The new EricMartindale.com is an experiment in data aggregation, and might have a few bugs. Feel free to explore, and then provide feedback directly to @martindale.
New video to promote The All About Forensic Psychology website. I originally built the the website as a student resource for an undergraduate course in forensic psychology I wrote and delivered.
Highlights on the website include:
A detailed and clear account of what forensic psychology actually is. Important because of the way the subject has been distorted, sensationalised and inaccurately presented in books, films and on TV. See following link.
A series of information pages on criminal profiling. A fascinating subject to learn about in iteslf but also important to know of its place within forensic psychology; for example is criminal profiling a realistic career goal? See following link.
Free full-text articles. A wonderful collection of publications including a special "Inside the Criminal Mind" collection showcasing all the major articles written by members of the Behavioral Science Units, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, at the FBI Academy. See following link.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
New video to promote The All About Forensic Psychology website. I originally built the the website as a student resource for an undergraduate course in forensic psychology I wrote and delivered.
Highlights on the website include:
A detailed and clear account of what forensic psychology actually is. Important because of the way the subject has been distorted, sensationalised and inaccurately presented in books, films and on TV. See following link.
A series of information pages on criminal profiling. A fascinating subject to learn about in iteslf but also important to know of its place within forensic psychology; for example is criminal profiling a realistic career goal? See following link.
Free full-text articles. A wonderful collection of publications including a special "Inside the Criminal Mind" collection showcasing all the major articles written by members of the Behavioral Science Units, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, at the FBI Academy. See following link.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
October 16th is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women's achievements in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Ada Lovelace is heralded as the first computer programmer, writing programs (calculating Bernoulli Numbers) for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine as early as 1843 [1]. One of the most prominent mathematicians at the time, August de Morgan, had impressive things to say about her abilities, “which would require all the strength of a man's constitution to bear” [2], and Babbage himself highlighted her prowess over other contemporaries to Faraday, the legendary English scientist, in a succinct personal correspondence [3]. I've included a transcription of her work [4], showing just how thorough and detailed she was.
It's important to take a moment to note some of the other women who have made significant contributions to the advancement of society over the years. One of my favorites is Marie Curie, seen in this photo as the only women to appear alongside the intellectual powerhouse that assembled for the Solvay Conference in 1927. Seated between physicists Planck and Lorentz, she is in good company along with the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg.
Curie remains, to this day, the only person to have ever won a Nobel Prize in multiple sciences. [5]
Here are a couple other notable women that deserve recognition: - Gertrude Belle Elion (biochemist): Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988. [6] Gertrude invented an incredible swathe of drugs using innovative new research methods [7], including the first treatment for leukemia. [8] - Jane Goodall (primatologist): outstanding achievement in anthropology through her incredible 45-year field study of wild chimpanzees [9] which has wildly changed the school of thought in regards to man's connection to primates. Goodall has been a role model of mine since I first encountered her and her work as a child reading National Geographic Magazine.
Instead of letting today pass only remembering one woman's contributions, take a moment to share your story and your female role model. [10]
So, what women do you revere in science, technology, engineering, or maths?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
October 16th is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women's achievements in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Ada Lovelace is heralded as the first computer programmer, writing programs (calculating Bernoulli Numbers) for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine as early as 1843 [1]. One of the most prominent mathematicians at the time, August de Morgan, had impressive things to say about her abilities, “which would require all the strength of a man's constitution to bear” [2], and Babbage himself highlighted her prowess over other contemporaries to Faraday, the legendary English scientist, in a succinct personal correspondence [3]. I've included a transcription of her work [4], showing just how thorough and detailed she was.
It's important to take a moment to note some of the other women who have made significant contributions to the advancement of society over the years. One of my favorites is Marie Curie, seen in this photo as the only women to appear alongside the intellectual powerhouse that assembled for the Solvay Conference in 1927. Seated between physicists Planck and Lorentz, she is in good company along with the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg.
Curie remains, to this day, the only person to have ever won a Nobel Prize in multiple sciences. [5]
Here are a couple other notable women that deserve recognition: - Gertrude Belle Elion (biochemist): Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988. [6] Gertrude invented an incredible swathe of drugs using innovative new research methods [7], including the first treatment for leukemia. [8] - Jane Goodall (primatologist): outstanding achievement in anthropology through her incredible 45-year field study of wild chimpanzees [9] which has wildly changed the school of thought in regards to man's connection to primates. Goodall has been a role model of mine since I first encountered her and her work as a child reading National Geographic Magazine.
Instead of letting today pass only remembering one woman's contributions, take a moment to share your story and your female role model. [10]
So, what women do you revere in science, technology, engineering, or maths?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
October 16th is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women's achievements in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Ada Lovelace is heralded as the first computer programmer, writing programs (calculating Bernoulli Numbers) for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine as early as 1843 [1]. One of the most prominent mathematicians at the time, August de Morgan, had impressive things to say about her abilities, “which would require all the strength of a man's constitution to bear” [2], and Babbage himself highlighted her prowess over other contemporaries to Faraday, the legendary English scientist, in a succinct personal correspondence [3]. I've included a transcription of her work [4], showing just how thorough and detailed she was.
It's important to take a moment to note some of the other women who have made significant contributions to the advancement of society over the years. One of my favorites is Marie Curie, seen in this photo as the only women to appear alongside the intellectual powerhouse that assembled for the Solvay Conference in 1927. Seated between physicists Planck and Lorentz, she is in good company along with the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg.
Curie remains, to this day, the only person to have ever won a Nobel Prize in multiple sciences. [5]
Here are a couple other notable women that deserve recognition: - Gertrude Belle Elion (biochemist): Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988. [6] Gertrude invented an incredible swathe of drugs using innovative new research methods [7], including the first treatment for leukemia. [8] - Jane Goodall (primatologist): outstanding achievement in anthropology through her incredible 45-year field study of wild chimpanzees [9] which has wildly changed the school of thought in regards to man's connection to primates. Goodall has been a role model of mine since I first encountered her and her work as a child reading National Geographic Magazine.
Instead of letting today pass only remembering one woman's contributions, take a moment to share your story and your female role model. [10]
So, what women do you revere in science, technology, engineering, or maths?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
October 16th is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women's achievements in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Ada Lovelace is heralded as the first computer programmer, writing programs (calculating Bernoulli Numbers) for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine as early as 1843 [1]. One of the most prominent mathematicians at the time, August de Morgan, had impressive things to say about her abilities, “which would require all the strength of a man's constitution to bear” [2], and Babbage himself highlighted her prowess over other contemporaries to Faraday, the legendary English scientist, in a succinct personal correspondence [3]. I've included a transcription of her work [4], showing just how thorough and detailed she was.
It's important to take a moment to note some of the other women who have made significant contributions to the advancement of society over the years. One of my favorites is Marie Curie, seen in this photo as the only women to appear alongside the intellectual powerhouse that assembled for the Solvay Conference in 1927. Seated between physicists Planck and Lorentz, she is in good company along with the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg.
Curie remains, to this day, the only person to have ever won a Nobel Prize in multiple sciences. [5]
Here are a couple other notable women that deserve recognition: - Gertrude Belle Elion (biochemist): Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988. [6] Gertrude invented an incredible swathe of drugs using innovative new research methods [7], including the first treatment for leukemia. [8] - Jane Goodall (primatologist): outstanding achievement in anthropology through her incredible 45-year field study of wild chimpanzees [9] which has wildly changed the school of thought in regards to man's connection to primates. Goodall has been a role model of mine since I first encountered her and her work as a child reading National Geographic Magazine.
Instead of letting today pass only remembering one woman's contributions, take a moment to share your story and your female role model. [10]
So, what women do you revere in science, technology, engineering, or maths?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a really weird movie, and it really scared me. Not only is the concept nail-head-on, but I used to be called Jim Carrey, and some say I bear a striking resemblance to him in my expressions. Well... yeah. It's difficult to explain.
So what, I got over that. But then, just when I thought the worst was over, I was randomly Googling - the verb form of to search the google search engine - and then... BOOM! HEADSHOT!
