Culture
Via The Guardian: two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate "and let loose among the fabled archive".
The journey to the Kubrick house starts normally. (...) There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house(...)I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining...
Concept to learn: «Die Rosinenpickerei» (Nun müsse sich das Land zwischen Isolation oder Integration entscheiden, die Rosinenpickerei gehe nicht länger weiter).
Deutschland hat laut Innenminister Otto Schily versäumt, die Schweiz rechtzeitig über die verschärften Grenzkontrollen zu informieren. Wenig Verständnis zeigt er indes für die "Rosinenpickerei" der Schweiz in den EU-Verhandlungen.
Gnod is a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. It allows you to discover new bands and artist, know related authors linked to your favorite, discover new movies and so forth.
Via angermann2: XML, stylesheets and Maya culture is a nice psot about the fact that the very concept of XML (separating shape and content) already existes in maya culture:
this thought of splitting-up a piece of information into content and shape isn't new at all. The Mayas already were knowladgeable of this strategy/technology. On March 21st and September 23rd the shadows cast by the sun reveal a winding serpent at the pyramid of Kukulacan at Chichen Itza -- proof of the aforementioned strategy. The information to be carried, the serpent, represents the XML-document. The sun and the pyramid's architecture constitute a kind of stylesheet, which gives structure and shape to the serpent. Now -- are the Mayas the founding-fathers of the paradigm of structurized documents?
Via the register:
A document leaked onto the Internet purporting to be a full specification for Nintendo's forthcoming DS handheld includes a touch panel input device, 802.11 wireless LAN support and a 3D graphics system.
setpixel provides us with a brief report about isometric view theory and it's application in Macromedia Director. Those view are so trendy today.
The isometric view has been popularized by its "3D" representation of levels in games such as Ant Attack on the ZX Spectrum (the first isometric platformer), Zaxxon, and Atari's Marble Madness game. Since 1982, many game developers have continued to use the isometric view.
Examples taken from Ant, Marble Madness and Zaxxon:
the register explains how google is dangerous.
Bad guys know about the "intitle" operator, but they know something else that makes it even more powerful. Often Web servers are left configured to list the contents of directories if there is no default Web page in those directories; on top of that, those directories often contain lots of stuff that the website owners don't actually want to be on the Web. That makes such directory lists prime targets for snoopers. The title of these directory listings almost always start with "Index of", so let's try a new query that I guarantee will generate results that should make you sit up and worry: "intitle:"index of" site:edu password". 2,940 results, and many, if not most, would be completely useless to a potential attacker. Many, however, would yield passwords in plain text, while others could be cracked using common tools like Crack and John the Ripper.
There are other operators, but these should be enough to make the picture clear. Once you start to think about it, the potentially troublesome words and phrases that can be searched for and leveraged should begin to multiply in your mind: passwd. htpasswd. accounts. users.pwd. web_store.cgi. finances. admin. secret. fpadmin.htm. credit card. ssn. And so on.
Remove material from google explained here
Googledorklists words and phrases that reveal sensitive information and vulnerabilities
We have two seemingly opposite problems at work here: simplicity and complexity. On the one hand, it has become very easy for non-technical users to post content onto Web servers, sometimes without realizing that they're in fact placing that content on a Web server. It has even become easier to Web-enable databases, which has led in one case to the exposure of a database containing the records of a medical college's patients (and by the way, the search terms discussed in that article are still very much active at Google, one year later).
Even when people do understand that their content is about to go onto the Web, many do not fully think through what they're about to post. They don't examine that content in light of a few simple questions: How could this information be used against me? Or my organisation? And should this even go on the Web in the first place?
Via Headlined news.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (HLN) - A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod.
I also saw an interesting php module that build a calendar RSS-enabled. Does agenda aggregators already exist ?
For of all you who plays with RDF crap, there is a nice tool RDFAuthor that help you to create rdf instance data. ->"Authoring is largely a matter of dragging in data and binding it together using a graphical interface.". It is a nice tool really handy for authoring RDF (and querying it...). I am also pleased that the huge robot in their logo comes from Robotech (in the robotech series, RDF stands for Robotech Defense Force).
