random($foo)

Oct 28

permalink

Subject:  The Rumors On the Internets Are True!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 


"I hear there are rumors, uh, on the internets."
        -President George Walker Bush


The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH have launched a new pre-election campaign,
"Never Forget," at http://www.internetvetsfortruth.org/ in an effort to educate
the voting public prior to the November 2nd election.

The website features documentary content highlighting the records of both
George W. Bush and John Kerry. 

The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH invite you to view this documentary evidence
as well as to enjoy the social and political commentary of Jon Stewart, Eminem,
and others.

We know the rumors on the Internets are true.  We invite you to visit and
decide for yourself:

  http://www.internetvetsfortruth.org/

And to please, pass this on to our fellow Americans.


Let's blogroll.



*****************************************************************************
*              THE INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH: NEVER FORGET               *  
*****************************************************************************
Need to vent?  Want to help? Long to engage in some geopolitical discourse?     
Email: letsblogroll@gmail.com

By popular request (big number so it won't run out):

NetNewWire now has 5061 unread items and counting. And it's randomly dropping read items despite my protestations (preferences set to not delete). non-suck RSS reader is definitely moving up the priority list.

Oct 27

All my new machines are now in. Here's what I got, from 3 ISPs:

Another 5-6 machines from volunteers, and then if need be, I can get more machines (possibly a full 100Mbps, and or new machines provisioned almost instantaneously @ EV1)

BTW, while we're talking about massive bandwidth, Marc Percel has the idea. He's distributing Fahrenheit 9/11 far and wide. ($2K for an unmetered 100Mbps? Not as cost effective when you do the math I think. 5x20Mbps from Servermatrix for $1K or you could get 15-20 1-2TB boxes for the month)

Update: not much sleep, but on track for today or tomorrow

Linkdump:

Oct 23

Wow, thanks everyone for their generous contributions. Dropcash success! (thanks to Paul for pushing it over the top) I've already provisioned 3 additional 100Mbps dedicated servers and will be putting them to good use. All contributors will be getting an early sneak peak at the next project being cooked up at the labs a bit later this week.

Oct 22

artists discussion

Last night, Robbie gets animated at SPARC's ElectThis! artists discussion.

I went to support a friend and listen to some good discussion, but also ended up giving some props to The Internets when the talk turned to distribution.

In a nutshell:

What is the definition of politics? Everything.

Thanks to all who contributed and keep it coming (if you want, I'll eat the difference either way, but it's certainly appreciated). I'm going to be picking up a couple servers that I hope to have up and running by Monday. I'm no whiz w/ the driving out and registering voters thing, but I have some ideas cooking that hopefully won't disappoint.

Oct 21

Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda

For more analysis, including a good chart summarizing the numbers, see Kevin Drum's blog.

I like the newly blatantly politicized blog that William Gibson is keeping these days. I suppose it must be hard to be a person of conscience and sit by without trying to do something.

If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I'd certainly owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan's presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.

Oct 20

I watched Going Upriver ($13.29 @ DeepDiscountDVD) tonight. I feel a lot better about Kerry. Watching him as a young war veteran, handling himself in the way he did in the situation he was in is rather astounding.

The, Sinclair, the.

watch as SBGI's chart drops

The rebound is based on their deciding to only "show clips" from the attack documentary. My question: are they going to run Going Upriver (ahem, EasyNews members, attention) clips as well? Also, are they going to dedicate an hour or two to discuss Bush's Vietnam experience (I think not).

I'm not sure Lessig would want to be Attorney General (although following up Ashcroft, it would be hard impossible to do worse), but FCC chairman, now that would be interesting.

Imagine a FCC that doesn't spend its time regulating what you can and can't say on the airwaves. A FCC that actually cares about having open, unfettered spectrum for the people, since they actually own it, instead of auctioning off every last megahertz to the highest bidder. Imagine a FCC where TiVo doesn't have to ask first before they create a new feature.

Oct 19

Sorry for the unresponsiveness this morning. Some assholes have been leeching some large files very aggressively, which ended up maxing out the number of active connections now that I'm limiting bandwidth.

Oct 18

OK, considering my bandwidth usage this month, I probably shouldn't do this, but hey, check it out (slowly, bandwidth capped):

Oct 17

This seems to still be climbing up Popdex and Blogdex (up to number #2!). Even at a peak 36GB/hr, I should be ok until tomorrow. After which I'll be clamping down w/ some mod_bandwidth and some dynamic redirects I think.

From Propaganda and the Public Mind, and worth contemplating:

You make yourself available for various groups all over the country. You made that choice early on. Why don't other intellectuals, other privileged people in your position, get engaged politically?