Okay, I can handle someone from WW2 looking almost like myself - and the fact that he's a pilot, one of my dreams. Okay. I can handle that. And then...
http://www.artofcombat.com/instructors.htm : The training group (SOI) in Dallas was small and under the guidance of Eric Martindale (which promoted Ralph to 9th kyu), ....
I can handle a martial arts instructor being named Eric Martindale as well, a little odd, but then again, I've always been involved in martial arts, haven't I? Eric apparently promoted that guy to 9th kyu, right? So don't you have to be 10th kyu? So he's 1337 like that, right? ... And then...
And of course there's the soccer referee, or is he a player? I don't remember. He's another Eric Martindale. A little weird, too... but I've played soccer since the age of five. And then...
Holy crap, that IS me. For real. Only slightly unexpected at this point... after all of these STRANGE entries. Slightly. O_o ....
And then...
I've apparently lost myself on http://lostfriends.org - or is someone looking for me? Oh... that's what I meant to say. I haven't found myself there yet... but apparently Google did. And then...
I WAS on this page at some point... and this one is somewhat entertaining. Apparently, in Charlotte during some point about a year ago, someone named Eric Martindale died in a car accident. I believe I had four people come up to me that day and ask if I had died... I was about two hours north of charlotte at the time, and the "Eric Martindale" news had reached most parts of North Carolina and Virginia, and I got two phone calls, one from my mother - asking if I had died. .... ... ... ... .... And then...
I'm the president of a North Carolina rotary club. I've always been a fan of rotary engines... but this is ridiculous... WTFH? .... I'm becoming very frightened at this point... very frightened. I love rotary engines. That rotary club is two cities away. ... And then...
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
October 16th is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women's achievements in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Ada Lovelace is heralded as the first computer programmer, writing programs (calculating Bernoulli Numbers) for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine as early as 1843 [1]. One of the most prominent mathematicians at the time, August de Morgan, had impressive things to say about her abilities, “which would require all the strength of a man's constitution to bear” [2], and Babbage himself highlighted her prowess over other contemporaries to Faraday, the legendary English scientist, in a succinct personal correspondence [3]. I've included a transcription of her work [4], showing just how thorough and detailed she was.
It's important to take a moment to note some of the other women who have made significant contributions to the advancement of society over the years. One of my favorites is Marie Curie, seen in this photo as the only women to appear alongside the intellectual powerhouse that assembled for the Solvay Conference in 1927. Seated between physicists Planck and Lorentz, she is in good company along with the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg.
Curie remains, to this day, the only person to have ever won a Nobel Prize in multiple sciences. [5]
Here are a couple other notable women that deserve recognition:
- Gertrude Belle Elion (biochemist): Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988. [6] Gertrude invented an incredible swathe of drugs using innovative new research methods [7], including the first treatment for leukemia. [8]
- Jane Goodall (primatologist): outstanding achievement in anthropology through her incredible 45-year field study of wild chimpanzees [9] which has wildly changed the school of thought in regards to man's connection to primates. Goodall has been a role model of mine since I first encountered her and her work as a child reading National Geographic Magazine.
Instead of letting today pass only remembering one woman's contributions, take a moment to share your story and your female role model. [10]
So, what women do you revere in science, technology, engineering, or maths?
#AdaLovelaceDay #STEM
[1]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ada_and_the_First_Computer.pdf
[2]: http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/demorgan.gif
[3]: http://books.google.com/books?id=vKesSblgySgC&lpg=PA164&as_brr=0&pg=PA164#v=onepage&f=true
[4]: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
[5]: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/nobelprize_facts.html
[6]: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-autobio.html
[7]: Holloway, M. (1991) Profile: Gertrude Belle Elion – The Satisfaction of Delayed Gratification, Scientific American 265(4), 40-44.
[8]: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8325/83256-mercaptopurine.html
[9]: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0304/feature5/fulltext.html
[10]: http://directory.findingada.com/stories/
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
There's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, DMOZ. There have been many attempts to unseat the directory project from its position as the most authoritative listing resource, such as the Yahoo Directory. Many of these attempts have fallen by the wayside, as Rand Fiskin points out, but none have remained more controversial than DMOZ. More recently, Chris Crum's post on WebProNews about his lack of respect for DMOZ has stirred up a hornet's nest of DMOZ criticism, including a particular post claiming DMOZ is a waste of time.
I forwarded a lot of this on to Philip Nicolcev, known by username as "frug", who is the editor of several roleplay-oriented categories on DMOZ. He responded to me directly with a highly insightful email, and I was fortunate enough to receive his permission to share its contents.
I've been editing the pbp category at DMOZ for what... 4 years now? About that. This article is a big whiny complaint which misses the mark. They are both correct and sadly mistaken.
Yes, dmoz is outdated and yes, it fails because of attitude problems, but not silly allegations of 'corruption' or people who are bitter because they didn't get listed. We don't list everything, I don't list even half of the submissions I get, and anyone who has been an administrator or an editor for a similar type of project knows better than to take these kinds of complaints seriously.
One thing they say is definitely correct: Apply once carefully following their rules if you wish and then, as Will suggested, forget about them.
This is exactly the approach that should be modeled for any directory, regardless of its state or condition. When you are submitting a link to a directory, you are being offered the privilege to be listed as a resource by the owners and management of that directory. They are not obligated to list your link, let alone review it in a timely fashion--but this would be genuinely appreciated and would reflect on the directory's position as a "good" resource.
DMOZ is the primary source for Google's Directory, and you must respect the opinion of such a large and successful company. It's obvious that the idea behind an open directory like DMOZ is good, but where they fail is in execution. More on that later.
He continues:
That is what you should do. Apply once and forget about it, don't claim anybody is corrupt because whether you believe my opinion or not, there's no corruption. Nobody cares enough about dmoz anymore for it to be valuable for extortion. Don't be ridiculous. Furthermore if you were to speak to some of the senior editors you'd discover that they are pretty damn uptight, even obsessive.
The problems with dmoz are, in my opinion, twofold. First off, you have the dated trashy look of the website which is a relic of the 1990's. It's not user friendly, it doesn't entice anyone to go browsing, and it hasn't adapted or added features that would help people understand the structure of the directory or find what they're looking for. The editor forums still use phpBB2, and you should see the editing panel. You wouldn't believe how dated this stuff is. Frankly it has needed an overhaul for years now.
I largely agree with him. The phpBB team deprecated the phpBB2 branch at the beginning of this year, ending support for the outdated platform. AOL would do well to do a complete overhaul of the site's design now that "Web 2.0" has come and gone (and I could referencepostsallday on that) - and AOL has completely missed their opportunity to latch on and ride the wave.
Philip finishes his correspondance with the frightening truth that has been plaguing many post-Web2.0 sites and services:
The second problem, attitude, is partially the cause of the first problem. It's a stagnant atmosphere where nothing gets done and nobody gets listened to. They would rather leave a directory as a cluttered mess of garbage than risk breaking its structure by overhauling it. Fixing my category took me about two years before I had approval to restructure it, and I'm in a small niche category nobody pays much attention to. Since becoming an editor I have deleted about 60% of the outdated links listed. Had I not joined, they'd still be there cluttering things up with linkspam geocities pages from 10 years ago.
So yeah, dmoz is failing, but not because of corruption or because some guy didn't get what he wanted. And, honestly, if the author of this article was applying to dmoz just to 'test how fair it was' then I'm glad they rejected him. Somehow they made the right decision because he's wasting their time.
And that's the exact problem - the DMOZ community has completely stagnated, which has resulted in the puddle of goop that the directory has become. In my personal opinion, I think that AOL could do a lot better job at community management (all reputation management aside) by setting up a more rigid structure of responsibility. The editors need to be held responsible for a timely review specified by their superiors, and there needs to be cross-checking of the editor's work by other qualified editors.
All said and done, DMOZ needs some love if it's going to survive as anything more than a relic of trust and authority in the Web 2.0 bubble. As Philip points out, it has both good and bad traits and deserves further attention, but it needs to be attention in (and from) the right direction. The questions remain; where has AOL been? What can be done about the editors (or lack thereof)? How can DMOZ be improved?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
When did you create your first Google Account? During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years. It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.
