Following the AFAQ, now you can get Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy in an ebook format as well.
After converting the AFAQ to an ebook format, I’ve thought I might as well release some of the other stuff I’ve converted for my personal use. One of them is Studies in Mutualist Political Economy which I’ve been reading lately. Like the AFAQ, I’ll provide you below with a few popular versions for ebooks along with the master copy which you can use to create your own versions.
Of course, I’ve already contacted Kevin Carson to get the OK for this and apparently the book is available on a copyleft license (GFDL? He didn’t specify) so I can post the files here without problem. Eventually he’s going to host the files on his own site as well.
Since I’m on the subject, perhaps it would be appropriate to say a few things about the content of the book. For someone like me who basically self-educated on libertarian socialism as who has come to the conclusion that the labour theory of value applies, a synthesis of LTV with Marginalism sounded promising. However, even though I enjoyed the refutation of Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism of the LTV, the actual synthesis didn’t impress me. I won’t make a substancial critique here (perhaps another time) but I’ll say that too much weight was given to Austrian “axioms” and shaky conclusions about free markets.
Nevertheless, it’s still an interesting book and it was the first time I read soemething from the Mutualist perspective. If nothing else, it gave me a few more ideas to write about and pointed out some differences between that and social anarchism.
Transposh is a new shiny plugin that promises to make translating your wordpress blog to other languages a breeze. If you’ve gor a multilingual blog, you can’t afford to miss it.
Through NoState.com I’ve come to discover Transposh, a new WordPress plugin that promises to make the task of translating pages of your site to other languages very easy, and to also take reduce the personal effort required to do so by crowd-sourcing the task.And boy does it deliver!
You may have noticed that I occasionally write in other languages, particularly in my native Greek. That doesn’t happen so often because my audience is mainly international now but it still bugged me that my choice of language was in effect making it difficult for my friends and relatives from my birthland to follow and participate. However the task of replicating each post on another language was simply too much to bother.
However Transposh finally gives me an opportunity to fix this. I can much more easily do the task of translating my pages to my native language myself, since it utilizes google translate to get your text changed, transparently. That is, the text will switch to the google translation of the language you want and you can edit and fix it right there and then, without having to go through the dashboard or anything.
Not only that, but the elements of the page which exist in other locations as well, such as the title or the header, once corrected once do not need to be corrected in every other page of your site as well, but rather are intelligently cached and served.
Oh, and did I mention the crowd-sourcing part? This is my favourite bit. Transposh gives the opportunity for the blog author to not only allow other registered users to translate, but also for anonymous as well. This means that all interested parties can help improve your site. This might not be of much use for small fishes such as me, but for larger players with an international audience, it will certainly provide a lot more labour. Of course, there’ always the issue of vandalism, but much like any wiki, some solutions should be possible.
You can see how translating with Tranposh looks like. The colour show the status of each sentence (Google-translation, Human-edited or none)
This crowd-sourcing now means that if you find an interesting article in a Transposh-enabled site, you can help translate to the language you wish (of those the author made available) and then send the link to all your friends whos’ foreign language skills are not so good.
For an Alpha version plugin, I’m impressed. Both at the quality of the code but also at the quality of the support. The main developer is lightning quick to respond and help with problems (although that’s bound to change as the plugin becomes more popular I guess). For example, my first and largest problem was that it seemed that the translation of each page was taking forever, sucking all my resources and that caching was not happening. However after some discussion with the developer, I discovered that by simply leaving the first translation to finish, everything became much snappier on subsequent attempts. That is because the general elements are translated once on the first time (which on an element heavy page like mine can take a while) but are cached once this is completed.
Oh, and did I mention that that it can also make nice permalinks for your translated articles that are indexable by google and cacheable by Hyper-Cache? (And I assume WP Super-Cache as well). For example, you can find the Greek translation of this article here.
So if you’re writing a multi-language WordPress blog or if you have an international audience, I think it’s time you give this plugin a go. Even if you don’t have the time to perform the task, you give the capability for others to read it easily (without having to go to visit google first) or even do the full job of translation themselves for the most interesting stuff.
For the Division by Zer0, I’ve now activated the Greek and German languages since I don’t expect people from other places to visit much. However if you’d like another option, simply let me know and I’ll enable it.
The Division by Zer0 has finally passed the 100.000 unique visitors mark. W00t!
The Division by Zer0 has finally passed the 100.000 unique visitors mark. W00t!
I only noticed this from my WordPress stats, which count my visitors since Feb 2008, but Google Analytics gives me about the same number since 2006 (and that is always much reduced). So I can safely say that I’ve passed this little milestone in the life of this site. It’s not incredibly important, but it’s nice to know that so many people have read what small I had to say.
