Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Studying email headers of a spam turdlet that slipped through the net, found this in the headers, trying to pass as header lines added by SpamAssassin:
X-IMAPbase: 1113505409 1 NonJunk
Status: O
X-Status:
X-Keywords: NonJunk
The cat-n-mouse game is never-ending.
Miles grabs a book at random from the shelf, runs toward Amy, holding it high. “Do you like THIS book, Mommy?”
It’s a copy of The Communist Manifesto.
Amazing screensaver for the Mac called Freefall — tracks data, motion, and areas of coverage of 850 sattellites in real-time over spinning, zooming, panning 3-D renderings of the earth and continents. The quick video preview on the web site doesn’t come anywhere close to doing it justice — the experience is immersive and somewhat psychedelic. Wild to be able to visualize just how many satellites are orbiting at all times, and how scarily close their path vectors come. Satellite data updated over the internet as needed.
The satellites are spinning,
a better day is breaking.
The galaxies are waiting
For planet Earth’s awakening.
(Sun Ra)
A student with a borked PC-formatted FireWire drive called – the drive had failed and all of his thesis work was on it — 8.5GB worth of video, ProTools audio projects, images, documents. We have a variety of Mac-based rescue tools, but didn’t have anything but Norton on-hand for PCs. Google turned up ProSoft DataRescue. 40MB download, burned to a CD, which booted… a custom version of Gnoppix(!). Went straight to its own interface, no Linux desktop. DataRescue’s philosophy is that trying to fix drives can cause more damage, so it only scans, builds databases, and offers recovery (but you gotta pay for the recovery part!). Three hours to scan, and it turned up about 95% of the lost data, which it then copied to another drive we plugged into the system. A thing of beauty.
The hardest part was creating a valid destination drive. We only have FireWire drives here, and DataRescue wanted one that was FAT-formatted, not NTFS. But… surprise! WinXP no longer knows how to format drives FAT or FAT32 — NTFS only. That meant we needed a PC with a FireWire port that wasn’t yet on WinXP. We turned up exactly one in the whole school, which saved the day and let us create a valid destination.
Boring yeah, but somehow you end up with this feeling like you’ve just pulled a body from the river, gotten it breathing again.
The concept of “stewardship” as described in the Bible: “We are not owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to ‘watch over and care for it’ (Gen. 2:15).”
Position on the environment of some of the most extreme anti-environmentalists of the religious right: “The truth is,” writes Carter [author of a widely circulated paper warning against the lure of creation care], “the whole of nature has been delivered over to man for him to use as he sees fit. Man is not simply the head of the natural order, rather, that order was made for him.”
The Bible supports environmentally sound thinking, so the first step in encouraging pro-environment Christianity is dismantling the James Watt-derived notion that Jesus would actually want us to milk dry the earth (“After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back”). [Update: A commenter points out that this widely-circulated quote was not actually made by James Watt, but attributed to him by Grist.] There are still many Christians who believe that Rapture is imminent, and that there is therefore no need to take care of the earth.
Nice piece at AlterNet on the greening of the Christian Right.
Conservative evangelical Christians are getting worried about the fate of God’s creation. Can the greening of the GOP base happen fast enough to derail the party’s scorched-earth plans for Bush II?
Despite the efforts of old-guard religious conservatives like Carter to squash the growing Christian environmental movement, many national Christian groups, such as the National Association of Evangelicals, are working to teach churches that you don’t have to sleep with hippies to care about your world. The memes are slowly changing.
Roosevelt had it right:
Today’s GOP likes to toss around the name Teddy Roosevelt, but it has no use for the party philosophy expressed by T.R. when he declared, “[S]hort of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendents than it is for us.”
Baby steps.
In general, I like to think of the old birdhouse as a sort of time capsule — an immutable web-based record of interesting things artists were doing online when the web was catching fire in the mid-90s. But every now and then, an artist contacts me to say that they’ve moved on, are doing more interesting things these days, and would prefer not to have the dusty old content online anymore. Just got a request like that from surrealist William Carr, who is now doing most of his utterly wiggy visual arts in video and Flash rather than the static graphics he was doing back then. His new site is called DreamHive, and is a trip. Bye William!
The untold story of how NASA excluded black Americans… and how the Negro American Space Society of Astronauts got to the moon a full three years before whites took all the credit. The Old Negro Space Program (55 MB, worth it).
Just started experimenting with the beta of NetNewsWire 2.0. Leaps and bounds, it’s come. In-line HTML renderer so you can see full web pages inside the reader rather than launching an external browser; select text and click Post to Weblog to pre-fill an Ecto (or other posting client) entry; a bunch of built-in skins through which you can view RSS entries (I’m reading through the BeBox skin now… memories!), subscriptions to de.liciou.us and Flickr tags, tabbed views, etc. Every now and then you find a piece of software that just sparkles with excellence. NNW’s got that sparkle.
Update: I just pulled down “Show Sites Drawer” in NNW2 and was surprised to see that birdhouse.org is among the list of blogs built into the application itself. Way to go, me!
Ticket scalping is legal in California, I learned from an East Bay Express piece. When you think about it, why shouldn’t anyone be able to buy any item from a store and sell it on the open market at a higher price? And why should tickets be regarded differently from any other meatspace item in this regard?
But traditional scalpers are being trumped by digital scalpers, as computer software evolves with the ability to defeat human detection software. If software can crack a captcha image and buy tickets online on behalf of its master, a stadium can be sold out in minutes. That’s exactly what happened when U2 tickets went on sale recently and Ticketmaster servers were hammered with two million hits per second.
Trying to figure out why anyone would go to see U2 on purpose, let alone pay money to do so, is beside the point. The question is, is asking computers to go get a bunch of tickets for you qualitatively different from asking a bunch of friends to go stand in line hours before Ticketmaster’s doors open? It’s kind of like comparing MP3 trading to the old days of taping. The principle is the same, but the difference in quantity is so immense that you effectively have a qualitative difference.
Laws will change.
It’s time to talk about Thomas the Tank Engine.
If you don’t have a young child, quick introduction: Thomas is based on a series of children’s books started in 1942 by the Rev. W. Awdry to entertain a sick young boy. Today, Thomas is a multi-million-dollar empire of books, wooden trains, and TV shows / videos. The Thomas universe consists of a group of engines and coaches living together on “The Island of Sodor” where they get into trouble, help one another, take pride in being “Really Useful,” learn important lessons about cooperation, bravery, friendship, and self esteem. What makes the Thomas railroad different from a “typical” children’s railroad is the fact that all of the engines and coaches have faces, personalities, strengths and weaknesses, modes of interaction that mimic (the better aspects of) society at large.
Continue reading “Thomas the Marketing Machine”