Flutterby™!

Hey, if someone out there could go to http://002forb.nwsvr.com username "guest" password "guest" and tell me if they see my workshop, that'd rock. Thanks.

Just learned that in Australia "hacker spaces" and communal workshops go by the name "Community Shed". A whole new sociological vista opens.

Burgled in Philly

When John Davidson’s apartment gets robbed, he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer while he lies to the police

Energy.gov: where information goes to die. Dawn Stover goes seeking information on Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository on the Energy.gov web site, comes up with some problems.

Open data is hard for a lot of reasons, but I think a big one is that so many people still don't get the web. PDFs have slowed down the process of building useful electronic documents a whole hell of a lot, and learning how to move beyond the paper world into data even as minimally structured as HTML is something that eludes many web publishers.

It's a whole new mind set, and as anyone who's tried to navigate newspaper web sites effectively can tell you, something that people mired in the old processes are not coming over to easily.

Mess with cyclists and they will mess. you. up. Police: Man shot teens in self defense.

A 16-year-old boy was shot and killed and another teenager was wounded by a man they tried to rob as he rode his bicycle along a Schuylkill River trail Wednesday morning, police said.

Thanks, Larry.

First World Problems Rap

David Ogilvie writes to Ray McCalt:

I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

@borkware: "Hereby staking my claim on the code-review term codenoscopy."

@bagelturf: "@borkware Call yourself a Groktologist."

NineBullets.net: Lana Del Rey: Chicken McNugget, or McRib. A little musing on manufactured music that draws some good similés with food.

Okay, I hate to link to the New York Times, but two in one day: NY Times: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work:

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

Yep. To design a change now, you have to fly to China so that you can figure out how you can make the supply chain support that change. How long do you think we're gonna maintain our lead?

NY Times: Paying a ‘Sports Tax,’ Even if You Don’t Watch:

Although “sports” never shows up as a line item on a cable or satellite bill, American television subscribers pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming — no matter how many games they watch. A sizable portion goes to the National Football League, which dominates sports on television and which struck an extraordinary deal this week with the major networks — $27 billion over nine years — that most likely means the average cable bill will rise again soon.

So not only are you paying out the nose for local tax breaks, additional policing costs, peak-load traffic, and other externalities to host their stadiums in your town, if you pay for TV you're also funnelling money into the giant economic sink that is professional sports.

I got to that via JWZ's rant about DirecTV's "deceptive business practices", which is also interesting because his reasoning for wanting to pay for television is the timeliness of the delivery of the product: To be watching what other people are watching.

The "something for the water cooler conversation" effect is part of what drives my bandwidth bet with TC, something I really need to dig deeper on the stats of.

Koushik Dutta of the CyanogenMod team proposes an alternative to the Android Market, in which one could get "one click root apps, emulators, tether apps, Visual Voicemail apps", as well as the other apps.

Shadow forwarded along UT San Diego/Wall Street Journal: More riders trying 'fixie' bikes with one gear, many risks, and I didn't think it was that important, but it's been sitting in an open browser tab, and...

They're illegal in many places. Laws in most states where fixed-gear riding is popular – including New York, California, Maryland and Oregon – require that bicycles be equipped with a brake that enables the operator to make the braked wheels skid on clean, dry pavement. Still, fixed-gear cyclists and lawyers in those states argue, often successfully, that the rider should count as the “brake” if he or she is able to achieve the same effect.

and I had a half-formed thought that related to that article on autonomous cars that I just blogged, which had a bit about the technical challenges to bringing these things to market and a huge bit about the legal challenges to making our driving that much safer and more convenient, and...

Today I had an electrical inspection for my shop. The city is requiring me to install motion and light sensors on my exterior lights, or to change them from standard screw-in Compact Fluorescent to something else. There's enough spill-over from the lights in the back yard that we can't go to bed with them on. Motion and light sensors seem only make it more likely that I'll leave them on. So I'm about to be out $50+installation time for some pieces that I'm just going to yank out when they go bad, if not before, after the inspection is done.

As I said, it's a half-formed thought, but I can't help but feel that these are all indications of flaws in our legal system somewhere.

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here.

An In-Depth Case Study on the Pretty Lights + BitTorrent Partnership, or: How a music artist embrased Pirate Bay, BitTorret, and piracy, to become successful.

Via Sensible Erection.

Electrical inspection done, need photo sensors on outside lights, and wall plates, before the final on that permit.

Just ordered a Wansview NC540W network camera for the shop. No H.264, but motion JPEG, web interface, pan and tilt. We'll see how it works.

Nat Torkington: The President's challenge: What more does government want — or deserve — from the tech world?

In the wake of SOPA/PIPA, a statement from the Whitehouse says:

Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.

To which Torkington responds:

All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi--hell, you can even get online while you're on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

Rob Malda's review of Star Wars Uncut: The Director's Cut led me to Star Wars Uncut: The Director's Cut (YouTube).

The concept: Star Wars Uncut asked people to shoot 15 second segments of the original Star Wars. This is a bunch of those edited together. It's amazing.

Another get together for folks interested in urban planning. 4PM Thursday at Aqus in Petaluma.

Norman W. Edmund, founder of Edmund Optics and Edmund Scientific, 1916-2012.

