geekness

Penguin Day, Live!!

update: I'm at Penguin Day, as discussed in my previous entry, and just wanted to mention a cool thing that is happening:
live updating to the wiki for the event.
There are tons of laptops here, a temporary wireless access point, and people are taking notes and pasting them into the Wiki as we speak.
You can hear snatches of biz-speak and investoresque jargon as you circulate around.... This is the kind of conference that you would expect to be at a Hyatt Regency out by the airport or downtown, but it's at Freegeek, which
has always had more of a "loading dock chic" kind of look to it. There are no microphones, and bascially one big room, tho
breakout sessions have spread into the little meeting room next door. But, it seems like a lot of good will come of this.

And yet I still just don't know what I personally want from it. My heart is just, in general, not in computers anymore. sigh.

Penguin Day

Today I'm going to Penguin Day at Free Geek. Penguin Day is a little symposium to bring together open source developers with non-profits. A worthy goal. Read more>>>

Spamassassin let me down

Got into a big emotional exchange of harsh words today, in which I was accused of ignoring someone's emails and being ageist and sexist. I got defensive, whined about how busy I am, how deluged in email I am every day, but as the discussion continued specific emails got mentioned that I was almost certain I had never ever seen at all. Eventually I figured out they had been caught in my spam filter. About 10 in all emails from this person had been false positived in the last month or so. dammit. In my desparate attempts to curtail spam I think I have become too extreme in my spamassassin rules score settings. goddammit.

css

been reluctantly trying to learn more about CSS. not sure why. i guess i thought it would be useful for this site i'm setting up for Villa Ingenio, a neighborhood in Bolivia where some of the computers for Bolivia project computers are going to.

anyway i really should read this: Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models

but have not had time yet.

blog tools

The blogosphere has been actively chattering about 6-apart's new MT licensing. I hadn't really thought too much about it but I started to today and its a pain in the ass. Even after this announcement from 6-apart, with changes in their new liscensing, it is still not acceptable.

What really is frustrating to me is I'd like to switch but there doesnt look to be any other blog tool written in perl that has all the features I want. I hate PHP but all the best tools seem to be written in that. grr.

mobile phone virus

So now someone has discovered a virus that infects mobile phones. Just what we need. Another reason not to buy another mobile, I guess. I've been thinking about it for months.

As Thoreau once said, "We have become the tools of our tools."

sigh.

iPod pirate radio station

This article explains how to use your iPod to make a pirate radio station.

There's lots of great ideas for what to do with such a portable FM transmitter. One of my favorite is:

We usually keep a couple tracks of silence ready to go, ever get stuck at a stop light for like 10 minutes and the dude in the next car is blasting the radio? With the super easy iPod interface you can quickly get to the station he

blog spam & other technological woes.

Today for the first time, my blog started getting spammed. How freaking lame. Like I don't have enough trouble with email spam. Luckily, I know SQL and it was fairly simple to just go into the mySQL shell and mass-delete all the spam comments. But I also looked around for some methods of preventing blog spam, and I foung this handy article,
"Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog". I've done 2 of them already. Hopefully this doesn't become a huge problem...

Disruptive Technologies

This article about wireless access points that run linux is pretty interesting. Lots of semi-utopian (capitalist-utopian) ideas about what to do with the things. But the point is that they are what Cringely, the author, calls a "disruptive technology." Cell phones, personal computers, and the internet itself are other examples of disruptive technologies. Yes.

The thing he fails to mention is that disruptions caused by disruptive technologies are not always a good thing. Nuclear fission is another disruptive techology. The powered looms that spawned the Luddites was another. The list could go on. It's like the assumption that all change is good that so many new economy business gurus preached. uh uh....

It brings to mind one of my favorite Marcuse quotes:

"The traditional notion of the 'neutrality' of technology can no longer be maintained."
-Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

(thanx matisse)

non-profit IT consulting for non-profits

I'm finally doing a little paying work, and it's for something I can get behind ethically for once, the
Collaborative Technologies project/group.

CollabTech is a relatively new project of Free Geek, the non-profit computer recycling/rebuilding/educating organization here in Portland. Read more>>>

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