Ok, nobody took my on my Dreamhost invitations offer so I might as well throw them out there for anyone who might be interested.
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So feel free to take them and register for Dreamhost. You’ll get 2 Tb of Space and 20 Tb of bandwidth per month. You will also get a nice price cut on 5 and 10 year plans.
You can only use them for the next 4 days unfortunately but If you do use on of them, just write it in the comments so that others are aware.
In the last few days I’ve been absolutely stunned to learn of the current insidious events going on in the USA. While the spotlight is grabbed by the huge financial disaster caused by the known shortfailings of Capitalism and greed, the US Government is slowly putting the pawns into position to initiate martial law and eventually a police state.
And what is the reaction in mainstream blogs and news sites? Basically nothing. Everyone is just pointing and laughing at Palin bumbling around or gnashing the teeth and pointing fingers for the bailout or simply doing business as usual.
And in the meantime you’re got the Army deplying in US grounds to “quell civil unrest and unruly individuals”.
You’ve got your own US Army. In your own country. Answering only to your “Decider”. Getting ready to Quellyou!
You should be marching in the streets right gawddamn now and asking for Bush’s head on a plate. Where’s your anger? Where’s your freedom spirit? Where’s your outrage?!
You have none. You keep on going as if the world is not crumbling slowly around your ears. People don’t even care to ask “Why is the army in our borders? What Civil unrest are they talking about? Is there something that our police force cannot handle?” No. You just accept that they must know what they’re talking about. There must be some unrest where you need the army. You know which? The unrest that’s going to happen when the final piece of their dictatorship falls into place.
But it’s too fucking late for you now. If you people are still so asleep that even after you have standing army taking up positions you still don’t act, it is with great sadness that I conclude there is no hope.
If you’re one of the few who are worried, or more appropriately, scared shitless about what is going on and you can’t mobilize everyone to go on the street, then get the hell outa dodge. You can come to Europe and at least help us fight the creeping islamization.
One thing you must know. Nothing is going to happen when you rant and rave on reddit, alternet or any other site. They want you to do that because then you’re not doing anything else. Unless you take very immediate and drastic action to chimpeach then you won’t have the chance to peacefully avoid this. If they don’t cancel the elections while declaring martial law because of a “National Emergency”, they will steal the elections for McSame. They’ve done it before so they know if works because, hey, you just let it pass then anyway…
So, Dear U.S. Americans, you have now you last chance to put your freedom where your mouth is. I don’t think you will but I sure as hell hope you prove me wrong, for your own good.
One week to go for the the next CotG and I thought I’d remind you that we have a theme and the theme is: Impossibilities.
At the moment I have received 14 submissions which tells me that by the end of the week I may have quite a few of them. A few of them can even fit the theme but only unfortunately one was explicitly crafted for this carnival.
Come on people, we’re talking about religion here. There’s certainly enough ideas to go around. Haven’t you had enough about Politics? I know I’m sick and tired of reading about Palin in the Atheosphere. Yes she’s an incompetent Cretinist. We get i already.
But I digress.
So this post is basically a reminder for the theme of the 102nd CotG. Lets see how it turns out.
If there’s one thing that online services like this provide is a voice for all the people who’s opinions would never be presented in the traditional media. When those online services take our voices away because they just feel like it, I say that it’s time to move on. They already have a shaky relationship with Atheists but this should be the last straw for many of us.
Like so many things in life, they need us, we do not need them.
Without people using Youtube, it wouldn’t be the online power it is today. I can already foresee that many people will say that Youtube is what everyone is using and thus you don’t have a choice if you want audience. Well, like partisan politics, this is only in your head and it hurts you when you do not realise it. You do have a choice, you just have to use it.
At the moment, many users are protesting the latest ban by reposting the removed video. This is all well and good but, and I hope to be proved wrong, Google is too big, you made them too big. They don’t give a toss. Especially for a few dozen vocal atheists.
Do you want to protest? Take your ball and go home. Make a public statement and invite your subscribers to join you. If there’s anything Youtube is taking note, that is market share. If they were to lose 50k users overnight, they might stand up and take notice.
But where should one go? Well, there are of course dozens of youtube clones out there (many of them considerably better than) but that’s also a problem by itself, for who’s to say that tomorrow that service is not going to start banning your videos as well?
This is why I’m proposing you use something a bit different. Namely Vuze
Image via CrunchBase
What is Vuze
Once upon a time, there was a BiTtorrent client called Azureus. It was the best of the bunch. Eventually they decided that P2P can also serve as a great way to serve content without having the immense costs associated with hosting everything on your own server.
They became Vuze
Now you have a service where the content is not held by them but rather by everyone who is using it. They only handle the portal/library and that’s about it. When you publish something to Vuze, you get to keep it as does anyone else who has seen it.
Yes, Vuze does retain the right to remove content from the portal as well but looking from where they started, I believe they will not be as trigger happy as Youtube, plus if things get out of hand.
