Movable Type 3.1 Sneak Peek mixer
Six Apart just announced their Movable Type 3.1 Sneak Peek mixer next Thursday, August 12, at 5:30 p.m. It’s in San Francisco, so I will definitely be there….
Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.
Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 44 of 72.
Tor: Onion-routing system for anonymous activity
Ann Harrison of Wired News writes about Tor, an onion-routing system developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research Lab. Tor allows data routing through nodes that are only aware of their previous node and next node. Tor is distributed as free software under the 3-clause BSD license….
Weblog design
I never really liked the design of my weblog. When I moved from Blogger to Movable Type I was more worried about getting every entry converted to the new system and lost sight of structure and design issues. I finally decided to do something. I have changed my XHTML to include more lists, spans, and divs to create more specific blocks of code. Each entry is part of an ordered list and has its own unique list item id. I might have gone too far when I made some lists with one item, but those lists have room for expansion…
Slate: California’s SUV ban
Andy Bowers noticed a sign near his house prohibiting vehicles over 6000 pounds and upon further investigation discovered most large SUVs are technically banned in entire cities. Just as most of us instinctively check our speed when we drive by a police car, these luxury truckers should think twice about cruising illegally down Wilshire past a Santa Monica cop. If a few Tahoe owners got slapped with tickets for driving while overweight, the rest of them might actually start learning where their vehicles are legal….
Microsoft to launch weblog service in Japan
Microsoft will launch a trial weblog service in Japan on August 10 followed by an official launch later this year. The service will be powered by T.O.S Co., Ltd and Microsoft aims to have one million users in its first year. My guess is the weblog service will be an extension of the ASP-based home page software T.O.S already has: Maho no I-land….
Benoit Mandelbrot speech on August 19
Benoit Mandelbrot, Yale professor and inventor of fractal geometry and the Mandelbrot Set, will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 19 at 6 p.m. Mandelbrot’s new book, The Mis-Behavior of Markets, applies fractal theory to financial markets. Should be an interesting event!…
Army comissions 10 teraflop supercomputer using AMD Opterons and Linux
The Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center in Maryland will receive a new supercomputer named Stryker to model the behavior of new weapons materials. Stryker will contain 2304 AMD Opteron 2.2 GHz processors in 1186 separate systems. Capable of a peak performance of 10 teraflops, Stryker will be one of the most powerful Linux computers in the world. Linux Networx currently powers Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Lightning computer with a peak performance of 11 teraflops….
We the Media full text available online
O’Reilly Media published the entire text of Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media,under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. Chapter PDF files are available for download….
The Guardian interviews Nancy Cartwright
Emma Brockes of The Guardian interviewed Nancy Cartwright, voice of Bart Simpson, about her life as a voice actor. This month Cartwright is performing her play, My Life As a 10-year-old Boy, in Edinburgh….
Public Patent Foundation: Linux potentially infringes 283 patents
The Public Patent Foundation has found that version 2.4 and 2.6 of the Linux kernel potentially violate 283 not yet court-validated patents. 98 of the patents are owned by Linux allies such as Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sony. IBM holds 60 patents, HP holds 20 patents and Intel holds 11 patents. The kernel potentially violates 27 Microsoft patents. Open Source Risk Management has a PDF press release on the Public Patent Foundation’s findings….
Google IPO site is live
Google’s IPO site is now live. You can access the prospectus, watch the management presentation (27 minutes 6 seconds), and request a bidder ID….
Kazaa 2.7 promotes user weblogs
Users of Kazaa 2.7 (currently in beta) can promote their weblog or Web site within search result and traffic panes. Once you enter your Web address through the options menu your user name will be hyperlinked in the search results and traffic display. Interesting feature and it adds accountability. I am guessing this feature will be more useful to distributors than end-users. Independent music distributors can direct users to their Web site for more bands or a rich media presentation. Vendors can offer sample clips on Kazaa and link to their sites where a full-length clip is available for purchase….