You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1]. Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2]. I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.
I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox. It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
When did you create your first Google Account? During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years. It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.
You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1]. Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2]. I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.
I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox. It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
When did you create your first Google Account? During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years. It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.
You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1]. Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2]. I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.
I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox. It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've always loved Eve Online. It's a space MMO, with ridiculous levels of immersion. They tout that it's the world's largest game universe, and let me tell you - it's absolutely huge.
Character journaling is a great way to extend the world of a game and add more depth to both the character and the plot. Be careful that you don't fall victim to the inactivity that often plagues real journaling! Stick to it, and you'll reap the benefits of fleshing out your character and having a solid history of the thought processes involved.
P.S.: Google Reader is an amazing tool that lets you follow your favorite sites and their content without ever checking the page. You can check out my shared items list to see what sort of things I follow, but check out the official Google Reader page for more information.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
When did you create your first Google Account? During a conversation at the +LocalSense office today, I happened to go back and look for the oldest email I'd received in my Gmail account and it got me thinking about just how much data I've given Google over the years. It's incredible to think about a sense of scale now, especially considering that I have [as of this moment] 134,530 messages in Gmail alone -- that doesn't even consider all of Google's other services now tied to my Google Account.
You can quantify some portion of how much Google knows about you through the "Google Dashboard" [1]. Google also allows you to download [some] of your data with their data liberation tool [2]. I recommend doing this regularly, and making an effort to be aware of the amount, and value, of your data.
I received the first two emails in my Gmail inbox on 11/28/04. They were both from Google, and a few of the links don't work anymore. [3] Didn't anyone tell them that cool URIs don't change? [4] The attached photo is of the well-written introduction to Gmail, the second message in my inbox. It's fun to look back and think about the state of email at the time, and how innovative Gmail actually was.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I often get asked for my Skype address, sometimes in relation to business or casual conversation. I politely decline with some degree of hand-waving about my reasons, and suggest an alternative form of communication (typically either Google Talk or Google Hangouts, depending on the context—both are built right in to Gmail!). I'd like to outline some of the reasons why I've made the decision to avoid Skype, primarily so I have something to link to when someone asks me about it.
First and foremost, we don't really know what Skype actually does. The binary (the actual program you run on your computer) is obfuscated, so attempts at disassembling it [PDF] to verify some of its strange behavior and the information it is transmitting have so far come up with very little. This is an issue, because Skype produces encrypted traffic even when you are not actively using Skype. This means we can only speculate on what information Skype is collecting about you after you've so graciously chosen to install it, and perhaps more importantly who it is sending that information to.
When a Skype client is not in a call and is running on a machine with public IP address, it has on the average 4-8 active TCP connections and atleast one UDP connection.
While connecting to external IP addresses is normal for a server/client architecture and necessary for receiving notifications, the volume of traffic and number of connections is concerning, considering the compounding issues between Skype's peer-to-peer architecture [PDF] and the "reasonable level of detection accuracy" in snooping on voice calls in Skype [PDF], despite the [purportedly] encrypted nature of the Skype protocol.
Speaking in general terms, Skype is "black box" software which has undergone no public review despite very concerning observed behavior. When new Skype malware (like Skype IMBot, of which an analysis is available, or the more recent Skype account hijacking) is released, there are very few options to protect ourselves if we've got Skype installed. On Linux, tools like AppArmor and TOMOYO exist, but without the ability to easily view the source and understand the attack (per perhaps even fix it proactively, before it occurs) we are at the mercy of Skype's new maintainers to provide a timely resolution in a reactive approach.
If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.
— Richard Stallman
In conclusion, while Skype may be convenient, it presents a series of questions that must be asked and implications to be considered before choosing it over other chat, VoIP, and video chat solutions. I can only hope that more people consider these things before doing so.
Asides
Some of the other things I found interesting, more recently than the research I've linked in this post, include Skype's role in the Syrian conflict, in which a claim was made as follows:
A media activist in Idlib named Mohamed said a rebel informant working for the government was killed in Damascus six months ago after sending warnings to the Free Syrian Army on Skype.
“I saw this incident right in front of my eyes,” Mohamed said. “We put his info on Skype so he was arrested and killed.”
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
While marketing RolePlayGateway, one of the things we considered was the "virality" of our approach. Viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. We're going to guide you on the road to a truly viral campaign.
A successful viral push can be launched simply by following three simple rules.
Don't spend everything you have on a single campaign.
Don't rely entirely on one vehicle of viral marketing.
Be different from everyone else; stand out.
While we're not nearly viral enough, part of our success so far has been the evangelism of our passionate users. And there you have it, one of the most important keys to successful viral marketing:
Passion:
Users who are passionate about your service, your community, or your site. They will propagate, they will evangelize, and ultimately will generate more passionate users who will do the same thing for you. Dawn Anfusocalls these members Boomers - and it is important to not ignore them.
Make it easy for your users to share. Make it hard for them NOT to share. Add a feature on your site that encourages them to send an email to their friends about the service. Add blocks where they can copy and paste code straight to their social profiles on sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Jeanne Jennings wrote an amazing article on Optimizing the "E-mail This" Marketing Opportunity, and I'd recommend you read it and implement the things you learn from it.
Widgetize:
On that note, we arrive on one of our most powerful vehicles for viral marketing: Widgets. The list of sites that you can infect with widgets are endless. From iGoogle to individual sites, widgets encourage users to put your tool on their page. Be sure to incorporate other techniques here: Include encouragement to share it. Make it easy to post elsewhere and share.
One of the items that RolePlay Gateway could utilize to great success is the concept of game trailers. Many of the games on RPGateway are text-based, and have no real graphics. However, most of these games have amazing storylines, storylines which could be utilized to hitch audiences, or at least entertain them. Flash-based videos, or trailers, with pivotal content, captivating video and audio, and viral marketing elements such as "Email this!" or "Share This", would be an amazing leap forward. Take a look at how YouTube's video player works. Such trailers could even be uploaded to social networking sites, like YouTube and Google Video, and shared to millions of users with a touch of viral marketing magic.
Juice It Up:
Include your URL everywhere you go. Facebook, MySpace. Everywhere. This generates user authority, even if the site you are on has nothing at all to do with your target market. Cross sections are a beautiful thing, and even if you don't get a drop of link juice in comments, market saturation is a very important, yet delicate, part of viral marketing.
Maintain a presence on every social networking site you can sustain. Extend your campaign to all of them. Create social groups for each of these sites, and publicize them. The more targets you hit, just like investing, the less committed you are to that particular market. Your assets are distributed, and while the workload may be unfathomably difficult (keeping up with so many social networking sites sucks... that's why we have ProfileLinker), the potential for success is incredible.
Reward:
Another option is to provide tangible rewards for marketing. This can be in the form of prizes, such as in a contest, or to individual users. Incentives are very powerful, and drive many users to promote where they'd be otherwise apathetic. Things can be very simple, such as giving them tokens or credits, to very expensive, such as providing real cash per referral. This is probably the most effective, albeit expensive, method of encouraging users to infect others.
Don't Stop.
Don't set these actions in motion and then hope they work. Get involved. Comment on profiles. Reply to messages. Enhance your viral effect. Make it tangible. If users can see that there is a real person there, they will be a lot more enthusiastic and encouraged to participate, and your viral marketing campaign will be more successful.
Other Resources!!!Web Marketing Today has an amazing list of resource articles that are sure to help you build your campaign.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Including the Artificial Intelligence class that I and over 58,000 people have signed up for ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html ), Stanford is now offering 13 of their fall semester classes (including statements of accomplishments for those who complete them!) online, for free:
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Including the Artificial Intelligence class that I and over 58,000 people have signed up for ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html ), Stanford is now offering 13 of their fall semester classes (including statements of accomplishments for those who complete them!) online, for free:
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Including the Artificial Intelligence class that I and over 58,000 people have signed up for ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html ), Stanford is now offering 13 of their fall semester classes (including statements of accomplishments for those who complete them!) online, for free:
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
This is same Richard Feynman that amuses himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents. When he was working on the Manhattan project.
