about being ill-used — in any way, shape, or form — by one of the Democratic contenders, National Review wants to hear from you. Information about rules and prizes at the above-cited URL.

This should be fun.

[Posted with ecto]

looking at life through broken windows

A friend writes: “this page looks like crap” (I’m paraphrasing here) and sent me a screen shot to prove his point. Hmmm, works for me. So I took a look at it in the Leading Brand, in both browsers I can expect to see visits from. The left image is from Mozilla 1.6, the other IE 6.0.2800.xpsp2.030422-1633.

mozilla
ie
Not that my stuff is a work of art, but the most beautiful sight you can imagine won’t be improved by looking at it through a broken window. Replacing it seems like the right thing to do.

[Posted with ecto]
Continue reading “looking at life through broken windows”

more on site optimization

I reimplemented MTOptimizeHTML on the main page.

Before :
131835 Feb 1 15:17 index.html

After:
114726 Feb 1 16:07 index.html

That 17k difference is some savings (15%), but 114k is still plenty big.

Of course with mod_gzip, it goes down to 27,622, for a 76% savings. That I can deal with.

I think I’ll just keep it on the main page for now and see how it goes.

[Posted with ecto]

the best system monitoring widget I’ve seen so far

These two screen grabs are from MenuMeters, a very nice little extension that displays CPU, RAM, disk usage, and network statistics, all in a very small (but configurable for those of us with 19 inch displays) amount real estate.

cpu-graph mem-menu

And almost as cool was the simplicity of how you capture images like this. Grab for the screen capture, Preview to crop and save as a jpeg, ecto to post, and we’re done.

[Posted with ecto]

what would you be willing to go to jail for?

Crooked Timber: Time to count the ranks of the faithful

She followed her conscience, and she apparently broke the law. Now she has to face the consequences.

Not exactly Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but this is the day we observe MLK’s birthday and there was some resonance between this case — where a government employee leaked some documents and may go to jail for it — and others where people have wilfully violated laws that contradicted their sense of justice.

a possible business model for downloadable music?

Saw this mentioned on BoingBoing . . . .

We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals – DRM is easily circumvented and just puts obstacles in the way of enjoying music. Apple has even privately stated that they decided to use a weak form of DRM solely to get major labels onboard.

Finally, buying music through Bleep means that you are supporting the artists work, and in some cases you are getting mp3’s encoded by the artists themselves. After the bandwidth charges and Bleep running costs are subtracted, the artist gets half of the album or track price.

While the first part of that is interesting (it echoes a conversation Josh and I had some time back, and that I tried to work out a solution to here), I’m more interested in the second part. Someone — a small label, of course — is taking a chance on their customers. There are a few factors at work here. The artists on this label are not commoditized hit machines, and have a relationship with their audience that makes this less of a risk. Also, the label’s business folks are likely to have chosen their vocation and even the company itself out of a love of music, rather than just a way to make a living (or a killing, as the case may be).

I still think it makes more sense to let Apple, TiVo, et al, take small bites out of the DRM obstacle and let their (and our) position strengthen. It’s not like this is a big secret, but if we lose enough small battles out of “principle” we risk losing the war.

now playing: Love Song from the album Themes for Great Cities by Simple Minds
(this track was converted from an LP: it would be nice if the RIAA cartel would take the chance Warp is taking and release their back catalogs: but they love money more than music and have forgotten how to make one with the other, it seems).

[Posted with ecto]