Wait, Twitter's automatic link "shortener" just made my tweet longer. Stupid link shortener idiocy.

Anyone have experiences with network or IP cameras with 2 way audio and Linux clients?

So, wait, Overstock.com is charging 5% more than the manufacturer's web site? Uh... Credibility: lost.

Brad Templeton has some interesting notes from Santa Clara University Law Review conference on the legal issues of autonomous vehicles.

Also links to an MSNBC article on the conference.

Hmmm... The SF Gate front page currently has "Rare photos of Joe Paterno" followed immediately by "Why cockfighting persists".

Of course I saw someone posit yesterday that he's not really dead, it's just horseplay.

The Flickr photos and videos of Wanda Sowry, automata maker.

Via LumberJocks: British Pub scene Automata by Wanda Sowry. Video of the pub scene in action.

RT @rtraister:

Rand Paul refuses pat-down at Nashville airport on way to an anti-abortion rally in DC. Because keep your hands off his body. Happy Monday!

Rand Paul in pat down standoff with the TSA in Nashville:

The TSA version of events is that Paul triggered an alarm during routine airport screening and refused to complete the screening process (pat-down) in order to resolve the issue. Paul was escorted out of the screening area by local law enforcement.

Rand Paul is pro-choice on toilets, anti-choice on women's health issues.

Whoah: 9 out of 9 U.S. Supreme Court Justices have decided that police need a warrant to plant a GPS tracking device on your car.

You know those scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies where Legolas is waving around his bow, pulling arrows out of his quiver and firing, and then repeating that, in fluid motions? And how it all looks like CG bullshit?

This woman empties her quiver swiftly and methodically (YouTube video), and another video where you can see more of her and the target.

Via this Sensible Erection thread.

7xx-RFC: An RFC for a new series of HTTP status codes covering developer fouls.

RT @lturrentine:

4K of IBM memory found in my grandpa's pole barn, captured in a 692K photo. #mindblown http://pic.twitter.com/nUGM5ff8

The picture is totally worth clicking through for.

RT @elfsternberg:

Rick Santorum's new fundraiser project is acronym'd CUM? He's the world's most elaborate performance artist, right? https://t.co/EnkPUAfe

Indeed, the link leads to https://www.ricksantorum.com/unite/ which proclaims a "Conservatives Unite Moneybomb". Wow. We're meta³ here.

With the news that porn performers in the City of Los Angeles will now be required to use condoms, Brad Guigar has a modest suggestion for moving porn production to Philadelphia.

Former Senator Christopher Dodd turned MPAA CEO and lobbyist threatens to cut off campaign funds:

"Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake."

Shadow passed along this report that nails and tacks were found along the Australian "Tour Down Under Challenge" bicycling event route an hour before the racers were due to roll through.

Sabotage is suggested.

Posting this from the workshop's WiFi http://www.flutterby.net/2012-01-19_Workshop_Progress

As the sideshow that is the Republican presidential primary winds into full gear, the various smear campaigns against Barack Obama have started returning. Just this morning I got yet another forwarded email that attempted to revive the Obama birth certificate and "Connecticut" social security number and all sorts of other goofiness.

There are reasons to be displeased with Barak Obama's presidency, to be sure (NDAA, extrajudicial execution of American citizens, and so forth), but in a field of right wing wackjobs (ie: everyone but Rommney and Paul), an ideologically honest if politically inept guy who's still got some questionable stances on freedom (Paul), and a guy who's entire platform seems to be disavowing everything his political career has been up to now (Romney), I think it's important to evaluate the least of the evils.

To that end, I suggest Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's long game will outsmart his critics:

Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms. By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.

Via David Chess, who includes some of the criticisms I think are worth revisiting.

New York Times — Arthur S. Brisbane — Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

Dear Mr. Brisbane: The world has seen entirely too much of journalists badly rewriting press releases. You want to know why I don't give a damn if the newspaper industry dies a horrible grisly death? You want to know why I don't subscribe to the NYT online edition (and, yes, I do pay money for online content)? This. In spades.

The fact that the New York Times even has to ask this question shows how corrupt "the fourth estate" has become. So, Mr. Brisbane: Fuck yes. And the New York Times should also not confuse telling the truth with finding an alternative viewpoint.

Because otherwise you're worse than Fox News, because you don't actually take a stand for something, you're just republishing lies.

Via Brown Eyed Girl, who also links to Jay Rosen's response to this and the subsequent Brisbane hair-splitting.

Whoah: Newt's a swinger? Marianne Gingrich, Newt's ex-wife, says he wanted an "open marriage". Quoted because I think there's quite a difference between "open marriage" and "honey, either we get a divorce or I'm going to go get some on the side".

Matt Haughie of Metafilter talks about SOPA/PIPA and some DMCA harassment he suffered.

Yes, even more SOPA/PIPA: The Day The LOLcats Died (YouTube)

Neil Gaiman's Journal: An open letter to Washington from Artists and Creators.

Okay, we're back, but y'all need to do your part to stop SOPA and PIPA.

• Additional information about the SOPA/PIPA strike
• EFF: How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation.
• The Oatmeal animated comic explains SOPA/PIPA
• SOPA Track.com — Check how your congressweasel or senator has taken a stance on SOPA or PIPA