Categories
Digital Culture

Allow me to reiterate…

…how exactly fucked the media conglomerates are. To be more specific, the RIAA and the MPAA’s of the world who are still desperately attempting to control content in an age where it is beyond anyones control.

The latest brilliant idea? LaLa, a CD trading site that lets you post your wants and haves, matches you up appropriately with other LaLa subscribers, provides postage paid mailers, and lets the USPS do the swapping. It’s like P2P without the digital. The cost? $1.49 per disc that you swap, giving you the ability to trade old music for new at prices that almost rival AllofMP3. For less than $20 a month, you could have more new music than you could comfortably listen to, all DRM free and with the ability to control it as you see fit.

Just another thing that the RIAA can’t stop. Just wait until some rolls this up with some open source social software that allows small groups to do this without the need for postage. How could they respond if Facebook provided this functionality?

Categories
Digital Culture

Server vs CMS, take two

So on the continuing saga of the UTC library website redesign:

We’re basically choosing between two different CMS’s…Drupal and Joomla. Neither of which is playing well with our server, an older Red Hat machine which hasn’t been updated yet to the appropriate versions of PHP. This is because RedHat hasn’t pushed the version out yet….even though it is well behind the actual PHP versioning.

*sigh*

Joomla I’m working on tomorrow. Keep your finger’s fingers crossed.

Categories
Digital Culture

National Slayer Day

Reign In Blood

Don’t forget, folks: It’s National Slayer Day! Go forth and blast Angel Of Death to all in earshot!

Categories
Digital Culture

Pirate Bay

Pirate Bay vs Hollywood

Just to recap the last week or so for The Pirate Bay, the largest bittorrent engine in the world,

They were raided by the police, evidently under pressure from the United States and the MPAA. Keep in mind, of course, that this is in Sweden. You know, one of the places that isn’t the US. Their servers (along with other sites servers, which just happened to be in the same room) are seized.

Three days later:

Pirate Bay is back up, and now operating (evidently) as a distributed site in multiple countries with redundency. Ah, the beauty of Gilmore’s Law in action.

Their own take on it:

Just some stats…
… here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes – and how long it usually takes to fix:

Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days

Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days

The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days

.. yawn.

And finally, an absolutely brilliant speech from some of the people responsible for Pirate Bay, given at the Reboot conference.

The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.

How cool are these dudes? They have their own political party. Seriously. How much is a one way ticket to Sweden these days?

Categories
Digital Culture

This is just for Mark

No comment…if you’ve never seen or heard this…well…there are just no words. Shatner does Rocket Man.

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

Valleyschwag 2

ValleySchwag 2 unwrapped

I recieved my first Valleyschwag package yesterday…I must say, I’m impressed. From the detail put into the packaging to the schwag itself, a cool once a month surprise. It’s like having a birthday every month!

ValleySchwag!

It was, as you can see, wrapped in painted burlap. After you peeled away the burlap, the goodies inside were:

ValleySchwag 2 contents

All in all, not bad for $14.95. The Rubyred T-shirt and the Goatse stickers will be worth that much in conversation at least, and the PerplexCity cards are just cool.

Categories
Digital Culture

Fox news Godwin

Sometimes real life IS just like the Interweb! Watch Fox News commit a real life Godwin!

From Think Progress:

Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, an organization that has received over $390,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. This afternoon on Fox, Burnett compared watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to watching a movie by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to learn about Nazi Germany.

Transcript:

That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.

Categories
Digital Culture

On my mind

ALA annual, my presentation, and what the hell I’m going to attend other than it. I’ve not had the chance to do any real planning, so I’m expecting I’ll probably be sitting in the van on the way to NOLA with the schedule on my lap trying to figure out what I’m doing while I’m there. If anyone is interested in saying “hey”, I’ll be attending at least the LITA BIGWIG meeting, as well as the LITA happy hour. I’d love to meet anyone and everyone, so come say hello!

Website redesign. Consuming nearly my every conscious thought are the issues related to the new website for my library\. Evaluating CMS’s is one thing, but the truth is that I don’t really know what I think of them until I actually build a test site…which I just barely might have time to do before I actually have to build the real site. Add on top of that information architecture (boy do we need a patron-centered rethinking), and the idiosyncrasies of templating for each CMS…I’m torn between reading everything I can, and just jumping in a getting my hands dirty.

On top of all this, Betsy is currently still in Costa Rica, which doesn’t improve things any. Talk about distraction!

No wonder I haven’t had much time for writing. I need to try harder on the “blog daily” thing. I find that if I miss a day or two, it becomes easier to not do it, and I hate not blogging.

Categories
Personal

Vacation

Dale Hollow

Today I’m off to Dale Hollow Lake with the family for a little vacation. We were there in 2003, and it was a ton of fun and very relaxing. I’m hoping for more of the same! More on the website redesign, templating, and such to come.

Categories
Digital Culture

Content Management Systems

So in preparation for the upcoming website redesign, we’re evaluating CMS‘s at UTC. I’ve managed to get Drupal and Joomla installed, and will probably go through 2-4 more (phpMywebsite, e107, a few others) to check look and feel, ease of structure, flexibility, etc. While I’m very comfortable with the overall website design process, creating a new template for the CMS we eventually choose is going to be interesting.

I’m going to attempt to chronicle the process here on my blog, including mockups, templating, etc…both for myself as a note-taking venture, and in hopes that others might find it interesting/useful.

So far, I’m not leaning towards any particular CMS. Drupal has enormous popularity and a ton of support in the form of modules, but Joomla is far easier out-of-the-box. I’ll have to take some time and play with both, creating new templates and such before I’m clear on whether they can do what we want them to do.