Here’s to 1 Mil 🙂
And now, some stats, just for the heck of it:
Current RSS Subscribers: ~200
Most popular referrers: Google Search, Stumbleupon and Reddit.
For the last month, Intense Debate has been behaving extremely badly. It’s been hiding comments from everyone, on seemingly random rates and times. Basically, at various occassions, replies to particular threads would disappear. Sometimes it would be just one or two replies, at others it would be the whole thread past the first reply.
And while this started out mild, as the month passed, it has grown progressively more intense, to the point where now there’s always at least some replies missing, and at worse, hundreds of them. This is even more annoying since those comments still exist in the system (ie, I can see them in the dashboard) but appear sporadically. So in one refresh I will see 90/100, and the next refresh I will see only 15.
Unfortunately, the developers have really dropped the ball on this. Even though this seemed from the start as a quite important problem, and even though this was reported early on, there was initially no response, then there was some non-functioning workarounds, and finally the problem was acknowledged just last week after me and other started screaming bloody murder. Incidentally, it was at this point where this was becoming unbrearable which I assume meant some of their big name clients started complaining as well.
So now, this is creating a comment hell situation for me, especially for the long discussions I’ve opened with Lockeanists and the like. Not only do many people get confused about their disappearing replies, but they also get the impression that I’m secretly deleting comments. And this just too much.
So for now, I’m going to stop replying to comments until this fucking issue is resolved. This is not say that I will leave your replies unanswered, but that I will only start a conversation, when a conversation can be maintained. Of course, this assumes that IDC will get their act together and fix this annoying bug ASAP. If this does not happen, I may have to do the unthinkable and remove it altogether in order to be able to discuss again.
Needless to say, this whole situation is seriously pissing me off, especially since I’ve been a devout proponent of IDC for a while now.
I’ll be updating this post with the status of this comment hell in the future.
UPDATE1: It seems that the IDC folks have finally located the code causing this and have produced a fix to stop this from happening in the future. Now all that’s left is fixing the problem as it already exists and they plan to push an update for this once they know the fix worked.
Stardocks CEO believes all Pirates are thieves, even though they practically help him. I (not-so kindly) disagree.
This is basically what the latest post from Stardock’s CEO comes down to when he says the following:
But…but…what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates? Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.
Emphasis mine.
So what exactly is pissing Frogboy off? That Piracy helped make his game stunningly famous even before it hit the stores? That file-sharing did free advertisement for Demigod to the scale that it catapulted it to the 3rd place in sales (possibly higher if you count online sales). That Pirates urged each other to actually support Stardock if they can, to promote this kind of initiative?
Frogboy should be on his fucking knees praising Pirates at this point for all the free publicity they gave the title, not simply by the fact that they gave the game to each other to try before it officially hit the stores, but also for the controversy this raised on popular news sources which brought further spotlight to the game.
And this is, in short, the reply: “Fuck you, you’re goddamn thieves!You piss me off!”
So how exactly are pirates thieves Frogboy? Do you subscribe that every downloaded copy is a lost sale? Do you not consider for a second that the people downloading games maybe can’t afford them (so they wouldn’t buy it anyway) but they still do free word-of-mouth publicity for you? Do you consider that perhaps for others the quality of the game does not validate the price but they may still buy it just because they are pirates?
I used to think that Stardock was enlightened enough to figure out that file-sharing is caring, that pirates are, as gamers, on their side. But this latest post makes me reconsider. I’ve become a big supporter of Stardock just because of what (I assumed) their take on Piracy was and as a result I’ve bought every game I wanted to play from them. I will reconsider that as well.
Unveiling the Atheist Resources, a project which hopes to provide a valuable centralized resource to the Atheosphere. By Freethinkers, for Freethinkers.
Would you like to have a place where all information relevant to Atheist Blogging would be gathered and constantly updated for your benefit? Well for the last few months ((Well, more like days of actual work, as the whole thing stayed basically idle for most of its existence)) me and Larro have been working exactly on such project to provide some help for Atheists, especially the bloggers but not excluding those who take a more passive look.
I conceived the idea once I noticed the large number of resources, ideas and tips that existed and the many ways that bloggers had put them to user. For example, the simple concept of a blogroll had allowed the Atheist Blogroll to exist, from which many other stuff could be based on such as a search engine in atheist blogs or optimized reading lists. Furthermore, many atheists were blogging about ways to use the various tools online, such as Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the like.