Come to think of it, they is this childlike element in great scientist. They think of things that would be considered un-adult by passive societal norms. They think different and importantly, they enjoy what they do. This is same quality we find in true hackers.
Check out this URL to one of Y Combinator's, Paul Graham's essay in which he considers Richard Feynman, a true and one of the early hackers. http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Including the Artificial Intelligence class that I and over 58,000 people have signed up for ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html ), Stanford is now offering 13 of their fall semester classes (including statements of accomplishments for those who complete them!) online, for free:
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Alright, so MIT has this #physics professor named Walter Lewin [1]. He teaches (among other things) Classical Mechanics (lectures, slides, and notes all available on OCW [2]) and he appears to be a chalkboard wizard. ♪♫
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Alright, so MIT has this #physics professor named Walter Lewin [1]. He teaches (among other things) Classical Mechanics (lectures, slides, and notes all available on OCW [2]) and he appears to be a chalkboard wizard. ♪♫
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Alright, so MIT has this #physics professor named Walter Lewin [1]. He teaches (among other things) Classical Mechanics (lectures, slides, and notes all available on OCW [2]) and he appears to be a chalkboard wizard. ♪♫
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Alright, so MIT has this #physics professor named Walter Lewin [1]. He teaches (among other things) Classical Mechanics (lectures, slides, and notes all available on OCW [2]) and he appears to be a chalkboard wizard. ♪♫
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Venezuela would need to transport the gold in several trips, traders said, since the high value of gold means it would be impossible to insure a single aircraft carrying 211 tonnes. It could take about 40 shipments to move the gold back to Caracas, traders estimated.
“It’s going to be quite a task. Logistically, I’m not sure if the central bank realises the magnitude of the task ahead of them,” said one senior gold banker.
So the challenge is this: how can Venezuela safely retrieve 211 tons of gold from its European stores? What solutions can you come up with using lateral analysis?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
So, entirely not in light of any recent events, I was integrating the chat rules that Vexar wrote into RolePlayGateway's Rules, and I was looking for some examples of forum etiquette that other forums use. In searching, I found this perfectly humorous video:
(I found it on Neil Boortz's website, but since headed over to videojug to get the original. PS, Neil? You're awesome.)
That was probably the best one I found, above and beyond the video I came across that seemed geared towards the Steam forum community, which was a bit too NSFW to actually embed here on my blog. If you'd like, you can go check out posting a new thread on AlbinoBlackSheep.
I'm admin on several online forums, and I'm a moderator on many more; not counting the countless other communities where I'm an active member. I was pretty proud of the rules I put together on Gateway, and I think they're clean, simple, and easy to follow. No one likes being bombarded and tacked down by rules, so I try to keep them as simple as possible. What do you think of them?
How do you manage forum users and set rules? I know Martin Reed has some good tips on forum rules, and there are many others out there that learned a lot from running forums. The best thing that we can do is learn from others, and gather experience on how to handle these issues. What is your approach to forum etiquette?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've been building a scraper using PHP5 and the newly added XPath functionality. The idea here, as an exercise in programming, is to scrape complete records from Google Maps, including name, address, and phone number.
Here's a snippet of what I've been trying to do. This probably isn't the best approach, but I can't quite figure out how to pull a child of a resulting element, PHP is forever returning an error when I try to use firstchild.
//start our result counter $i = 0; //try setting higher than 1000 while ($i < 1000) { //show status so we don't get lost echo "Currently extracting data from records ".$i." through ".($i + 10)."...";
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.
The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.
There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.
There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.
I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.
The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.
There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.
There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.
I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.
The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.
There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.
There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.
I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Please see my post regarding Capitalism versus Statism [1], watch the video from Anonymous [2], and take a look at the non-partisan nature of these protests [3]. Don't just look at my links, go out and do the research yourself.
The #OccupyWallStreet movement appears to be spreading like wildfire across the country. San Francisco [4], Washington D.C. [5], Nashville [6], Portland [7], and New Orleans [8] all had organized and peaceful protests today and yesterday consisting of thousands of people. Other protests are rapidly forming around the nation [9], numbering at 895 different cities at the time of this post.
There's something very real, visceral, and most importantly democratic about how we're using the Internet to show a ground-up perspective of what is happening at these protests. There's nothing like seeing people like +Michael Mozart on the ground in New York, streaming live video of the protests, or +Rob Salzman sharing a steady stream of photos of the thousands of protesters in Portland directly to the internet. It's getting more and more difficult to trust anything but an individual who is on the ground, experiencing and documenting things first hand.
There is a major difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants", even at the chemical level [10]. We're entering a time where the people who've grown up with practically ubiquitous Internet access are becoming comfortable with adulthood and asserting their beliefs and opinions. This will have major and far-reaching implications at all levels of the human condition -- and I think we're only beginning to see the manifestation of this paradigm shift.
I'll be at the protest at Moore Square here in Raleigh, NC on Sunday at 5PM. Join if you'd like.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've been relying heavily on node.js this past year to provide a robust set of tools to solve the problems I encounter on a daily basis. I was pleased to see honorCipherOrder was added to node's TLS library in node.js v0.7.6, and released with node.js v0.8.0.
Late last year, security researcher Juliano Rizzo announced a new attack against the AES encryption used in the SSL/TLS transaction he dubbed BEAST. The details are interesting to those who care, but it turns out that we can mitigate this attack in node.js by enforcing honorCipherOrder on the server. Let's take a look.
If you have an HTTPS server that looks like this:
var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');
var options = {
key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem')
};
https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200);
res.end("hello world\n");
}).listen(443);
...you can now manage the cipher order by using the ciphers option. In the following code snippet we're going set the options for the above server to use Steve Caligo's cipher order, which prefers TLS 1.2 ciphers (which are not vulnerable to the BEAST attack) for clients that support TLS 1.2 but falls back to the RC4 ciphers on TLS 1.0 clients.[...]
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've been using Twitter since pretty early on (and long before @oprah), and I've found it to be a superbly convenient communication tool and notification service. Even though it's still very young on the web (Twitter was founded in March of 2006) It's been the home to great ideas like the #twitterdata proposal and the publicdomain book-via-tweets project. It's also an awesome reputation management platform, and can be used to both to provide effective customer service and help distribute news and updates about your business or product, which is exactly how I use it for my online roleplaying project.
But as with the rest of the social media world, Twitter can become very complex very quickly (but I still contend that there is no social media overload) and as a result, can be difficult to manage. As a result, I use several third-party tools to help me manage and gather information that helps me do my Twitter job much more efficiently and effectively.
Splitweet
[caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Splitweet allows you to post and monitor multiple Twitter accounts and brands."][/caption]
For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts (like some people who create a Twitter account for each roleplaying character they use), Splitweet is an absolute savior. This service allows you to tweet to multiple accounts at the same time, as well as combining the "stream" from each account into one page. A lot of desktop Twitter clients offer this kind of functionality, but where Splitweet truly excels is in its ability to track what it calls "brands" (more reputation management terms here): you can specify keywords and phrases that will appear in a separate feed, even if you do not follow those users. This gets us around the disastrous changes Twitter made to the @replies, and helps us keep up to date on any mentions of our site's name and any tweets relating to what it is that we do.
Sherflock
[caption id="attachment_195" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sherflock provides detailed statistics and summaries of Twitter users you are associated with."][/caption]
Sherflock is an absolutely awesome stat tracking machine that helps weed out the waves of spam that have been coming in since Twitter has gone mainstream. Sherflock gives a large number of statistics about each every account the either follows you or that you are following, and lets you sort and filter users based on these statistics.
Twitterfall
[caption id="attachment_194" align="alignnone" width="217" caption="Twitterfall offers a live stream of twitter updates on keywords that you specify."][/caption]
This tool allows you to specify any number of keywords that you wish to view on a live, moving stream of tweets. This is very useful if you are using a computer that allows you to "pin" a window on top (like Ubuntu Linux), or if you have a multiple-monitor rig, or even if you use multiple computers using the input-sharing app Synergy. You'll get a live feed of updates on any topic of your choice, which can even be updated and changed in real-time.
