Category: observations

EmptyBottle.org: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Wonderchicken:

“Punk (with a large P for marketing –ed) got co-opted and marketed and corporatized, and it damn near died, as all Big Ideas do. That’s not to say that small-p punk is not still alive. It is, down in the ditches, where the spirit that drove the rage has morphed and moved on and dropped back under the monkeymass radar. Music and community is being made now that might not fit so easily into the same easy label, but there are folks out there making stuff that builds on and extends the best of the punk alt-rock scene from 20 years ago and more. Some of ’em are more relevant than others, sure, but the passion’s still out there. The anger, the love, the frustration, the woohoo. The party rolls on, even though the faces have changed.”

(Please read the whole thing: it’s worth it. And the Dave Eggers essay he mentions is a must read: I have it as a bookmark and dearly wish I had come to the realizations he describes much earlier. )

The whole ethic of DIY is compelling stuff, even 25 years after the Sex Pistols and Ramones mooned the industry. The punks were building on an ethos of free expression without commercial considerations.

Weblogging is coming up on 10 years, and you need even less talent and equipment than a punk band did. Enabling people to become producers as well as consumers is a radical idea today, though it had been SOP since time immemorial a couple of centuries back.

So, yes, it’s a party, it’s an art exhibition, it’s a jungle telegraph, it’s whatever the person pressing the Post button wants it to be. You write for yourself and if people read it, comment on it, link with a trackback, that’s gravy. I had never given much thought to subscribers, as opposed to individual pages being read, til this past week. Forty-some people: I couldn’t name 40 friends, and to be realistic, I would have to attribute those 40 as friends of the writing they find here. But it’s gratifying, nonetheless. I have never written as much or as well in old school paper journals. And that’s been worth it. Thanks for reading.

[Posted with ecto]

The following are excerpts of excerpts of . . . .

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The following are excerpts of a telephone interview conducted with David Kay, after he stepped down as the chief U.S. arms hunter in Iraq:
Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage:
[ . . . ]
“Q: You came away from the hunt that you have done believing that they did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country?

A: “That is correct.”

Q. Is that from the interviews and documentation?

A. “Well the interviews, the documentation, and the physical evidence of looking at, as hard as it was because they were dealing with looted sites, but you just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program.”

Q: Do you think they destroyed it?

A: “No, I don’t think they existed.”

So much for clear and present danger . . . .

Seen on Crooked Timber.

[Posted with ecto]

AOL Presidential Match Guide:

According to this fine guide, Kucinich is my man.

[Posted with ecto]

Hmm, I just re-enabled the Technorati plugin to automagically insert the names and URLs of sites that link here, and sadly I note there are but four. This is a byproduct of acquiring a domain instead of sailing under the no-ip.org flag of convenience . . . .

The Technorati Link Cosmos to the old URL is a little healthier: 23 Inbound Blogs, 29 Inbound Links.

Ah, well. If you are linking to my old URL, I’d appreciate it if you could re-point the link. I can use all the street cred I can get.

[Posted with ecto]

Anti-Monopoly:
Apparently, that’s how it originated . . . but as things played out, that’s not how most of us learned about it.

“To begin with, the Monopoly game, in its original form, was called “The Landlord’s Game.” It was invented and patented in 1903 by Lizzie J. Magie, a follower of Henry George and his single-tax theory, as a means of teaching the evils of exploitation by landlords and the capitalist business system prevalent in America.
[ . . . ]
One evening in 1932 an unemployed salesman, Clarence B. Darrow, joined the Atlantic City Quakers for a Monopoly game session. Recognizing the commerical potential of the game, and unsympathetic to the Quakers’ view that it was not meant to be used for profit-making, Darrow copied the board and presented it to the president of Parker Brothers, Robert Barton, as his (Darrow’s) own invention.”

via Rogue Semiotics

There seems to be some evidence in support of that argument.

[Posted with ecto]

joar.com > Using encryption and digital signatures in Mail:

“Q: The keychain will not import a certificate because “The specified item already exists in the keychain”.
A: This is most likely because the certificate about to be added has the same email address as a certificate already in the Keychain. Inspect the imported certificates in the Keychain Access application to verify if this is the case or not.
If you have certificates for more than one email address, you possibly requested and, or downloaded the same certificate more than once.
Also, you might be exporting a certificate file from Mozilla with more than one certificate, where the Keychain already contains an identical certificate. “

Now, I had a couple of problems with this since all my keys are currently labelled as “Thawte Freemail Member.” But as you can see in the bottom pane, it’s possible to see what email address you’ve associated with a given key.

Toggle the “trust settings” widget . . . .

The step-by-step tutorial offered here is well worth reading. I think his idea of linking .Mac accounts with a certificate is a great idea and a good way to get this idea into more widespread, ie, not just for geeks, use.

[Posted with ecto]

The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Enable Rendezvous on Fedora Linux:

“HOWTO: Enable Rendezvous on Fedora Linux

…or just about any other UNIX you happen to be running”

Well, this gets me a bit closer. I can see OS X clients/servers from a freeBSD machine and vice versa. Nice. Now to work out to advertise all the services I might want (printing, etc.) and cobble together an rc script.

mDNSPublish Red _http._tcp 80 will make an http listener called Red visible to rendezvous clients. Swap http for daap and 80 for 3689 and you’ve published your iTunes music.

[Posted with ecto]

AK’s weblog:

Andreas is posting a lot of stuff about Howl, which is a nice coincidence: I am trying to work out how to publish a networked printer so my Panther clients can see it.

“Howl also provides simple sample applications, e.g. for announcing (mDNSPublish) and browsing (mDNSBrowse) services on the local network. Now if only all the applications were service discovery enabled. Then you could simply announce e.g. your SMTP server via mDNSPublish “default mail gateway” _smtp._tcp. 25, and any service-discovery-enabled mail program could simply browse for ‘_smtp._tcp.’ when having to send an email, and thus no user intervention is required for configuring an SMTP server. This would be especially useful for wireless networks.”

I haven’t any success with the examples yet, and that always worries me.

[Posted with ecto]

Underpants Gnomes – Wikipedia:

“In the South Park episode entitled Gnomes (Underpants Gnomes), The Underpants Gnomes are a community of underground gnomes who collect underpants.

The Underpants Gnomes have a three-step business plan, consisting of:

Collect underpants
???
Profit!

Where none of the gnomes actually knows what the second step is, and all of them assume someone else within the organization does.”

via Ben Hammersley

[Posted with ecto]

Apropos of the previous post, while I was reading the one it referenced, I learned that Robert Scoble’s weblog gets 3000 hits a day, or was doing that at some time in the past couple of months.

My daily average right now is over 4000 pages a day (I don’t report on image files, or .css, just html and rss/rdf files). My XML files (for newsreaders) are way down the list: in fact, I can’t see them in my current reports. (I’ve just changed the configuration to report on all URLs to see where they end up.) I also don’t log traffic from my home network so my own posts or reading doesn’t show up in the reports.

It’s always interesting to see how people find their way here and that page itself is one of the top 5 viewed pages most days.

So would I consider this successful, after almost two years in? I suppose so. The comments I get are often helpful, and the search traffic suggests some of this stuff is useful.

There’s some stuff it hasn’t done for me: it hasn’t helped me find paying work, either directly (if someone decided I had some minimal skills from what they see here) or indirectly (my Amazon affililates account, direct donations, and Google’s AdSense have all been disappointing: Google might just cover my cable modem bill . . . . ).

Perhaps I need a hobby.

now playing: Beck’s Bolero from the album Beckology (Disc 1) by Jeff Beck