I think I’m going to soon look at setting up the site with “asides”, so that instead of gathering up large buckets of links that I have only a few comments on, I can just drop them in as “asides” between my longer and more content-y posts.
In the meantime, another (possibly final) agglomeration of miscellaneous links.
- This might be a naive question, but given the surplus of processor power we typically have now, why don’t modern OSes have file systems that automatically calculate/generate parity information on every write? You see this all the time with tools to create external parity or checksum files, or applications to generate Reed Solomon codes, but why isn’t this just built into the filesystem? If the OS can include on-the-fly compression (which many of them have for over a decade now), why not on-the-fly parity generation & recovery for bad sectors?
- I’ve been fascinated with machinima for a while now–at least since the Summoner version of the Dungeons and Dragons skit, and definitely since Red vs Blue first hit the web consciousness. The game started to change with Bloodspell with the project showing the kind of scope that you could attempt. In the post Second Life world, of course, the possibilities get even more interesting, as you see in things like this. If the days had a dozen more hours in them, I would spend some time on this–I’ve got this idea for a video for the BiL tune “Drowning” that I’ve always wanted to make real, and this would be a practical way of getting something close for a practical amount of effort and investment. Will has been looking into this lately, and has piqued my interest in Moviestorm. As soon as I get that dozen extra hours… Hey, I could even do something for the Shadow Unit contest.
- While I am quite impressed with Google’s distcc tool, I am really, really glad that my current projects don’t involve anything that would benefit from it–my gigantic Java builds typically take only a few minutes (so long as I skip that annoying JSP precompile step). This does have it’s downsides, of course. I do want a similar tool to push the process of running regression tests off developer machines and onto test servers, but I think that’s pretty well in hand now.
- Festung Amerika continues, with the build up along that scary Northern border continuing. You know, when I read Spinrad predicting this albeit for entirely different reasons, long before 9/11, I thought it was a very amusing conceit. I wonder if he’s happy that he got things so right.
- This is absolutely the best write-up I’ve seen on the Hamdan verdict, especially the Post-Sentencing Update part. I wish that this kind of thing got some play in the “mainstream” media. Not just the verdict, which was covered, but the deeper analysis about what it means that this was the result, and the sentence, in the larger context of Gitmo, etc. Also, I’d like to see a lot more on the Administration interference in the tribunals as well.
- I know it’s been discussed to death, but I think it’s weird that the OSS archives story was universally framed in terms of Julia Childs. There’s so much other stuff there! It’s too bad Powers did his Philby novel already, because I bet this stuff would have been a goldmine for the kinds of secret history tidbits he so ably welds together.
- “I’m not saying that drugs should be decriminalised because it would be fun if we could all get stoned with impunity. I’m saying that we’ve tried minimising harm through a draconian legal policy. It is now clear that enforcement and supply-side interventions are largely pointless. They haven’t worked.” At some point logic has to kick in, right? At some point we drop this whole “stay the course or be weak” thing and try something new, right?
- Word.
- This is probably the single most disgusting headline I’ve read in a long time. Not that there’s anything wrong with the headline–it just carries the message, which is the disgusting thing. This would also make some lovely context in reports on world food shortages.
- How can you be web-savvy enough to know that Wikipedia is an important front for messaging, but not web-savvy enough to know that you will get caught attempting to manipulate it? The sad truth, I suspect, is that the people in question are quite web-savvy, but are also fully aware that a lot more people will read the Wikipedia articles than will ever hear about the manipulation. Sigh.
- I know the Wii is famous for being a console for party games, but… well, wouldn’t this either result in terribly awkward parties, or else something right out of the darkest 70s?
- Hearing the whole story about a company refusing to let a man chose a certain password makes me laugh. It also makes me think of Lily Tomlin.
- Once again Jeffrey, you have crystallized my thoughts exactly. Actually, wait: today’s is in the same vein, and even more on point.