Using these three tools will help you maximize you Twitter performance and make the most of an already awesome service, preventing you from being inundated with the massive stream of messages that you're surely going to subscribe to.
What are your top three Twitter tools? Feel free to make a comment or write your own post, and I'll gladly append a link to this post to help everyone out!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
"Computational knowledge engine" WolframAlpha [1] just announced a new offering aiming at power users of their already amazing data science toolkit. I'm very impressed with the features they've chosen to add, including image processing and 3D plot export. Maybe I'm just being a huge nerd, but I think this'll be great for generating assets for presentations and demos. :)
I already use WolframAlpha for quickly plotting relationships in certain algorithms, or referencing certain datasets. It's great for checking on specs like display densities [2], calculating a transfer time (while automatically cross-referencing network specs!) [3] or even looking for obscure computing metrics [4]. It can help you calculate chemical reactions [5], or even plot a protein structure. [6]
My favorite day-to-day application is quick and dirty regression, for visualizing trends in my data [7], but it's still cool to play with n-gram decomposition [8].
Google hasn't even come close to this level of utility, even with innovations like Google Squared [9] (which was sadly shuttered last year... [10]) and the addition of function plotting to their universal search earlier this year [11]. They've been rolling in more and more tidbits like this, but I don't know that a company as large as Google can keep up with the delta, even with again-CEO +Larry Page's war on cruft [12] freeing up resources for projects like this.
It's priced at only $4.99 per month (or $2.99 for students, which I am not -- but I'll happily pay the premium at this price point!), right up my alley as building something comparable for local use (or even acquiring an existing software package) would be prohibitively expensive and moreover, complex.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I had a pleasant conversation with a Mac fanboi, this morning.
(08:51:01 AM) Linux User: Do Macs come with an SSH server by default? (08:51:12 AM) Mac User: bluh...huh? (08:51:19 AM) Mac User: just woke up (08:51:22 AM) Linux User: Oh, lol. (08:51:26 AM) Linux User: Good morning, sunshine. (08:51:30 AM) Mac User: lol (08:51:40 AM) Linux User: I've been at work for an hour. ;P (08:51:57 AM) Linux User: Anyways - does the default Mac have an SSH server? (08:51:57 AM) Mac User: now...what are you babbling about? (08:53:25 AM) Mac User: no, but ssh is supported for X11 apps (08:54:22 AM) Mac User: ....x11 being the x window environment in the Mac OS (08:54:47 AM) Linux User: Right. (08:55:22 AM) Linux User: So - X11 applications can SSH to other locations? (08:55:58 AM) Linux User: And - what's the Mac equivalent of a repository, and/or aptitude/apt-get/yum? (08:56:01 AM) Mac User: I really don't know, I haven't messed with it (08:56:12 AM) Mac User: what the fuck are those? (08:56:46 AM) Linux User: I can go to the command line here, and say... "apt-get install " and it'll download and install that program from the repository. (08:57:53 AM) Mac User: ...99% of Mac users don't go "Command-Line Commando" on their system.... (08:57:59 AM) Linux User: Also, if the program has any dependencies - it'll get those, too. (08:58:00 AM) Mac User: so...enjoy that.... (08:58:11 AM) Linux User: Oh, it has a GUI, too. (08:58:22 AM) Mac User: website? (08:59:02 AM) Linux User: It's a core component, it doesn't particularly have its own site. (08:59:22 AM) Linux User: Mac doesn't have an application finder and installer type thing? (08:59:24 AM) Mac User: of what? (08:59:27 AM) Mac User: no (08:59:30 AM) Linux User: Weird. (08:59:38 AM) Mac User: OMFG!!!! NO!!!! WHAT WILL I DO!???!?!? (08:59:51 AM) Linux User: I was trying to install openssh-server on a friend's mac... (08:59:57 AM) Mac User: y'all pc ppl always find the weirdest off-beat shit to pick at (09:00:05 AM) Linux User: Mac's are PCs to, ho. (09:00:16 AM) Linux User: Understand the word Personal Computer? (09:00:21 AM) Mac User: uh, by the definition "personal computer" only (09:00:38 AM) Linux User: PCs also don't have to run Microshaft. (09:00:43 AM) Mac User: but be it known that a pc is a pc and a Mac is a Mac (09:01:01 AM) Linux User: Considering Macs aren't "Macs" so much anymore, without the kooky PPC crap. (09:01:10 AM) Mac User: ? (09:01:42 AM) Linux User: They're regular PCs, now. I can install Windows on a Mac, I can install Plan9, MacOS, Linux. (09:01:52 AM) Linux User: They don't use PPC anymore, right? (09:02:05 AM) Mac User: you can't remove the Mac OS, though (09:02:10 AM) Linux User: ...want to bet? (09:02:13 AM) Mac User: yup (09:02:16 AM) Mac User: go ahead (09:02:20 AM) Linux User: LOL. (09:02:31 AM) Mac User: remove the Mac OS, and then lemme know what you plan to do (09:02:35 AM) Linux User: Anyways - MacBook pro - does it have more than one button? (09:02:45 AM) Mac User: FUCK NO!!!! (09:02:49 AM) Linux User: Alright, nevermind then. (09:02:58 AM) Mac User: now, shoo (09:02:59 AM) Linux User: I was going to buy one, because they're sexy. (09:03:01 AM) Mac User: go buy a dell (09:03:22 AM) Linux User: Dell is increasing their Linux support. (09:03:23 AM) Linux User: :) (09:05:19 AM) Mac User: that is to say that they now have some kind of linux support? (09:05:52 AM) Linux User: They've always had Linux support, but it's been somewhat hidden. (09:06:00 AM) Mac User: pphhhht (09:06:12 AM) Linux User: They're increasing client awareness of the option, now. (09:06:29 AM) Mac User: ya know, it really doesn't mean anything to me (09:07:11 AM) Linux User: I was considering purchasing a Macbook and installing Ubuntu on it, for my laptop. (09:07:25 AM) Mac User: I can run any other OS I want, should I happen to have a sudden drop in IQ, and my machine is pretty awesome.....so.... (09:07:55 AM) Mac User: why would you buy a Mac to run something you can run on a dell? (09:08:01 AM) Mac User: why? (09:08:04 AM) Linux User: Because Macs are sexier? (09:08:08 AM) Linux User: I don't want an ugly dell. (09:08:23 AM) Mac User: uh, yeah, and at least half the "sexier" is in the GUI (09:08:28 AM) Linux User: Not at all. (09:08:35 AM) Linux User: My GUI is 100% more teh sex. (09:08:45 AM) Mac User: ......wow (09:08:47 AM) Mac User: um (09:08:48 AM) Linux User: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzb3MSp82Vs (09:08:49 AM) Mac User: no (09:08:51 AM) Linux User: :) (09:09:05 AM) Linux User: You can't install Beryl or even Compiz in MacOS, can you? (09:09:46 AM) Mac User: ooh....pretty....gimmicks..... (09:10:08 AM) Linux User: Oh, is there an equivalent of workspaces in MacOS? (09:10:17 AM) Mac User: in Leopard, yeah (09:10:24 AM) Linux User: That's this next version, right? (09:10:30 AM) Mac User: yizzur (09:10:34 AM) Linux User: Awesome. (09:10:43 AM) Mac User: "Spaces" (09:10:49 AM) Linux User: Lol. (09:10:59 AM) Linux User: We Linux folk have had that for years. (09:11:00 AM) Mac User: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html (09:11:01 AM) Linux User: But anyways. (09:11:15 AM) Mac User: again....I don't care, and you're the only one who noticed (09:11:34 AM) Linux User: LOL. Awesome argument. :x (09:11:43 AM) Mac User: I don't argue anymore (09:12:03 AM) Mac User: If you've bigoted yourself into using PC (09:12:10 AM) Mac User: s, thats ur own fault (09:12:44 AM) Linux User: Well, if I can't "uninstall MacOS" - or heaven forbid, order it without MacOS, like I can order most PCs without any OS, for a significant price reduction... (09:12:49 AM) Linux User: It's not worth getting a Dell. (09:12:52 AM) Linux User: Or any "PC". (09:13:02 AM) Linux User: Or an Apple, for that matter. (09:13:08 AM) Linux User: Dell, I can do that with, though. (09:13:17 AM) Linux User: I share your Microsuck hatred. (09:13:18 AM) Linux User: I really do. (09:13:23 AM) Mac User: you make that sound like a feature (09:13:24 AM) Linux User: But I also hate MacOS with a passion. (09:13:32 AM) Mac User: for no reason (09:13:37 AM) Linux User: No, for full reason. (09:13:42 AM) Mac User: there's 2 sides of the fight, dude (09:13:46 AM) Linux User: It's a *nix OS, without all the good stuff. (09:13:48 AM) Mac User: Apple, and mico$ith (09:13:57 AM) Linux User: Then there's Linux. ;D (09:14:05 AM) Linux User: We're not part of the fight, we've already won. (09:14:06 AM) Mac User: you're out in the woods trying to be a nonconformist (09:14:22 AM) Linux User: Not at all, actually, I started using Linux because most of my friends were. (09:14:23 AM) Linux User: :/ (09:14:28 AM) Mac User: yeah, 2% market share. WOO HOO!!!! (09:14:36 AM) Linux User: 55% of the server share. :/ (09:14:48 AM) Linux User: I think it's above 60, actually? (09:14:58 AM) Mac User: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/ (09:15:01 AM) Mac User: > you (09:15:16 AM) Linux User: Why, exactly, would I run MacOS as a server? When I have Linux? (09:15:23 AM) Linux User: You don't have a package manager (apt) (09:15:40 AM) Linux User: apt-get install apache2 php mysql (09:15:42 AM) Linux User: Done. (09:15:48 AM) Mac User: you wouldn't (09:15:58 AM) Mac User: and that's your business (09:16:04 AM) Mac User: why are you talking to me again? (09:16:20 AM) Mac User has signed off.
