• Open Government Information Awareness – Media Lab becomes relevant again
• OpenGroupware.org – finally an OSS exchange alternative? /. discussion
• Small Stories in printed form! Cool. I’ll be dropping by Golden Apple tomorrow, so I’ll be looking for it
• How to Photograph Fireworks – will have to try this out next year
• N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella), by Jason Freeman
• To install: Wonder Shaper
• PeerGuardian 2, a P2P lightweight firewall (seems fruitless), with list of bad IP’s
• Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide
• XUL Programmer’s Reference (via Bit Banger)
• OSCON 2003 Day Three
  

  Brian Aker, fresh on his new job as Senior Architect at MySQL, shocked the world (or, at least, me) when he announced that he’d embedded Perl in MySQL and was using it for stored procedures a couple of years ago. Of course, it did segfault rather often. Fortunately, it’s highly mature now. In his talk on “Making MySQL Do More”, Brian showed the embedded function API. You can write new functions for MySQL in Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. (Keep asking him about Ruby.) You can link to C libraries; he’s used Image Magick and zlib. I’m excited about how easily you can modify queries . SELECT DIFF(foo) … anyone?

• More ping pong shenanigans [2.4M ASF]

Current programming projects:

• Comic Book Reader – learning Cocoa/Objective-C, what better way to learn than to program something useful?
• Azureus – doing some work on this BitTorrent client to see if it can be easily ported to OS X.
• P2P Identity/Relationship Tool – as yet unnamed project, but it should be pretty cool
• blogging tool – finish blikiliner. To possibly add: bitflux/other integration, nEcho support, post aggregration (via bookmarklet? scraping?); do cool stuff w/ blo.gs rss cloud

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

burst! is the best BitTorrent client I’ve found so far. BT++ is a wxPython client, theoretically cross-platform. A friend recommends mlMac, an mldonkey front-end that also has torrent support.

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.

• Core Documents of U.S. Democracy
• Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents
• The Declaration of Indepence (hi-res image)

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.