Blog Posts

on Gojira (1954)

Evan and I watched Gojira (1954) last night (thanks, Netflix!). We had fun reading the subtitles, and watching Gojira do his thing. A fun movie, with some surprisingly deep cultural subtext (the society of post-atomic Japan, a scientist conflicted over his creation of a doomsday weapon…).

But… There was a scene in a fishing village on the Island of Oda Island, where an elderly man was describing the rituals they used long ago to ward of Gojira. Human sacrifice. Ritual dances.

on breaking away from hosted silos

This is a long, rambling, incomplete blog post that’s been rattling around in my head for a week. I decided to try to just put something in writing to see if I could make it less unclear. Caveat emptor.

If people are to manage their own content, forming their digital identities, they need a way to host software and content that doesn’t require obscure and detailed technical knowledge.

Us early adopters are not normal. We’ve been so close to technologies, for so long, that we forget what it’s like to be new to the stuff. Or not to live and breathe tech every day. Most people are not like us. They don’t know what HTTP is. It’s just some silly letters before the address of a website. They don’t know what DNS is. They don’t know what FTP is. They don’t know what SSH is. Or MySQL. Or PHP. Or Perl. etc…

Unhosted: Breaking the SaaS Monopoly - ReadWriteCloud

>The basic idea is this: an Unhosted app lives on a web server and contains only source code. That source code is executed on a user’s computer and encrypts and stores data on another server. That data never passes through the app server. Therefore, the app provider doesn’t have a monopoly on your data. And since that data is encrypted, it can’t be exploited by the data host either (or at least, it probably can’t).
>
>The data can be hosted anywhere. “It could be in your house, it could be at your ISP or it could be at your university or workplace,” says de Jong.

hey guys! wait up!

I can’t put my arms down!

post-delicious.com hysteria

It looks like Yahoo! is going to kill/merge/mangle/whatever the delicious.com bookmarking service. Hysteria! Madness!

I’ve used Delicious for over 6 years. I’ve got 3,298 bookmarks stored there, with 16,669 tags. There’s a handy dandy XML exporter that let me grab them all in one file.

Then what? I could import easily to another third party service. But it’s likely that people will migrate to different services, so the network effects from Delicious are already evaporating. And any third party service will eventually die anyway.

How I made the TRON ASCII video

Jim asked how it was done, so in the spirit of sharing DIY tricks, here’s the basic steps I followed to make the TRON ASCII video.

Basically, it was tying together two separate programs, in a GUI pipe.

I grabbed the .mp4 video file from YouTube, to use as the source.

The hard work of rendering the video as ASCII art was done by the command line movie player `ASCIIMoviePlayer`. That program was a technology demo by Apple at one of the WWDCs I went to (a long time ago), and it works great. It’s been updated as the open source QuickASCII project, which is cross platform. It has some nice features added, including scaling and support for colour. Seriously. Coloured ASCII art, rendered in real time from any video file. Insane. It seems to work on any Quicktime-capable format - here’s the output of the Reverend Devilhorns animated GIF, as ASCII:

there's a new wizard in town

reverend devilhorns

GIFBOY