And that was him blocking me. Mac people really do think differently.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Did you know that we have a feature that lets you share any topic with any of your friends?
We all know how addictive RPGateway is. Don't be alone in your addiction - there is strength in numbers! Share things with your friends and get them addicted, too.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
FIC has announced an on-sale date for its Neo1973, expected to be the first low-cost, high-volume phone with a user-modifiable Linux-based operating system. Additionally, the OpenMoko project building open-source software for the phone has published a wealth of technical resources.
See the link for more information. This is a huge step towards my dream phone.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
There's been a lot of talk about how Squidoo is getting punished because of how they are getting used by spammers. The idea there was to go in, create something called a "lense" that is relevant to something about your niche, and then do your marketing thing there.
Well, I just ran into "a new service from Amazon. It appears to let you create your own list and present it to the social community. I'm definitely thinking about using it before the Googledance makes it another cesspool.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've recovered a VERY old backup of GWing's index pages... and I don't think I have any better ones.
I'm very proud of Fletcher, mainly because it's so simple, yet so functional. I've not had any problems with it, and I seem to have everything modded perfectly for the uses it is put to.
Wow, I had intended to sleep at about 11:00, but a couple of friends came over. They left at 11:30. Yet here I am at 12:49 AM, sitting alone, still fiddling with HTML. Is there something wrong with me, or is this normal?
I'm also looking down at my signature for Gmail, which is what I'm using to write this entry right now. I thought at first that I enjoyed flaunting my IT-Professional-ism, but then I realized that I'm just too damned lazy to go down and delete it. Of course, my ultimate realization is that I'm still sitting here typing about absolutely nothing. -- Eric Martindale IT Professional Admin of GWing.net
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I just invested in $500 worth of targeted advertising for GWing Roleplay. So, what's the total impact upon my wallet?
A grand $5 in activation fees.
Big shoutouts to Computers.net for pointing this out. I was thinking of organizing a group of friends to throw multiple instances of these offers into advertising for GWing, but I realized that it would be difficult to target the advertising properly, as I found it rather complicated to create my own template of keywords and negative keywords to match the optimal result for what we desire in our community. If you sign up for these offers, be sure to carefully monitor your expenses! The billing is most likely set to recurring, and will continue to charge your credit card after your account balance has been used.
Alternately, I woke this morning to find DoesMyGeek's New Podcast, and was greeted by a shoutout and a link over the air to yours truly, and GWing Roleplay. What an amazing podcast, talking about the classic combination, roleplay and beer. Here's to you guys. ;)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Between work, my social life, and training, I play a game called EVE Online. It's the first game I've ever shelled out a monthly fee for, and it's well worth it. I came across this fan-made video for one of the in-game factions on CrazyKinux's blog.
Full screen this and play it in HD, while keeping in mind that this is made entirely of recorded gameplay video.
I'm the director of a group of players (called a "Corporation" as opposed to "Guild" in other MMORPGs), and if you're interested in playing with me, shoot me a line or message me in game as "Baeryn". You'll never find a game so perfect.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Here's a fun little bookmarklet that I use from time to time. It selects every available element on a webpage and changes it to a random color at an interval.
Click it to see a sample, or click and drag it to your bookmarks bar for use on other sites.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
250 GB 5400 RPM SATA II (I considered a bigger hard drive, but I have a NAS at the house and honestly plan on taking advantages of synchronized OSes like ChromeOS in the very near future, so I decided against it)
So far, I'm absolutely lovin' it. The hardware is very clean and Apple-like, with no disgusting third-party stickers plastered all over the thing. There's a System76 logo sticker on the back, which I could easily remove with some isopropyl if I so chose. Part of System76's sales pitch is pre-built Ubuntu boxes (which is what sold me, to be honest), so it came with Ubuntu 10.04, my day-to-day operating system of choice (especially since Backtrack makes things oh-so-awesome.)
I do have some minor complaints:
I had a dead pixel on my LCD. They won't replace it unless "there are more than 6 dead pixels. :(
As a result of the hinge design, the screen won't fold back more than ~35°. A bit of a pain in specific use scenarios.
A lack of one-button volume controls. The volume controls are only available through function keys, sadly. Some buttons on the top right for volume up, down, and mute would make this already awesome laptop perfect.
I don't know how much control System76 has over these hardware-design issues, but fixing them would seal the deal on any of my future purchases. ;)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
If you notice, I currently display my Foursquare badges over in the right hand side. I'm not sure about how long I'll display them specifically, so here's a screenshot:
I recently received an email inquiring about how I accomplished this. Well, since I use Chyrp, here's how I did it:
In includes/controller/Main.php, add the following, somewhere around line 715 (immediately after $this->context["sql_queries"] =& SQL::current()->queries;):
// BEGIN Foursquare Badges
$cURL = curl_init();
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.foursquare.com/v1/user.json?badges=1");
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "your@email.com:your_password_here");
$strPage = curl_exec($cURL);
curl_close($cURL);
$foursquare = json_decode($strPage);
$badges = $foursquare->user->badges;
foreach ($badges as $badge) {
$this->context['foursquare_badges'] .= '<img src="'.$badge->icon.'" title="'.$badge->description.'" />';
} // END Foursquare Badges
In themes/your_theme_name/content/sidebar.twig, wherever you want to display your foursquare tags, simply add:
<div>
<h1>Foursquare Badges</h1>
$foursquare_badges
</div></code>
You can display this wherever you like, in any part of your Chyrp template.
Be aware that this requires PHP's CURL module. I encourage you to enable Chyrp's caching module as well, so every page load does not incur a single API request (I have a feeling that they probably won't appreciate it). The benefit of this is that your Foursquare badges will now be output by your server, so they are both indexable by search engines and degrade very gracefully when the client doesn't have Javascript enabled (NoScript users, particularly).
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I'm scheduled to weight in as a middleweight (171 - 185 lbs.), which is a step up from my normal weight (170). I've been lifting heavy and training hard, gaining some weight to meet Brian Ward in the ring in my third mixed martial arts fight. Since my last fight against Will Estes was deemed the most exciting fight of the night by StarNews, I've been training harder and working more towards my professional career as a mixed martial arts fighter.