Individuals have their own reasons. Presumably the reason most don't is because they think they're doing the right thing. That is, I'm sure that overwhelmingly people who are supportive of atrocious acts of power and privilege do believe and convince themselves that it was the right thing to do, which is extremely easy.

In fact, a standard technique of belief formation is to do something in your own interest and then to construct a framework in which that's the right thing to do. We all know this from our own experience. Nobobdy's saintly enough that they haven't illegiitimately done that any number of times, from when you stole a toy from your younger brother when you were seven years old until the present.

We always manage to construct our own framework that says, Yes, that was the right thing to do and it's going to be good. Sometimes the conclusions are accurate. It's not always self-deception. But it's very easy to fall into self-deception when it's advantageous. It's not surprising. (167-168)

Crossfire Downloads Exceed Broadcast Audience - glad to do my part. Will be interesting to try to total up the aggregate stats. (Does anyone have actual viewership numbers for that Crossfire show? Anyone from CNN reading?

Some observations:

Recently discovered online:

Go Internets!

So I've been meaning to mention this before, but wow, Drupal's default posting interface is stupendously bad. Here's an example of how it looks. That's right. Posting to the body starts 3 screens down. (You can sneak a peak at my code release taxonomy I'm building while you're at it).

OK, now, if you're done laughing, here's a quick redesign on the plate.

Sunday mornings can be dangerous. You know, when you're just clicking around and decide to visit some label website which leads to another label and the next thing you know, in addition to the one album with the one song you're looking for you end up also with another band's entire catalog in your basket. (check out the mp3s, they're great)

On the other hand, this haphazard clicky thing can also lead you to discover some amazing stuff you never would have. Like this band, The Heavenly States and the music video for My Friends, from their s/t, now re-released on Baria Records (available w/ bonus CD @ Amazon).

(In summary, while the best things in life may be free, gainful employment is a good thing.)

Oct 16

Real Time with Bill Maher talks about Mary Cheney

But my question about that whole flap, this this the Republicans are very angry. Dick Cheney said, "I'm an angry father." If it's not shameful to be gay, why are their panties in a bunch about this? I mean, they talk about her like she's some retarded monster they have chained in the attic, you know.

...

And it is an issue. They made it an issue. It's an issue in this election. Don't talk about my daughter who we are trying to discriminate against in a constitutional amendment.

80.88Mbps on nload. Whoa. I think it's safe to say that my ethernet card is getting a good workout. (hopefully things stay responsive or I may do some throttling.)

Oct 15

For your viewing pleasure (this calls for a permalink):

BTW, the WMV is fine quality-wise, but the AVI is there for completeness (I've taken the AVI down for the time being, see below for mirrors). Also, if this starts getting slow, be sure to check out the bittorrent (also, check suprnova). It's been /.'d so there are 4K+ seeds.

10/16 NOTE: at this point, the torrents will likely be faster than a direct d/l (Apache is handling 100+ simultaneous connections and avg'ing 7.0MB/s right now, 25GB/hr)

10/18 NOTE: Wow, this is crazy. I've updated the link to a redirector script as I'm going to pass the 1TB mark soon but want to keep this post accessible. If anyone has mirrors that they want to contribute bandwidth, drop me a line. I have a PHP script set up to do weighted round-robin redirection. Also, another pitch to try Phil's bittorrent. You've heard all about this P2P thing, why not give it a try? There are over a thousand active seeders, so it's going to be fast. Also, see this Daily Kos thread for some more links.

10/22 NOTE:

Oh, back to the files you're looking for:

10/19 Update - Followup:

See also, the CNN transcript:

CARLSON: I do think you're more fun on your show. Just my opinion.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Now, you're getting into it. I like that.

STEWART: Yes.

Fun lasts until I hit 1TB or I get a takedown notice. :)

Oct 14

What's a guy gotta do to get a decent RSS reader/aggregator? Write his own?

Tonight I listened to Vincent Cerf give a keynote for an IMSC open house. I didn't get to ask my question (what his thoughts on the impacts of software patents were on the principle of end-to-end), but I left feeling really energized. Also, MCI is still around? Is my Worldcom stock still a wash?

Vince Cerf w/ PowerBook

Afterwards, I skipped the free food and went back to McCarthy Quad, right in front of where I work. The programming board had apparently sprung some cash and brought Michael Moore out on his Slacker Uprising Tour. There were an impressive number of people (5K?), including a small, but loud protesting contingent. That was all good and fun until they became quite rude while a guest was brought onstage who talked about both the brother he lost in Iraq as well as the things that he thought were important as far as keeping hope, and doing the best that one can do (he is a substitute teacher in the LAUSD)... It's quite sad, because his speech, plain-spoken and thoughtful, was one of the highlights of the night. Tom Morello showed up and played some folk songs. Also, Michael Moore responded to some of the Iraq war supporters by offering to sign them up for the army now, rather than having those "kids 2 blocks down the street" fighting and dying for you. That was a zinger that hit pretty close to home, one'd imagine.