Other than that, there are a few other very solid benefits to using Vuze.
You are not limited to posting Videos. You can post any kind of file you wish.
You can upload at any quality you wish, at any size you wish, at any length you wish. No need to split in 10 minute segments.
Did I mention that Vuze is a full fledged BitTorrent application? That means that you don’t have to use Vuze only but can use, say, The Pirate Bay as well 😉
Friends and stuff but with quite a lot of extras. One of these extras is that you can share interesting torrents with your friends over a secure connection. I.e. torrents that you found in the aforementioned Pirate bay, or even your own homemade torrents for files you have on your disk.
It’s free software. This means that it’s more ethical and it gets very fast improvements. Plus whatever happens, it will never go away.
So there you have one proposal. I’m certain others will have other services that are good as well but I tend to always side with the ones who have Free Software roots. Better for everyone that way.
Youtube has dropped the ball on Atheist heads one too many times now and unless people take a definite action, they’ll just keep doing it, similar to politicians who get elected no matter what.
And that’s my two cents on this.
UPDATE: It seems youtube has reinstated the Video. Apparently it was organised muslim activists who flagged the video for removal. If that is indeed the case, then Youtube needs to, at the least, give a warning to the ones that flagged it and, my personal suggestion would be to dissalow flagging from those people in the future. They’ve already proved that they abuse the system for their own agendas.
I don’t know if anyone from Dreamhost noticed my recent promotion for Self-hosting WordPress, but I’ve just been handed special 5 promotional codes to give around and boy are they a doozy.
You will get four (4) times the normal disk and bandwidth!
If you choose our five-year plan, you’ll get $150 off.
If you choose our ten-year plan, you’ll get $200 off.
Now, 4 times 500 is 2Tb of space. 2. T-e-r-r-a-b-y-t-e-s (I don’t get to say this word often enough) and quite a lot of bandwidth as well.
The only problem is that this is valid for 2 weeks only so I need to give these out quickly. If you were thinking of taking me up on my self-hosting proposal, then there’s no better time than now. Once this is gone, you can’t get this offer any other way, short of stumbling on someone who got this invite as well.
So step up. I don’t have anything else to do with these so I might as well give them out. If you’re interested just email me or leave a comment and I’ll give you the 12-digit code of your dreams (pun intended 😉 )
UPDATE: I just noticed that If you go and sign with Dreamhost now, you get unlimited bandwidth and space for life, just because it’s their birthday. You don’t even need my invites, unless you want to save the money that is. Hurry up. Only 30 places left…
Glenda Watson Hyatt is a severely disabled person (Cerebral Palsy) who has used blogging through WordPress to expand her social life and get an online voice. Simply WordPress has changed her life and for this she has crafted the following video ((h/t Internetakias)).
[youtube]ajqq9bHomn8[/youtube]
If a person who can only use the computer through her left thumb can find WordPress easy enough to use then certainly all of you can do it as well.
So I am going to be your next host for the Carnival of the Godless and I am planning to make it a bit more interesting than simply having a list of links. I was a bit disappointed on how the 100th version turned out so I’d like to make something more memorable, something like the Pulp Edition. Of course I can’t really make such good art to go along with ((And I wouldn’t say no if anyone wanted to help with that)) it but I will at least try to make it as memorable.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
1. It’s going to be thematic
The theme in this carnival will be something a bit fitting to this blog’s name: Impossibilities.
Submissions dealing with Absurdities, Oxymorons, Inanities and even horrible facepalms are all going to be given the limelight in the version of the CotG. That does not mean that anything not dealing with these will be rejected but any post that belongs to the theme will be immediately pushed to the top and will have more care given to it’s presentation
So if you have something ready on this subject, go right along and send it. If not, well now is the time to spend some effort to make a better edition 😉 If you site down for a bit and think about it, I’m certain you’ll have many ideas on this subject. But please, I know it’s tempting but don’t swamp me with Sarah Palin related submissions 😉
2. It’s going to be storytold
I really want to avoid just posting a simple collection of links with a very short description as is what seems to be happening in almost all recent CotGs. That’s just boring. Thus, I’m going to attempt and weave an actual story out of the submissions sent. This is why it’s doubtly helpful to have sumbissions that fit the theme, as such will be easier to weave into the story.
I already have a rought concept of how it’s going to go but the actual story will be decided by the kind of submissions I have to work with. Stories that don’t fit the theme, I will try to use as well but I may end up just posting them as links at the end if I can’t see a way to include them.
I’ve already started getting submissions which is something I didn’t expect. I was hoping I had the time to write this post before people started sending. Due to this, feel free to send a replacement post if you have something more fitting to the theme but I would also ask you to spread the word a bit so that more people are aware of this.
Let’s hope this works out. Cheers for impossibilities.