Rest days start after my last training session on Thursday night, so I'll be getting some well-needed rest and relaxation Friday to prepare for the weighin on Saturday morning at the Greenville Convention Center. Afterwards, my friends and I are meeting one of my RolePlayGateway staff members at the Olive Garden in Greenville to enjoy my pre-fight lunch. Then it's off to rest (hoorah for naps), and then later that night - it'll be fight time.
Get in touch with me if you're out in Greenville and you're interested in having lunch with us or if you want to show up for the fight (which is at the Greenville Convention Center, tickets will be available at the doors), you're more than welcome to come.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
After a year and a half working with some of the smartest and most competent engineers I've ever met, it's time for me to part ways with BitPay. I've had the opportunity to be deeply involved in the design, implementation, and deployment of some incredible technologies, but we're turning a page in the story of Bitcoin's rise and it's time to start exploring the new chapter.
BitPay continues to paint an incredibly compelling picture as to what the decentralized future looks like – we worked on some incredibly far-reaching and massively impactful ideas, including:
- [ChainDB][chaindb], a distributed database backed exclusively by the Bitcoin blockchain.
- [Copay][copay], a truly decentralized wallet & identity management platform.
- [BitAuth][bitauth], a secure authentication mechanism for peers on the web, using the `k1` curve.
- [Impulse][impulse], a method of securing zero-confirmation transactions.
- [Foxtrot][foxtrot], a completely encrypted data transmission network.
- [Bitcore][bitcore], a library of common software functionality to glue everything together.
You might notice a few common themes. Let me point out the two most important.
Firstly, that everything here is open source (with the notable exception of ChainDB). Open source, and more importantly [free software][free software], is a very big deal to me. Prior to joining BitPay, I was [open sourcing education][coursefork], [contributing to open source software](https://github.com/martindale), and [speaking on the importance of open source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuYLWdG-lP0). Some of the things I'm most proud of are the things _other_ people built with the things _we_ gave away – _that's_ the real power of open source.
Secondly, that everything here is based on Bitcoin, not some alternative blockchain. BitPay was a firm believer in Bitcoin as the exclusive platform that would secure the post-fiat era, and that belief has held strongly with me before and after my departure. Until a more compelling alternative to Bitcoin emerges,
One of the other exciting things to come out of BitPay was the emergence of [DECENTRALIZE][decentralize], which we formed last fall with a few of our fellow employees. DECENTRALIZE has become [an acclaimed content source][cointelegraph:decentralize] in the latest resurgence of decentralized thinking, and now it gets to be a much bigger priority for me.
Before I joined BitPay, I'd put a lot of work into [Maki][maki], a framework for making full-stack application development significantly easier. Maki took a bit of a back-burner position while I was focusing on my work at BitPay, so I'll be redoubling my efforts to see that vision through. In fact, I think now's as good a time as any to share that vision.
To that end, I'm starting a new project named Fabric. I'd like to entirely eliminate centralized servers on the Internet and catalyze the development of an entirely new class of economic actor. More details soon.
As we embark on our next journey, let's always remember the carefully selected input used to create [the Genesis Block][genesis]:
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
[chaindb]: https://bitpay.com/chaindb.pdf
[copay]: https://copay.io/
[bitauth]: https://github.com/bitpay/bitauth
[impulse]: https://impulse.is/
[foxtrot]: https://github.com/bitpay/foxtrot
[bitcore]: https://bitcore.io
[decentralize]: https://decentralize.fm
[free software]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
[coursefork]: https://coursefork.org/
[maki]: https://maki.ericmartindale.com/
[cointelegraph:decentralize]: http://cointelegraph.com/news/114496/leaders-in-bitcoin-broadcasting-pandoras-box-is-open-and-theres-no-going-back
[genesis]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's been a crazy past couple weeks for me. I've been training up for my next fight (AFL 1, May 17, 2008 Elizabeth City, NC) and staying pretty busy at work. In other news, The Grand Tournament 2008 invitations were sent out, and RolePlayGateway will be hosting the event. I had a blast at the SEO - What You Need To Know Meetup in Raleigh, and met some great people (hi Ashley!), and got connected with the upcoming Advanced SEO Meetup (which I'm really looking forward to, Brian - sorry I missed the first one!).
Two of my friends passed away this past week, Brittany Custer and Chelsea Johnson, in two separate events. It's so sad - both of these girls had an entire life ahead of them.
A few of my friends have also had recent losses, all very devastating in their own way. I don't think you can possible hope to truly offer solace during times like these, but that is no reason to attempt to provide support and care for their loss.
It's a very polarizing view compared to what we often feel - especially looking at the age at which people pass away. With Cyclone Nargis and the China Earthquakes, there's a lot of pain in the world right now. It really makes you wake up out of whatever jaded state you're in and realize that hey, you're human. You're in this with the rest of us, regardless of how much hate you think you have.
I'm not participating in the elections this year. Full stop.
It's not that I don't feel like I can make a difference - it's that I refuse to be involved in what's going to happen next. I'll make my mark in my own way, this year. And hey, on a semi-related note, let me introduce you to an independent documentary (which means do your research to verify any of this) that I thoroughly recommend you sit down for 2 hours and watch. Two hours, give it your full attention.
All of that aside, let's all remember that we're in this together, like I said before. We need to be loving and supporting each other, through all of our trying times. Grow roots so that you might be able to nourish and feed others in their times of need, as we must do this in favor of our own health. (See The Golden Rule, figure 1.1)
For everyone who has lost someone, remember that everything has a cause and effect. You are still here and play a part in the effect of your loss - it is up to you to determine how you learn from and use the experiences you shared with this person. Be joyous and put these experiences to positive use, sharing and growing in their spirit.
Take refuge amongst your own family and friends - just as you have been there for them, they will be there for you.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
There's some discussion about how forums are or are not social media, (frankly, I don't think there's any question at all) - and it occurred to me the answer of why there is this rift in perception of forums/message boards.
Message boards haven't changed in almost 25 years. There simply hasn't been any real innovation - and that's why there's so much "real" social media out there that's exploding right now. The stuff is so radically different from traditional mediums such as forums that everyone is missing the core of what social media is: community engagement and interaction
So, here are some of the things I'd like to see in a forum, and some things that I've implemented on some of my own forums (heh, or at least planning to implement):
Trackbacks
It'd be awesome to have the same functionality in a blog post that we have on Wordpress or other blog software - did I give credit to someone? Let me hit the trackback API to make sure there's a connection between the two posts in the semantic web.
A forum thread is no different than a blog post. It has a topic, a goal, and a discussion pertaining to the original post. Let's see some of the functionality we found in the current decade put to use!
Native RSS Support
There's nothing worse than having to write an RSS extension for your forum, and still not have the functionality you want. Give every URL on my forum a /feed, please. This includes forums, threads, posts, users: the whole shebang.
While you're at it, tell Feedburner to support filtered feeds - a lot of my users don't want every single post. And I sure as hell don't want to burn a new feed for every forum. C'mon, let's meet somewhere in the middle.
Semantic URLs
Blogging software does it, why do we still have URLs on forums that use IDs right there in the URL? What benefit does that have to the user?
Social Profiles
Alright, we've got friends and foes lists on our forums, now - but where is the option to make this information public? Why aren't we displaying a users' friend list on their profile page by default? What about all their most recent posts and actions, and selected excerpts?
A community can only grow in a stifled manner if interaction between members isn't made as easy as humanly possible. Current forum software is stuck in the 90's, with an XHTML wrapper around it. Let's fix this, and soon - before we all melt.
Real Metrics and Algorithms
Stop using post count as a legitimate metric. This only encourages poor post quality. Let's see the ability to easily show Flesch-Kincaid, average word count, or something similar. The amount of posts a user has is not a good valuation of their contributions.
Instead, replace these with something more community-driven. Look at Digg for example. There is a solid (questionably) algorithm in place that measures users based on what they've submitted and the reactions of other users' reaction to that content, whether it be a comment or a submission.
Maybe I'm just whining. Maybe I've got legitimate desires. What do you think?