McCarthy Quad was completely packed

All in all, a pretty unique event, just in the sheer numbers and the atmosphere. I took some photos, and will try to put together a panorama if I get a chance.

Also, upon reflection, a pretty good night. One that also makes me realize that in many ways, I'm completely spoiled in my current environment. Am I not appreciating it enough? Recently I've had some cause to think and reassess about my life (ahh, life decisions).

I just turned 24, but I have a lot of choices. More than most. An embarrassing amount actually. What are my options? What do I want to do with my life? Am I happy with where I am and what I'm doing? Am I jumping through hoops for something I don't even want?

All good questions.

Oct 12

Oct 11

While I'm futzing around with hardware stuff, I want to make sure that I've gushed appropriately about OpenWRT and the super-router my $50 Linksys has now become.

Here's the ping to my a work server:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 8.33/12.443/21.739 ms

And here's the ping while I'm rsyncing at 230Kbps (off of theoretical 300Kbps upstream):

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 9.119/51.399/95.571 ms

Oh, and now here's while uploading at 250Kbps and downloading at 1.2Mbps:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 11.564/34.727/51.772 ms

About a 20X+ improvement over performance w/o traffic shaping. It's the difference between my shell being unusable and being productive while I'm transferring.

Now this is scary. I'm at 4 x 250GB currently. Was hoping to have 1-2TB drives before I needed to upgrade.

/dev/sda7             682G  499G  184G  74% /home

Now if only I had some good cataloguing software...

2.6 kernel compilation notes:

Oh wait, I have autofs already installed and set up. It just can't see my cdrom drive properly. Hmm... That's good b/c I can't find a 2.6.8 supermount patch

I've been working w/ Linux for 10 years now. Why are such seemingly simple things still so hard?

Oct 10

Oct 9

Art Party going on tonight. Looks like it's going to be a big bash. Should be fun to catch old friends.

Oct 8

Need some realtime fact checking (ooh, distributed realtime fact checking app would be fun) for this debate...

A friend mentioned I edit (post to, I assume) my blog than all the rest of the people on her blogroll combined. I'm probably not as much of a junkie as the people on my feedreader, but it is one of the advantages of editing the blog through vim. Sending off a missive is just a xterm-switch away. The next thing is to track up the total amount of day spent clicking away at this thing, but it's most likely less than the amount of time I spend walking between meetings and offices, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Danah says supporting the Mac is required for social computing.

You can build enterprise software that doesn't work on a Mac but you CANNOT build social technologies that don't work on the Mac. Who are key driving forces behind sociable technology? Freaks, (independent) geeks, academics and other marginalized populations. What do marginalized groups use when it comes to technology? Surprise - they use subversive tools. Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.

I'd go further and say that any social networking infrastructure MUST be inherently cross-platform, but I'm sure that lots of people are/will try to prove that wrong. Lets hope for their continued unsuccess.

Snopes: We Need to Talk

Claim: Aftermath of Hurricane Charley reveals message from God on billboard.

Status: True.

Not also, that the new advertisement blown off seems to be Mooby related.

Oct 7

With all these inbound links, some interesting things are showing up, like Wacky Neighbor (check out this great debate highlight reel set to hip-hop), Blognows' mov clips tracker.

Related, a resume for Bush that tries to be objective (see forward)

ahh, that's better. Oh, by popular request (Mr. Crosby is the legal contact at theplanet):

Ref: R3434
Re:
http://randomfoo.net/junk/200409/U2%20-%202004%20-%20Vertigo%20(Single)/

Dear Lance Crosby,

I am contacting you on behalf of the International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and its member record companies.  The IFPI is a
trade association whose member companies are some 1,500 major and
independent record companies in the US and internationally who create,
manufacture and distribute sound recordings. Under penalty of perjury, we
submit that the IFPI is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies
in matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including
enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

We have learned that your service is hosting infringing files on its network
(see above-referenced directory).  These files contain sound recordings by
the artists known as U2.  These sound recordings are owned by one of our
member companies and have not been authorized for this kind of use.  We have
a good faith belief that the above-described activity is not authorized by
the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.  We assert that the information
in this notification is accurate, based upon the data available to us.

