Culturing

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. Advantages:

Follow the instructions here for creating users on source server:

http://mattrude.com/2009/07/creating-a-secure-git-repository-server/

(ignore the rest of instructions on that blog post)

Capistrano set up will then be the same as http://socialsynergyweb.org/network/blog/building-capistrano-recipe-rail...

example:

Running git commands, etc

capfile would run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_copy command from destination to secure copy over db dump.

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For our general info

Various critics review the book. There's a fair amount of bitter sniping from would be cultural gatekeepers, but also some legitimate legitimate questions, qualifications, and counter-examples:

Evgeny Morozov for Boston Review.

Michel Bauwens follows up Morozov, arguing one must work for the future, not just be optimistic about it.

BoingBoing reports, "Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper has instituted a registration wall as a preliminary step toward a full-blown paywall. Readership of the online edition immediately dropped by 50%."

I remain skeptical that number seven is really happening as successfully as some think it is, and number eight seems to have forgotten the point made in number one (which is the most crucial one of all), but this is an excellent article for a general audience to ponder.

"Pioneer One is the latest project from Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith whose previous indie feature The Lionshare, became VODO's biggest success to date with over 450,000 downloads since its release. The success of the project inspired the writer/director duo to develop this quality drama in collaboration with VODO and its distribution partners. With a successful distribution of the pilot they're hunting for the donors and sponsors that will make the continuation of the show possible."

"For those of you who missed past postings, the tools I am evaluating wrap together a variety of open source tools to help archives with many aspects of the ingest, storage, and access process. So far, I’ve reviewed RODA and also DAITSS. Both of them, at least in their current forms, are difficult for anyone without server admin experience to install. Any archivist would need significant support to get them running...."

Here's a way to lose a few minutes: an interactive map that shows you, county-by-county, where Americans are moving to and from.

"The United States economy is in serious danger from a growing mismatch between the skills that will be needed for jobs being created and the educational backgrounds (or lack thereof) of would-be workers. That is the conclusion of a mammoth analysis of jobs data being released today by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce."

A very impressive bit of anticipation - from Knight Ridder and the Information Design Lab.

But also another reason to wonder why we're seeing the current crisis.

So today's the day. After 87 years in print, the comic strip of 'Little Orphan Annie' comes to a close, probably earning more coverage in its final weeks than it has in the thirty years since the musical.

Some thoughts:

Steven Pinker weighs in to dismiss the scare stories of Nicholas Carr and others (including an absurd piece the NYT itself ran a few days ago, which seems to have inspired Pinker to write this):

I love BoingBoing for doing this. It's a must skim photo essay about conservation efforts behind the scenes at the LoC. Not just books, but multimedia too. Great stuff, including detective work (the Vinland Map), and fun stuff like this:

"IRENE--image, reconstruct, erase noise, etcetera--is a system that creates a high-resolution digital map of a record's surface without touching it. Recordings on warped and damaged vinyl can be recovered and restored, then played back by a computer program that emulates the movements of a stylus passing over the modeled grooves"

Everyone knows it, but Tim Bray digs a little deeper. Inspired by the positive AND negative response to the Wired magazine app, he raises some questions about what makes the screen and print different when it comes to layout and design, and why that makes even talented people throw up their hands:

I remember the sustained howls of anguish from design professionals when the Web came along and everyone wanted to use it and suddenly many of the things they they thought they knew became wrong.

"The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn't the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. "Everything distracts them," observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab."

What do you say to an educator or parent who feels that making music remix videos, say, has nothing to do with literacy? In what senses are you describing such forms of expression as literacy practices?

Edit the page, then choose "Edit SVG"

"The study, carried out by researchers at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, says that the site is about as accurate as any published article you find in a peer-reviewed journal. The study specifically looked at Wikipedia pages on about cancer. The information turned out to be totally accurate, if only a little difficult to read. USA Today’s editors aren’t in charge of the site: the Wikipedia articles were said to be at a college-level reading level rather than a 9th grade reading level (found on PDQ, a professionally peer-reviewed Web site)."

"...So [Henry Ford] set off for the Amazon, armed with hubris, spite, madness, vision, utopianism and contempt for expertise. He resolved not merely to establish a rubber plantation in the heart of the jungle, but rather to establish a small, perfect midwestern town in the middle of the Amazon, a place where Fordism and its model villages, squeaky-clean abstinence, freedom from trade unionism, and emphasis of turning industrial workers into avid consumers of industrial goods would reign supreme.

