Not at OSCON this year, forgot about it and was just too busy. Too busy to really even follow along online, but for future reference:
Category: Legacy
Who needs CGI when you have men in black suits? Check out this great ping-pong clip [3.5MiB WMV] from a Japanese NTV show.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about web-specific stuff, and well, mostly that’s because I haven’t been doing anything particularly new or exciting.
From next week’s New Yorker: Patent Bending
All patents, of course, stifle competition. That’s why inventors like them. But business-method patents have an especially chilling effect, in that novel approaches to commerce can be ruled off-limits to others. What eBay was accused of copying was a concept, not a computer code. As James Boyle, a law professor at Duke, put it, “Under this logic, one could get a patent on the idea of fast food—not a different way to broil the burger but the idea of fast food itself.”
Mark Twain:
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations and articulating your superficial, psychological and sentimental observation. Beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your extemporaneous decantations, unpremeditated explanations have voracious veracity without any rodomontade and thrasonical bombard. Sedulously, avoid all poly-syllabic profundity, pussilanimous vacuity, pestiferous profanity and similar transgressions.
Elsewhere:
A writer of lyrical rhythms
Encountered a creative schism
When those who spoke terse
Demanded his verse
Lose its sesquipedalianisms.
Also in the wiktionary
Last night I went to see the Rilo Kiley tour kickoff. We missed The Golden Age (the line outside was sort of a mess), but did catch Tim Kasher doing a solo-acoustic set, which ended with a couple of really great songs, then M. Ward doing his great folk guitar thing, and then Rilo Kiley playing a great set to the sold-out crowd.
- M. Ward – Carolina [128Kbps 4.0MiB]
- Rilo Kiley – The Good That Won’t Come Out [6.5MiB]
Recently, I’ve been on a BitTorrent kick. Truly impressive what’s out there. Bytemonsoon is an interesting tracker that has a category dedicated entirely to comics, which is great. There are sets of +30yo books, scanned from aged first prints. Most of these are packaged in CBR or CBZ format, which are basically numbered RAR and ZIP archives, coded for the CDisplay Comic Reader, a pretty awesomely made comic viewing program (Windows only). Quite cool.
When using BitTorrent on my PC, I found myself consistently getting spontaneous reboots. I finally looked into it, and lo and behold, it’s a known problem with my Netgear FA311 card. The suggestion to upgrade the drivers to the latest (v1.80) seems to have fixed things. Always a pleasant surprise when you can find a fix, and it actually works as advertised.
Pitchfork has a great article on picking a new national anthem that starts off with a bunch of fun facts about the present anthem and ends with each Pitchfork staff member picking a song they’d like to see as the new national anthem.
I could have used this find/xargs w/ spaces in filename tip a month or two when spaces at the end of a file were screwing with a shell script I had.