How to legally distribute cover songs
CD Baby put together a summary of copyright considerations when releasing a cover song as a download or on a CD. More simple than I thought. The toughest part is identifying who to contact. Identify the publisher.Send a letter of intent.Pay royalties. (via BoingBoing)…
We the Media introduction
This Friday is the official launch of Dan Gillmor’s first book: We the Media. The text will be available under a Creative Commons license. Currently only the book’s introduction is online. I thought it would be cool to have an audio version of a portion of the book available by the Creative Commons party this Friday. Tonight I am happy to make available to the online community my reading of the introduction to We the Media by Dan Gillmor in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio formats. My reading lasts 19 minutes and 6 seconds. If you are interested…
MailFrontier tests phishing
MailFrontier showed 1,000 consumers examples of phishing e-mails as well as legitimate e-mails. The respondents fell for the phishing message 28 percent of the time. Take the sample quiz and see how you score. (via Slashdot) “About 20 percent of the Web sites devoted to stealing information are hosted in South Korea; another 16 percent are in China, and 7 percent are in Taiwan.”…
Weblogging about work
I received an e-mail this morning from an executive from my company asking I remove all references to my current employer (Callan) from my Web site. Thanks to Lawrence Lessig, Wendy Seltzer, and Robert Scoble I am already aware of some of the issues at play with branding and trademarks. Someone came across my blog by doing a Google search on Callan. I assume it was someone inside the company because this was passed along to Callan’s legal representation (Cooley Godward LLP) and then I was contacted. The first mention of my Web site within search results for Callan Associates…
Corporate branding on New York subways?
New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is exploring selling naming rights to its subway stations, bus lines, bridges and tunnels. Mayor Bloomberg has also proposed selling naming rights to the city’s parks. What’s in a name?…
iTunes on your cell phone
Motorola and Apple announced a partnership to transfer songs from iTunes to a Motorola phone via a USB or Bluetooth connection. Before Steve Jobs made the announcement Ed Zander held up an iPod and a Motorola phone and said “It would be great if we could just figure out a way to bring these two devices together.” The start of something bigger?…
Jürgen Klinsmann named head coach of German national team
Jürgen Klinsmann is the new head coach of the German national team under a two-year contract. Holger Osieck will be an assistant coach with a general management role and Oliver Bierhoff will be an assistant coach focused on training….
Re-recruit employees instead of focusing on retaining employees
Todd L. Pittinsky of Harvard University and Margaret J. Shih of University of Michigan wrote Knowledge Nomads: Organizational Commitment and Worker Mobility in Positive Perspective, featured in the February issue of American Behavioral Scientist. Mallory Stark of Harvard interviewed Pittinsky about knowledge nomads and approaches to turnover in the July 26 issue of HBS Working Knowledge. I like the conclusions from the studies. More managers need to understand motivation and commitment rather than hours and salary. Turnover is a symptom, not a problem. Change your mantra from “attract and retain the best employees” to “attract and re-recruit the best employees.”…
San Jose Earthquakes moving to San Francisco?
San Francisco Chronicle: “Mayor Gavin Newsom confirmed Thursday that he has met with Quakes president and general manager Alexi Lalas and other team representatives to talk about moving the Major League Soccer squad north from San Jose.” A soccer-specific stadium in China Basin was discussed. Kezar Stadium or SBC Park could be temporary venues until the new stadium is constructed….
Fortune: Money Machines
Ellen Florian wrote an interesting article in Fortune magazine about the history of the automatic teller machine as well as the changes in human-machine interaction they pioneered. (via Slashdot)…
Crosby Nash 2004
David Crosby and Graham Nash have come up with a clever way to market their new CD: structure a Web site and weblog like a presidential site. Watch the weblogging world get a hold of the story and you have a very cheap marketing campaign. (via MetaFilter)…
Military perk: free cosmetic surgery
Karen Schaler writes about free cosmetic surgery for members of the United States armed forces in the July 26 issue of the The New Yorker.
Wired News: Open Arms for Open-Source News
Daniel Terdiman of Wired News reports on Bakersfield’s The Northwest Voice newspaper giving its readers control of its content through online article posting. “36 percent of the content is photographs, while 13 percent is school news, 11 percent is community events, 7 percent is youth sports and 2 percent is church news. Ten percent of coverage is columns written by locals selected by Fulton for their expertise on things like horses, cars, schools and outdoor life.”…