We are asking for your immediate assistance in stopping this unauthorized
activity.  Specifically, we request that you remove the infringing files
from your system or that you disable access to the infringing files.  In
addition, please inform the site operator of the illegality of his or her
conduct.

You should understand that this letter constitutes notice to you that this
site operator may be liable for the infringing activity occurring on your
service. In addition, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if you
ignore this notice, you and/or your company may also be liable for any
resulting infringement. This letter does not constitute a waiver of any
right to recover damages incurred by virtue of any such unauthorized
activities, and such rights as well as claims for other relief are expressly
retained.

You may contact me at IFPI Secretariat, 54 Regent Street, London W1B 5RE,
United Kingdom or email Notices@ifpi.org, to discuss this notice.  We await
your response.

Sincerely,

Mr Paul Mitchell
Internet Anti-Piracy Administrator
IFPI Secretariat
54 Regent Street
London W1B 5RE
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)20 7878 7915
Fax: +44 (0)20 7878 6832
E-mail: Notices@ifpi.org
Website: www.ifpi.org

Prevayler - wow, why haven't I seen this before? This is the memory database that Jot uses (via Life with Alacrity).

Note, that while Calcanis thinks this is a commodity business, well, you might not think blogging would be what is has been when you first heard about it... From an enterprise perspective, I can say that this is definitely exciting, and from on the larger-scope (think Memex, Xanadu [or as Jot likes to put it, Excel]), it's even more promising. Of course, I could be biased.

Wow, so What Barry Says video I'm mirroring is getting some major traffic. Looks like it even maxed out my interface for some brief periods. Nice.

/

I don't really need to worry until I hit about 1TB, I think.







Hmm, was wondering why I had a spike in access to /junk (indexing removed) and it was because I had temporarily disabled my robots.txt file and forgot to reenable it (this is a good url to remember: http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller?cmd=robots).  Oops.





The Long Tail - Matt is right, Chris Anderson's article about how the Internet has changed the nature of the media life-cycle is a treat.  So simple, yet so well synthesized (definitely the best summation I've read).  Lessons to keep in mind as people start on "Web 2.0".




Oct 6



Wow, What Barry Says, an amazing 2 minute short, is so good that I'm mirroring it locally.






[rdfweb-dev] Plink - plink.org is going down due to the inability for FOAF to be expired.  Lack of control of proliferation of personal information is one of the major hurdles (a subset of the larger question of publishing control [see: Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging] and data control/faceting [see: Capabilities Theory]) in moving towards larger (hopefully open) identity management and relationship management systems.



Certainly, one way to do it is along the lines of using PKI and encryption to create classes of data encrypted on per-user, per-group bases.  Keys could then be directly managed and revoked to limit continued availability within the system regardless of the distribution of the encrypted data (spread it over Freenet or other P2P for caching!).  There are also other ways of expiring data, but those should remain in confidence for now.









I brought up OSAF's Chandler today in a staff meeting (and the higher-education counterpart Westwood) today, and have decided to install 0.3 and see how the dogfood is.  Will report, barring deletion of my hard drive.  ;)
 




You Call That a Major Policy Address? - at this point, is anyone surprised?  The only policy that the Bush administration has is about keeping power.



Did CNN and MSNBC get hoodwinked this morning? Yesterday, the White House announced that President Bush would be delivering a "major policy address" on terrorism today. The cable news networks broadcast it live and in full. Yet the "address " turned out to be a standard campaign stump speech before a Pennsylvania crowd that seemed pumped on peyote, cheering, screaming, or whooping at every sentence.



The president announced no new policy, uttered not one new word about terrorism, foreign policy, or anything else. He did all the things he wanted to do in last Thursday's debate, accuse his opponent of weakness, bad judgment, vacillation, and other forms of flip-floppery, though this time without a moderator to hush the audience, much less an opponent to bite back. And Bush loved it, smiling, smirking, raising his eyebrows, as if to say, "How 'bout that zinger?"





The rest of the column is quite good btw, and does discuss policy.



4 more years of Bush will be a validation both of Rove's underhanded campaign tactics, and of the idea that the Presidential office is now fair game purely for power grabs and cronyism.  That's not the America I want.





Web 2.0 fun.  People blogging it includes: Marc, jeremy, cory, jason, weblogsinc






Oct 5








Oct 4





Oh man, how did I forget to do  key exchange up north?  Silly.



Post Bay-area linkdump:





Oct 3



So, worth writing down, even while still buzzed (K10K housewarming -- good stuff), but jwz has definitely lost touch.  We couldn't get into DNA Lounge because my flat pants and my Rod Lavers weren't good enough apparently.  Obviously the geeks are no longer his peoples...  Well, such is such and all that.