Via Las Vegas Sun:
Rejecting the stigma that games are only for kids, researchers around the world are making computer games the subject of serious academic pursuit alongside literature, music and art. They are staking out space in universities - with Ph.D. programs, research centers and online journals.Game studies (or "ludology," as it's known, from the Latin for "game"), has spawned a new class of academics who devote themselves to analyzing how the wildly popular form of entertainment tells stories - and what it reveals about how we express ourselves.
I like this social bookmark manager, I read few of them but I don't have time to manage both my blog and my own del.icio.us/ :( I like no sense of place or thomas angermann
Via CNN.com::
A GameBoy Advance title "Boktai" uses sunlight as an essential part of the game. The amount of light determines the amount of power your hero has to defeat his enemies.
There is a solar sensor ! The game contents changes also with the intensity or amount of sunlight that the solar sensor receives.
When there is strong sunlight, solar energy charges up quickly. When weak, it charges up slowly. Sunlight is required mainly to charge energy to the solar gun which is the player's only weapon, and to fight the boss at the Pile Driver. And during moments other than these, the sensor will detect solar energy, causing the game content to change.
There are two gauges at the bottom right of the screen. The one on the top is the "solar gun gauge" that shows how much is left in the battery of the solar gun. The one on the bottom is the "solar gauge" that shows how strong the sunlight detected by the solar sensor at real time is. In order to charge solar energy to the solar gun, press the A Button when the solar gauge is responding.
- The stronger the sunlight, the stronger the wind in certain areas. - There are enemies that reveal themselves when the sunlight is weak. - There are enemies that slow down when the sunlight is weak. - The Pile Driver becomes more powerful.
I used to do skateboard. Now after having read Ian Borden's book Skateboarding, Space and the City, I fully understand what he means. Here are the "social lessons" of skateboarding: - skate sport functions as "focal point" in Schelling's terminology. That means that if you want to look for somebody, you go to the skate spot 8in my village, it was in front of the church). Everybody pass by or come and then you meet your buddies. - skate is also a strong way to visit cities, wandering and hanging out with people around. - skate allows you to see the city as a huge artifacts you can play with: barrier, handrailes... you're trained to pay attention to lots of details. It was certainly my first introduction tu urban studies.
Nice topic tackled by orange cone: Where are the cool places today?
For Bohemians there have been many cities that serve as the icons of their age, where "interesting stuff" was happening: Picasso's Paris, Weimar Berlin, Beatnick San Francisco, Swinging London, Post-Wall Berlin, dotcom San Francisco. What's the cool city today? San Francisco currently seems spent (for the purposes of this discussionthere was disagreement around the table) and there must (it's felt) be the next big thing, but where is it? Where is that cheap/creative/liberal/exciting cultural space where people stay up late talking big ideas and "subverting the dominant paradigm"? Could it really be....Portland?
We didn't know and I wonder if that place can exist anymore.
I fully agree with the statement "the "good ones"--the traditional centers of Western culture--are now too expensive to live in for someone trying to make a living selling abstract watercolors on the street to tourists". Like in the movie "Amelie from Montmartre", Paris is like a tourist sanctuary.
The current trend is to inhabit second-tier cultural centers, places where there is not a history of being a major cultural center. So Portland and Pittsburgh are acquiring their share of boho life, even Detroit is experiencing a revival of sorts
THOMAS GRÜNFELD's work is interesting, trying to mix different parts of different animals (ironic critique of "Gemütlichkeit"):
Brad Templeton introduced in 2001 a nice index: the Bill Gates Wealth Index. The idea is to imagine Gates seeing or dropping a piece of paper money on the ground: How large a denomination would the bill have to make it worth his time to stop and pick up ?Templeton calculated that during 1986, a $5 bill would have been 'too small for Bill' to bother with. By 1998, a $10,000 bill wasn't worth the trouble.
Peter Drucker:
General libraries (public libraries) do not contain information. They contain data. The customer decides what is information. Specifically, the general library contains no more information than does the telephone book unless the customer knows what he or she needs and wants. The general library is just a store, although librarians canand domake a difference.
The 'Tall Latte Index' as is counterpart 'Big Mac Index' is meant to show how currency-exchange rates translate to actual purchasing power. The index shows how many Starbuck lattes (as opposed to Big Macs) U.S. dollars buy in a given country when exchanged for the local currency. USA: $2.80. Switzerland: $4.54 UE: $3.72 Thailand: $1.93 Hong Kong: $3.22
