I found this great speech by Bruce Sterling at the SXSW Conference . I've only read one thing by Bruce Sterling, (actually co-authored with William Gibson ) called The Difference Engine. I now intend to pick up some more of his books.
Oh yea…..here is the audio clip.
Well, it’s official. Blue Security called it quits today, and closed up shop. Apparently PharmaMaster was planning DoS attack on users IP addresses that were gathered when Frog client applications posted opt-out request to the spammers site.
Eran Reshef was quoted in a Wired article saying “Our community would very much like us to continue on the fight against spam, and our community has grown over the last week,” Reshef said. “But at the end of the day if we continue doing so, within a few days, major websites will go down. I don’t feel that this is something I can be responsible for. I cannot go ahead and rip up the internet to make Blue Security work. This is not the decision a commercial entity can make.”
Read more about the community reaction here.
PharmaMaster thinks he has won. Black Frog is on the way though. Powered by determination of Open Source and stealth of power of distributed P2P. If PharmaMaster thinks Blue Frog was bad wait until he faces a beast that has no master, and no single point of attack.
If I can’t get satisfaction from a perfectly legal system like Blue Frog and Black Frog doesn’t pan out i’m putting on my Black Hat.
For all those idiots that claimed Blue Security was DDoSing the spammers and their advertizers check out this quote from a Wired article that they claim came from one of the spammers working with PharmaMaster in the attacks: “Blue Security is indeed hurting our business, but not by taking down our websites,” the purported spammer wrote. “Instead, they create a daily nuisance to our server administrators.”
Oh dear! Are we being a nuisance?! What these guy have some gall bitching about people being a nuisance. They have plauged us for years. I’m pissed…and ready for war. The potiential Black Frog project has just picked up a life long dedicated programmer. It’s on bitch!
Ok, so after a few hickups moving Serendipity over to the new host I decided to give the One-Click install of Wordpress a shot. Wordpress rocks! Nuff said…
Ok..not nuff said…not even close…but i’m too lazy to go into all of it right now so download Wordpress and check it out!
I was just about the give up my search and delay this project until I had some free time to design something myself. That’s when I stubled on mp[3]act. It looked like a well designed site, which meant the interface for the system would likely be just as nice. I immedeatly dove into the demo site and began poking around. After poking around for a few minutes I had almost forgotten that I was working with it from with in a web browser. After a pleasent few minutes poking about in the demo it was now time for the pre-im-going-to-try-this-out test to determine if it this project was as good as it looked. It was time to look at the package dependancies. I was expecting a sizable hornets nest of difficult to set packages with odd configurations. What I instead got was a simple list of standard LAMP packages, with no special and/or funky setup.
It looks to me, like the perfect solution to my problem. I’ll be setting mp[3]act up this week and detailing my progress in my wiki. Once all is said and done there will be a Ubuntu walk through to follow.
I just stumbled upon this on slashdot.org. DIY Projector Plans released under the Creative Commons License are available via BitTorent download here.
I’ve been quietly watching and fantasizing about building my own projector from inexpensive and readily available components for quite sometime. I remember when I first saw plans like this selling on eBay and wondered if it was really worth it. I was sure that making a projector would be possible, I just wasn’t sure if it was feasible. After reading this PDF I will definitely be taking the next $400-600 dollars of entertainment money from our budget and building one for the second floor in our house.
While reading the document I reached a section that addressed the issues of the LCD usually having only a VGA port style input and most home entertainment devices only having Coaxial, s-video, or Composite outputs. And began chasing ideas of getting a converter, but then remembered that at the heart of my ultimate entertainment center (in my head) lies MythTV and Linux. Then like a little movie all these great little projects began flashing through my mind from years past. Mini ITX motherboards, The Open Embedded Project, various inspiring case mods, projects and tidbits from Make Magazine, my serious lack of experience and know how in electronics. 
So I have decided that this will be the next project I will be working on. I am going to design an all in one DIY Projector and MythTV setup in and self contained unit. In my mind (with only a couple of minutes of casual consideration) it will only require a power cable and a Coaxial cable, although it might also be nice if it had a network cable running to it so that databases and external sources of video and audio are available. It could likely use with a wireless network card, but will have to consider bandwidth utilization of various video and audio formats to see if it can ride on the existing wireless network or should put on a separate wireless network.
Anyway…I will be posting the results of my venture into the DIY Projector/Home Entertainment Center project as I go along. If the successive post suddenly stop then I’m probably having too much fun to post, and if they change direction then my incredibly short attention span is probably being diverted away by my family or something else more interesting at the moment.
After loving Mambo/Joomla “long time”, i’ve decided that I need a simple clean easy to use system for my site, instead of an all encompassing CMS. So Serendipity has come to save the day… I hope this end up being easy enough to use that I will begin creating regular content.