But all this information was dispersed and difficult to find, especially for people who were just joinging the game. So it would be a great idea to have a centralized place where all such information would be gathered and through crowdsourcing improved over time to be as comprehensive as possible.
At the moment, this project is still in very early infancy and up to now it’s been mostly me and Larro who’ve been adding to it. I’ve been concentrating on the Toolkit while Larro on the Blog Directory (and the site layout). The former is to allow people to discover useful stuff for their sites while the later is to add a bit of self-management to the Atheist Blogroll and easy updating.
The project is based on the excellent DocuWiki software with a theme that approximates the Wikipedia one (I guess to make the whole thing more familiar. The wiki format should allow us to easily add, remove and update information without fear of losing it and without having to go through a difficult approval process. Everyone is welcome to join.
Of course, this won’t go anywhere fast with only just 2 people on it, so I think it’s about time that I put out the word on the Atheosphere and invite y’all to join. Strangely I’m not the first to mention this as the Jewmanist somehow discovered its existence early and blogged about it already. Unfortunately this didn’t elicit much of a response.
So what is the current functionality? Well of course it’s a wiki so you’ll be able to quickly add and edit anything. I’ve also enabled pingback functionality which means that when the AR links to a blog, it will appear (if this functionality exists – yes, I’m looking at you Blogspot) and when a blog links tot he AR, this will appear on the site as well. This way if someone writes on a topic, say, Technorati, and links to the AR, theit entry will show on the Technorati page for people looking for this information to follow.
Then there’s tags, which is something I’m hoping might become useful for sites listed on the Blogroll. Through them, one should be able to see which Atheist Blogs write about a particular subject and visit them. Along with all the information that should be present on each Blog’s listing, this should enable people to find Atheist bloggers with similar interests easily.
And that’s just the begginging. I’m hoping that with all these brillliant Freethinkers out there, we can make this something unique and useful. So I hope to see you all there.
My site has recently been trying to emulate a yo-yo. Apologies to everyone who’s been trying to access it and seeing either 404 errors or Internal Server Errors. Believe me, I’m more annoyed than you are by this.
This is a really tricky issue. I wanted to blame my host but I don’t think they are the cause. Something is corrupting one of my database tables which ends up causing php5 processes to hang and eventually consume all my RAM. I don’t know what it is and it’s not easy to find, particularly since I’m without internet at home and have to troubleshoot from work. That means no ssh terminal access and only a web-based ftp access and the php webadmin. Fortunately they were enough for the restore.
I am nevertheless getting mighty pissed off from all of this, particularly since this is not something easy to troubleshoot. I was lucky to get a quick reply to my question on the Worpdress fora but I haven’t received any more help on this. For some reason I suspect Intense Debate as it the one with the most common connections to the DB. Particularly since after disabling it and repairing the tables, the problem mostly went away. I was about the write a very exasperated support ticket to them but I wasn’t very sure so I left it for a bit.
I fully expect this to happen again soon and hopefully I’ll have a better idea where to look then (and hopefully some ssh access).
I just realized I missed the Ska-P concert in germany after their recent reunion. Now I find out that in mid-May they’re going to be in Greece and specifically in my home city Thessaloniki. To say that I’d like to see them live would be an understatement. Judging by how awesome and dancealicious their songs are by default, their live shows must be amazing fun.
[youtube]4nmO54Tf5vM[/youtube]
So the title of this article goes to the fact that I will lose this concert unless I pull a brilliant plan to somehow be in Greece at this particular Fortunately for me, We (me and the gf) already plan to be there at around this time but we were planning for around June. I need to simply make pull it back a bit.
[youtube]Q-Iv7JqlTjw[/youtube]
I was totally hooked to Ska-P from a colleague a few years ago and I’ve become a big fan since then. By the time I learned about them they had already disbanded but in 2008 they rejoined and brought a new album (which I need to acquire post-haste). Not only do they make awesome music – combining folk, metal and punk in a wonderful mix of Ska – but they also have a very uplifting tone and lyrics centered around liberty, anti-capitalism and racism. Just perfect.
[youtube]cZhl8HU2WQI[/youtube]
So um, yeah. Other than a blatant opportunity for me to post some vids of them in an attempt to hook y’all. This was simply an exclamation on the fact that I may lose my last chance to see them. This must not be.
Intense Debate Comments makes a significant step towards outpacing the competition. Introducing Plugins
Just in case you missed it, Intense Debate just announced that their plugin system has gone live (most likely in direct response to their competitor’s major announcement). This is the kind of news that I’ve been waiting for a while now and I’m very glad this had now been released. At the moment there are not many plugins available, only integrated seesmic and youtube comments, smilies and polls. Of all these, I’m mostly interested in the smilies right now but that’s not the important thing anyway.