Interesting account of a story taken without attribution, and then after this post went up, how CBS, the Financial Times, and other news agencies did the right thing.

Mistakes being made, but then being made good on, seems like something that wouldn't have happened ten years ago. Maybe everyone is (or at least some people are) learning something, after all.

The OCLC's Lorcan Dempsey applies a flows metaphor to metadata and information objects. Seems like there could be common ground here between the Flows developed by the Future Forward Institute/Forward Foundation and what he's talking about:

Just wanted to post this for our discussion/review.

Detroit is the canary in the coalmine. Every other Rust Belt city faces the same eventual fate. Amid this chaos is architect, Dan Pitera, Director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center....

The DCDC provides architectural and other design services for community organizations and other non-profit organizations. Dan has been leading the charge of the rebuilding of Detroit and is helping to right-size the once great city to help regain its former glory.

this discussion (and comments) fills in some of the blanks on the customization needed to get this code to work with large data sets MySQL is *not* used for the data....

SquidBee is an Open Hardware and Source wireless sensor device. The goal of SquidBee is getting an "open mote" to create Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).

"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough."

I've just had a chance to play with the implementation of websockets
in Googles Chrome browser. This post started me off.

After a small amount of experimentation I was able to make Erlang talk to a web page using pure asynchronous message passing.

I think this means the death of the following technologies:

* comet
* long-poll
* AJAX
* keep-alive sockets

* Mark Buchanan, "Meltdown Modeling: Could Agent-Based Computer Models Prevent Another Financial Crisis?" (pdf,1.2K), Nature, Vol. 460, August 6, 2009, 680-682.
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/MeltDownModeling.Nature080609.Bucha...

* J. Doyne Farmer and Duncan Foley, "The Economy Needs Agent-Based Modelling" (pdf,922K), Nature, Vol. 460, August 6, 2009, 685-686 http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/EconomyNeedsABM.NatureAug2009.Farme...

Press Release 20-May-2010

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell

First Self-Replicating, Synthetic Bacterial Cell Constructed by J. Craig Venter Institute Researchers

"In this two-part series, legal expert Robert McHale, author of Data Security and Identity Theft: New Privacy Regulations That Affect Your Business, provides a comprehensive overview of the legal security and privacy risks associated with cloud computing. Part 1 discusses the principal federal and state laws regulating cloud activities.

Given Apple’s increasingly evident distractedness from Mac OS development as it concentrates more and more on the mobile space with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, some are also suggesting that Ubuntu captures the traditional “Mac” spirit and vision better than the actual Mac OS does these days.

Create a new plugin for Redmine

At about 9am yesterday morning, I noticed on the monitor that the CPU utilization of one of my servers was abnormally high, in addition to a sustained 1mbit/sec of inbound traffic and 2mbits/sec of outbound traffic. syslog messages from Asterisk showed it to be a SIP brute force attack, so i dropped the offending IP (an Amazon EC2 instance IP) into /etc/idiots to block it and went back to my work.

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.

An interesting approach to generating webpages and using translators and converters.

The url on this post will lead you to an m3u file of the Resource Sharing call (it is stored on Internet Archive).

A User Perspective of GNU Social

This text follows a brainstorming session that occurred yesterday at a
park nearby in Amsterdam, with elinvi and psy, from lorea.cc.

It aims at providing a non-technical view of an idealized GNU Social
application from the point of view of a sample user, in order to
broaden the reflexion on GNU Social beyond self-promotion of various
projects, and out of a purely technical scope. You need to read it
once entirely before replying, otherwise you might get lost into
details where the idea is to provide a draft of a big picture.

"3D printer-hackers at McGill University in Montreal have modded their 3D rig to print solids made from ice. Scaled up, they believe they'll be able to create large-scale ice buildings, but for now, they're using it for very temporary, very cold, very intricate rapid prototyping...."

This is a post a made to smartmobs today about emerging biometric ID's in boht US and India. There is a serious lack of debate about all of this. Who controls our data? How does this line up with people's rights? It would be nice to see more debate about this

Their intent is to make access to the archival web an "http protocol matter" rather than a manual process (Wayback Machine, etc.).

There are two parts: first, using Transparent Content Negotiation to navigate to the archived resource, and second, a discovery API that "allows requesting a list of all archived versions it holds for a resource with a given URI."