random($foo)

The Onion, unabashedly America’s Finest News Source. I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America:

When the Founding Fathers authored the Constitution that sets forth our nation’s guiding principles, they made certain to guarantee us individual rights and freedoms. How dare we selfishly lay claim to those liberties at the very moment when our nation is in crisis, when it needs us to be our most selfless? We shame the memory of Thomas Jefferson by daring to mention Bush’s outright lies about satellite photos that supposedly prove Iraq is developing nuclear weapons.

At this difficult time, President Bush needs my support. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld needs my support. General Tommy Franks needs my support. It is not my function as a citizen in a participatory democracy to question our leaders. And to exercise my constitutional right—nay, duty—to do so would be un-American.

RAW tools:

• Raw Digital Photo Decoding in Linux – works hunky dory with test images (more Linux photo info)
• CRW for FreeBSD – port maintained by Matt Dillon
• CRW-X for Mac OS X 10.2 – thanks to the BSD port
• Linear post-processing links
• Bibble – $100, but might be useful…

Gabe posted a link to the Digital Journalist which has ongoing photo coverage. Also, see: WorldPictureNews, MSNBC: Images of War, CBS: Photo Diary. The following is a striking image from the CBSNews gallery:

A British soldier of a team led by the 2CS Regiment RLC is reflected in oil spilled on the soil as he patrols a Gas and Oil Separation Plant (GOSP) south of Basra. (AP Photo)

More: AFP, Reuters, NYT, Newsweek, Getty, Corbis

HOWTO: Free Credit Reports (online access as well, outline of regulations, etc.)

Instant Messaging Leaves School for Office, Message in a bottleneck – articles on IM in the enterprise.

Sun’s offering, at least what we saw a few months ago, was pretty pathetic. Interestingly enough, Groove isn’t mentioned. In any case, enterprise adoptance may finally lead to interoperability, which is a good thing. There’s still a big window for Jabber: there’s a lot of potential there for interesting stuff (that’s not available when you don’t own the server and/or can’t hack around w/ the guts).

Been fighting most of the day with lib problems, compile failures, and segfaults. Blechie. In interesting tech, Stewart writes an interesting pieces about social software and outlines his views of five characteristics:

• Identity
• Presence
• Relationships
• Conversations
• Groups

One characteristic also worth bringing up is History. This of course is a (perhaps the only?) characteristic of web communities that few other systems have. Specifically, a shared, referenced, indexable/searchable history. I’ve spoken before about the temporal mapping that takes place (this is just another way of describing it).

This is as good of a time for me to dig back and make some H20 comments. The Rotisserie approach certainly is interesting, and is ideal for the learning environment and encouraging active participation. In fact, this would probably be a better format for most online ‘debates’, but I’m not sure of it’s effectiveness in general conversation.

As far as filtering messages (finding worthwhile discussion) in general purpose forums/communities, I think that the best approach may be a combination of collaborative/predictive filtering via trust metric, prioritization via activity/popularity algorithms, and community moderation, preferably along more than one attribute axis. The secret to making it all work of course is to make it minimally intrusive upon workflow, ideally something that you’d do anyway (ie, how long you hover over a message contributes to a weighted view rank; remote scripting rating systems, key events).

Also see: W3C Annotea Project, Crit, XLink, [add more about typed links for semantic systems]

Counterspin Central on the Pearl Jam concert reporting. Spin and counter-spin.

A long-time friend has recently started keeping, of all things, a LiveJournal. On the bright side, it’s chock full of great little stories:

I just fell asleep at my desk. Awoke briefly to bruise the fingers of a co-worker who was tying my shoes together. A quick experiment on the key-repeat rate of my keyboard suggests that the 24719 consecutive ‘[‘ characters I found typed into my active source code window indicate ~37 minutes of sleep.

Add the 7 minutes or so I spent deriving that result, and typing this journal entry, and I’m now effectively wasted a solid 45 minutes. I heard a anecdote that we humans tend to waste approximately an hour a day waiting for the clock to strike [:00, :15, :30, or :45] before getting our lazy asses in gear.

I’m inclined to agree.

Slate: Al Jazeera – It’s just as fair as CNN. (and fairer than FOXNEWS)

Hydra may be a good reason why all your developers should be using OSX. This takes XP to it’s obvious conclusion, allowing simultaneous real-time editing via Rendezvous.