The important thing is that now the functionality of IDC can be improved at the whims of the community in any direction people wish to take it. No more do people need to beg the developers to implement the latest shiny feature, they can simply code it themselves. And thus the doors of innovation are now open wide.
It’s impossible to avoid seeing the hand of Automattic behind this latest release (or as I like to call it, the feature to end all features) as they are the makers of the most popular WordPress blogging platform who’s greatest power is certainly the ability for anyone to make plugins for it. Allowing users to extend the functionality of the program on their own is the single most important capability most modern succesful software have had. From Firefox, to WordPress and now, to Intense Debate.
So now all that’s left to do if for us to add the kind of features we want to have. There’s already quite a few wordpress plugins to extend the comment functionality which could not really work with an outsourced system and all those developers finally have a way to port their functionality natively.
Hopefully, this should free the hands of the IDC developers from getting tied into an feature war and let them focus on improving the stability of the platform and squashing many of the long outstanding bugs.
Imho, IDC has just pulled the rug out of the competition. I’m now very excited on what the future will bring and so should you..What do you mean you don’t have Intense Debate installed? What are you waiting for?
WARNING: There seems to be a conflict with the prototype javascript library (which is included with WordPress and can be activated through various plugins). If after activating the plugins for your blog you are not auto-logged in and your threading buttons stop working, this is probably the reason. Disable the plugins and monitor the support topic for updates. UPDATE: 2 hours later, and this bug is squashed. Activate at will. Now that’s some quick support 🙂
The site got compromised yet again. This time through a cross-site exploit. More aggravation follows. Some more information about what happened is discussed.
Has anyone smeared honey all over my site while I wasn’t looking? Once again I find out the Division by Zer0 has been compromised and spam links are being inserted invisible into my content. And that’s only 10 days after the last time. Argh!
This time I didn’t discover it through a google search but rather when someone from NoState.com contacted me through IM to let me know. This time the spam links were not hidden from the normal source but rather simply invisible in the normal page. This at least makes them much easier to find out and know when you’ve removed them. Nevertheless, this always feels like a very nasty violation every time it happens.
However the exploit was better hidden this time. It wasn’t just a few files hidden in my subdirectories but rather code inserted in my actual wordpress and theme files. This seemed to have been done through some kind of xss exploit but I have no idea how it managed it as I’m running the lastest WP version. Fortunately Adrian was good enough to point out a wordpress support thread for my exact issue which helped me locate and rip out the source of the spam quickly. This is why it pays to microblog your aggravation I guess 🙂
Btw, I also noticed that the previous malicious cache.php file had reappeared in my wp-content folder. This time I saved a copy before deleting it and now you can all see what kind of crap they put in your server. Notice the quite humorous note telling you that “modified republishing is restricted”. Or what? Are they going to take you to court?
At least this later crack forced me to finally go ahead and lockdown my site even more. Now the site root, wp-content and my theme directory are read-only from my user as well. Let’s hope this doesn’t create any issues. Unfortunately I cannot make the plugin directory read only as very often they need to write in there as well but I don’t think this was done through a plugin so I think I’m good.I’ve also finally changed the prefix for all my database tables to avoid any zero-day exploits which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
I also tried to install one logging plugin I saw mentioned in the wordpress forum but unfortunately it didn’t work for me. What would be really great however is a way to monitor all your site files for changes and whenever any file is modified or added, an email would be dispatched to the admin. Sure, you might get notifications for when you upload a new plugin or add new images through wordpress’ builtin function but you could easily ignore those. But when you see a change in your index.php that you didn’t initiate, then certainly something needs to be checked.
On a more positive note, I’ve gone ahead and integrated with Google’s Friend Connect. You can probably see it already on my sidebar where you can add yourself as a “member” of the site, whatever that is. I used to have Facebook but that requires you to add a FB application which not everyone cares to do. Everyone and their mother has a a google account by now however so hopefully this may give me a better idea of how many people like the site enough to register themselves.
But I swear, if I get compromised again, I’m going for a complete wipe and reinstall. It can only mean that I’ve got a trojan that won’t stop making my life difficult.
Close
Ad-blocker not detected
Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Learn more.
After converting the AFAQ to an ebook format, I’ve thought I might as well release some of the other stuff I’ve converted for my personal use. One of them is Studies in Mutualist Political Economy which I’ve been reading lately. Like the AFAQ, I’ll provide you below with a few popular versions for ebooks along with the master copy which you can use to create your own versions.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=980)