Last.fm is one of the top, if not the best music service out there and it’s something I’ve been using for quite a while now. While last.fm includes things like groups, friends, forums and other aspects of a social network, your activities in these was never provided. In the latest version these activities (new friends, loved songs etc) were shown in the form of a little block in the sidebar but unfortunately there has been no way to grab that for use in Complexlife.
I knew there is a way to get these activities somehow as Friendfeed does show you when you love a track but having asked directly about it in the forum, I was told that getting this in a feed was just not an option.
Fortunately web-mastered stepped up and created a yahoo pipe which grabs the last.fm latest activities API and returns it as a feed. Very useful but unfrotunately I noticed that it wasn’t exactly in the format I needed. If I used that in Complexlife then you would only see the title (a generic “New activity from <username>”) and having no date info in the feed, b0rked the sort by date of Simplepie.
Thus I had to modify the pipe in a way that
Made the content become the title of the post (removing any html which might break Complexlife)
Provide the date in the RSS so that the item can be sorted
Creating the title
It took me a while to figure it out, but making the content become the title was the easiest part of it all. Since yahoo pipes provides a handy renaming function, all I needed to do is tell it to rename the content as the title
Renaming the content as Title
The first part copies the whole content as the date field. I will later use this get the date. The second part renames the current content to the title so that it is displayed in whole. If I didn’t do it, I would get only part of the content displayed with elipsis after 30 characters or so.
Now I need to remove all the html code the activity stream has in. As it includes links to my profile as well as to artists and tracks, this would break the link complexlife puts for each row. The only way to remove the unecessary parts is of course through regular expressions and yahoo pipes gives exactly that function.
Removing the unnecessary parts from the content
This part actually goes before the renaming/copying as I remove various parts I also don’t need from the date field. Thus when I copy, I save duplicating the work.
The most interesting part is the previous the last field, wherein I tell it to remove all html tags (anything between < and >) and all their settings (i.e. target=”_blank”). Thus I’m left with the title in plain text.
Creating the date
This was a more tricky part as not only does the last.fm activity stream API consider it a good idea to put the date on the content but it also puts it in as a relevant entry to the current date.
Putting the date in the correct field was the easy part as all I needed to do was copy the content in the date field and remove everything except the date. As right before the date there was a fullstop, it was fairly simple to use another regex to delete anything until the last fullstop
With a little regex magic, anything except the date is gone
The more difficult part was to make the relevant fuzzy date to become something that is expected to be in an RSS feed, which is something very specific in time and format. Fortunately, I noticed that there is a specific module that does exactly that: Date builder. How convenient.
Unfortunately this module accepts only strings so I could not really parse my whole feed through it unless I had a loop. Oh wait…
With a loop I can make all date items in the correct format
Sweetness. Unfortunately one problem remains which is that because the date provided is always fuzzy, I end up getting a rolling date for the item each time the pipe is run. For example, an item which has a date of “one month ago” today will point to Aug 28, tomorrow on Aug 29 etc. There’s not much I can do about it other than wait until (and if) last.fm deems it worthy to give us a proper feed.
And now my new shiny feed is in exactly the format I need to have for Complexlife to use it. A little hacking later and version 0.9.8 is ready to go. The last.fm activity stream is finally lifestreamable 🙂
After the recent exciting events I thought it is time to attempt and convince the guys behind Intense Debate to open up their code to the Free Software community and as a result reap all the known benefits such an action will produce.
Image by pt via Flickr
After the recent exciting events I thought it is time to attempt and convince the guys behind Intense Debate to open up their code to the Free Software community and as a result reap all the known benefits such an action will produce.
I’ve been thinking of proposing something like this to them for a while but with all the recent alpha testing, convention-going and all the rest they were doing, I thought it might just fall through the cracks. However their acquisition from Automattic embolded me to go ahead and propose it.
I absolutely think that such a move will be an extreme success, both in terms of popularity and development. Currently they are being outfeatured by their main competitor, Disqus who has already managed to rollout the version 2 of their wordpress plugin and also have various other necessary features like trackbacks (including trackback agnostic platforms like blogger).
Opening the source will also allow all the ideas that are currently waiting on the backburner to be worked on by anyone interested to have them. IDC can then just keep control of the commits and with two or three dedicated developers totally outrun everyone else.
There are of course more benefits other than fast development. For one, they will finally be able to put their wordpress plugin in the Plugin Codex so that we can get automatic upgrades. It will also open up the system to people with very specific needs who cannot currently use it. Those people could simply install it locally and tweak it for their own uses without taking up valuable support time.
So if you like this idea, go ahead and vote it up. All you need is a Get Satisfaction account and to click a button. Show them how popular this will be.
I would also love to hear any other ways you can think of that liberating the source will help. We can then use those as extra reasons for them to switch. Of course, if you have reasons why this would not be a good idea, also speak up. Lets discuss it 😉
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