P.S.: And good god, phpBB! Why didn't you include this stuff in your phpBB3 release?!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Running a role playing game online presents a large of amount of flexibility in the way you run the game. You no longer need individual sessions where all players are present, and there are a plethora of options as to where you are going to run it - if you want to run it in any one place.
One of the number one questions I receive relates to the medium for online RPGs. There are tons of different ways of communicating online, mainly grouped into a few categories. We have instant messenger, chats, message boards, and emails. There are a few custom services out there, but I'm going to touch on the four that I've mentioned.
On RolePlayGateway, we have a set of roleplaying forums as well as a roleplaying chat. When you're running an RPG, there are a few items you should consider when deciding where you're going to keep everything.
Forums have the benefit of being static and always available - users can post to forums at any time during the day and be sure that other users (and roleplayers) can see their message. Forums are also very flexible, they allow you to embed images and other multimedia within your posts, allowing you to share any experience with your players. However, it is post based - forums are often not the quickest way to communicate, as it is not a live feed of information like a chat.
Chats, on the other hand, have the benefit of being real time. Games can be run in chat (and instant messenger) on a moment's notice, and work best when all of the players can be available at the same time. Because it is real time, short blip-based sessions such as character conversations and interactions work extraordinarily well with chats. Players can get the chance to interject into other player's actions and statements without the worry of too much time going by. It is for this reason that the longer posts, such as those that exceed a paragraph, are often too large and unwieldy for chats - players end up waiting too long for each post, and will get bored.
Longer posts do very well on forums, where writing an individual post can take half an hour or longer to refine and perfect - just enough time for the players to go look at other games and other topics before they come back and begin formulating their response.
If you're running a game with a detailed and/or complicated storyline or characters, it is always good to post something on a forum for player reference. This lets the players have a place to communicate out of character (OOC) - such as when they won't be able to make a chat session, or when they want to discuss plans for character interaction, growth, or development. Even if your game is already on a forum - it is a good idea to create a place for OOC discussion. For chat-based games - this gives a perfect opportunity for players to jump in at the middle of a game with little trouble, as they simply need to read over the history of the game on the forum, which they can do at any point in time, and less time is needed explaining the game to the player.
Instant messenger works well when dealing with one on one sessions, such as when two characters are the only ones in an interaction or a meeting needs to be private. These interactions can be summarized or written into a cinematic format and then posted to the forum, for other players to enjoy as well. Instant messenger (as well as Private Messages) does very well at asking questions of the other players, which is convenient when you have a question about how they're playing a role or a reference they made in character.
There are also emails - many games aren't run by email anymore, but email is still a very valuable tool. RolePlayGateway like many forums offers you the ability to subscribe to topics. Subscriptions will let you receive an immediate email update whenever someone replies to the thread. This is extraordinarily helpful when there's an RPG with only a few players that can only reply every once in a while, but it requires that people, y'know, actually check their email. RolePlayGateway also has the special ability to instant message you when there's an update to a subscribed thread. All you need is a Jabber account (GMail accounts work, too) and to set up the notifications. We'll send you a message as soon as there's an update.
What methods have you used to manage your online roleplaying games? Are you a fan of forum or chat? Both? What helps you determine where you're going to hold your game? Discuss!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
In liturgical Islam texts, we are called Masihi (مسيحي), or "Followers of the Messiah". In Chinese, we are 基督徒 - a literal "Christ follower". Regardless of what you call us, I feel that who is defined as a "Christian" has deviated far from what has been laid out by Christ and his closest disciples.
On a daily basis, I am faced with the bitter disgust incited by the dogma surrounding the "Christian" faith. A growing number of intellectuals shun Christianity as a result of its hypocrisy; all too common is the known Christian who is seen lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise sinning--directly in opposition to the perception of the Church to be wholly condescending upon sinners and their deeds. The view of Christian doctrine that enforces a "fire and brimstone" doom upon those who do not repent from their sinful ways is one that is misunderstood and misinterpreted, turning people away from the true nature of Christianity before a full understanding is given.
In 1st John, John writes (and I promise to keep my number of Bible references to a minimum):
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
1st John 1:8
It is the very nature of the Christian faith to recognize that we sin: this is the whole premise of following the figure that our faith is named after. We are sinners, and we do participate in activities and perform activities that are duly defiant of the damnation that is preached from some pulpits. It is our aspiration to emulate the figurehead by admitting our sins and providing unconditional love to everyone and everything we come into contact with that is supposed to set us apart from nonbelievers.
However, it is unfortunate that most "Christians" have lost sight of our true nature (that is, to love and care for all of God's creation) and are not the loving and caring role models that our faith demands. John continues in chapter 4:
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
1st John 4:7-12
As the passage exemplifies, God is embodied in our capacity to love; it is the command of love that we must maintain first and foremost. If we do not have love, we have nothing. (See "All You Need Is Love")
I fully agree with the perception that Christians today are too righteous: we are commanded to be humble. It is for this reason, among others, that I most frequently choose to be called (...) a "follower of Christ" as opposed to a "Christian" (which ironically enough, was used as a condemning phrase). Christians have no right to tout their holiness as a indicator of superiority over anyone.
We must love everyone; Muslims, Jews, the poor, the sick, the needy... people of all races, faiths, nationalities and conditions; all are included in the Christian's domain of unconditional love and tolerance, no matter what their actions. As the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said:
Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
One of the sites I own and run (RolePlayGateway) has a pretty large forum, with several customizations and features that I've added on to the base install of phpBB3. As time went on, we continued upgrading the servers (moving from GoDaddy shared hosting to GoDaddy virtual dedicated servers, then onward to MediaTemple's (gs), and now we're on the second tier of MediaTemple's (dv) hosting) in an effort to keep the hardware moving as fast as possible.
As I'm sure you know, hardware can be pretty expensive! One month, while on MediaTemple's Grid Server, we racked up $600 in CPU time overage charges. (Ow.) Now that we've moved onward to bigger and better packages, we're shelling out just about $100 per month for a rock-solid server solution that can be upgraded seamlessly in the future. But since upgrades can only go so far without being prohibitively expensive, I thought it was time to take a look at some of our coding approaches.
Enter memcache, the distributed database caching solution originally designed by LiveJournal to help them deal with massive databases and large volumes of users. DavidMJ has written some shiny ACM modules to help phpBB3 make use of some caching systems, and a memcache module was among them.
That didn't work so well. It gave about a 50% boost to phpBB3's performance (which was great!), but we were still choking the server, and ended up upgrading to a bigger and more robust package with MediaTemple. So I started looking into more options, and DavidMJ suggested xcache. So I go grab xcache and compile it, then enabled it in php. Bingo! There's a 500% boost in our page compile times, and across most of our pages we're now well under 0.1 second compile times. (With the exception of viewtopic.php, which frequently approaches 2 seconds due to bad coding on my part... this will be fixed soon.)
So now that I've got the thirst for speed, let's take a look at how we're performing. To do this, use the apache benchmarking tool:ab -n 100000 http://www.mydomain.com/my_page
This will test the URL you specify 100,000 times, and give you some feedback about how the page performs. You'll end up with something looking like this:
Server Software: Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname: www.mydomain.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /my_page
Document Length: 0 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 15.30100 seconds
Complete requests: 1
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 1
Total transferred: 715 bytes
HTML transferred: 0 bytes
Requests per second: 0.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 15030.100 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 15030.100 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 0.00 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0
Processing: 15030 15030 0.0 15030 15030
Waiting: 30 30 0.0 30 30
Total: 15030 15030 0.0 15030 15030
Some tweaks to the default xcache config that I recommend:
Set the number of caches to one per processor on your server!
; set to cpu count (cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep -c processor)
xcache.count = 4
This post will be updated as I explore phpBB3 and more server side options. (I wrote part of this post, then stopped writing... and figure I'd publish it a couple days later anyway!)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
[K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
[L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
[M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
[N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
[O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
[P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
[Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
[S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
[T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
[U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
[X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
[Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)
Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
There's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, 
I often get asked for my Skype address, sometimes in relation to business or casual conversation. I politely decline with some degree of hand-waving about my reasons, and suggest an alternative form of communication (typically either 
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
