Stuff happening in my life
Ukepedia is a new project by me and Louisa. Long story short: Ukepedia is Wikipedia articles performed on the Ukelele (or Ukulele if you prefer). The long story isn’t actually much longer than that.
Here is a video of me performing the Wikipedia article “Otitis Media” (which I also performed live at The Chemic Tavern on Thursday and at Bar Camp Leeds just today).
Record your own, upload them to You Tube and submit them to us!
Admitting it for all to see on his BBC blog. Very brave of him:
Past horrors and mistakes do not seem to have weakened a servile belief in the ultimate benevolence of the state and a willingness to grant it unlimited powers.
In this country, if you start to blame the system itself – and the men right at the top – you tend to get into all kinds of trouble.
Unsurprisingly though, he’s talking about China and not the USA or the United Kingdom.
The Open Rights Group are a UK based organisation fighting for our civil liberties in the digital age. DRM, e-voting, copyright term extensions, FOI, net neutrality, privacy, RIPA, creative commons etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. They’re like an English EFF.
They have a tiny staff and many other volunteers who are extremely dedicated to the cause and are working very hard for our freedoms. They are funded entirely by donations which pays for the staff, an office and expenses of running campaigns and pestering politicians. They’re currently hoping to push their income up so things are more sustainable.
So, please sign up and give them some money every month. Anything from £5 upwards would be super. If you use computers for pretty much anything, it will make your life better – or at least prevent it getting any worse.
I’m speaking next Tuesday (15th April 2008) at the Manchester Free Software about my geeky web comic, Everybody Loves Eric Raymond. Apparently people are still interested in it even though it hasn’t been updated since December! Hooray!
It’ll be a bit of a mix of the two talks I’ve done before on ELER, so some stuff about the history of the comic and how I make it, plus some ranting about free software, free markets and leaders.
I was asked by the then organiser (and my friend) Matt Lee who was then extraordinarily renditioned to North America with his new wife, leaving the new organisers to pick up the pieces. Luckily most of the pieces were found and it’s all go, though I do now appear to be talking about my new Rails hosting company too and my name is spelt differently. If there is time, I’ll talk about some of the stuff we’re doing at Brightbox with Free Software.
Talk starts at 7pm at the Manchester DDA. More details on the Manchester Free Software website.
I’m in Prague with Brightbox for the Euruko Ruby Conference 2008 from tomorrow evening until Monday morning. I’ll post photos to the Brightbox Flickr photostream as we go along. If anyone wants to meet up for a drink, email me at john at johnleach dotty co dotty uk.
UPDATE: Photos here.
The public can see for themselves the ‘neutral’ media language used to describe Israeli actions: ‘incursion’, ‘retaliation’, ‘military operations’. By contrast, Israel endures ‘terrorist attacks’, ‘slaughter’, ‘a bloodbath’. Careful analysis by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, of the Glasgow University Media Group, found a persistent, ugly pattern:
“In our samples of news content, words such as ‘mass murder’, ‘savage cold-blooded killing’ and ‘lynching’ were used by journalists to describe Israeli deaths but not those of Palestinians/Arabs. The word ‘terrorist’ was used to describe Palestinians, but when an Israeli group was reported as trying to bomb a Palestinian school, they were referred to as ‘extremists’ or ‘vigilantes’.” (Philo and Berry, ‘Bad News From Israel’, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 259)
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080311_israeli_deaths_matter.php
Just felt what at first I thought was a heavy gust of wind but what then very quickly became an earthquake. We’re in Leeds but quickly got reports from friends over instant messenger, irc and twitter that it’s been felt elsewhere in Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and Nottingham.
I’m hearing the collective throat clearing of every geologist in the country in preparation for various TV and radio interviews.
I personally have been expecting the end of days for a few years now and am well prepared in the form of:
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
WikiLeaks and its domain registrar for the wikileaks.org domain name, Dynadot, have been sued by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, because of leaks claiming illegal activities at the bank’s Cayman Island branch.
The Judge order the DNS registrar to freeze the domain. The main servers are in Sweden though, so the cover names still work (such as the UK one: http://wikileaks.org.uk). There are also mirror sites. This is a good example of why you shouldn’t rely on US domain names (and why we need more diversity of root server control no doubt). Not sure how much better the UK system is though.
The Tor network has hidden services for this kind of thing and though not perfect, helps protect against this kind of attack (the Tor website is censored by my Vodafone ISP btw). A good time as any to volunteer to host a Tor router server.
The dominant system of economics is unstable, inimical to social justice and lethally damaging to the environmental support systems on which we all depend. A major failure in professional journalism has been the refusal to analyse this; or even to report that real growth rates in the developed world have been declining since the 1970s. Instead, corporate-employed journalists and mainstream analysts frequently extol the alleged spectacular achievements of an ‘unparalleled’ rise in wealth.
Medialens – a UK based media analysis project.
That quote is from one of their latest alerts, “‘CREATIVE DESTRUCTION’ – THE MADNESS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY”. Find it here: part 1 and part 2. You can buy their book, Guardians of Power, from here.
To briskly continue my regular series of cooking blog posts (previous post March 1st 2005) I present the vegetable dopiaza. I made one last night and it was yum, though I do admit to having been overly generous with all the spices – which I like but Louisa doesn’t.
Oh, btw, I’m doing a talk tomorrow at the North West Ruby User Group in Manchester about how we do the Ruby on Rails hosting at Brightbox.
I’ll be talking about SANs, Centos, Ubuntu, Xen, Apache, Lighty, NGINX, MySQL and other goodies. Heck, I might even mention Ruby, which would be nice considering it’s a Ruby user group.
My business partner Jeremy will be nattering about the business side and various other things.
Update: A couple of photos here and here.
The Open Rights Group (UK’s equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is two years old today. They fight for our digital civil rights (shoddy electronic voting schemes, software patents, all that kind of stuff) and are very good at it from what I’ve heard and seen. Go read all about them and please consider supporting them, if you haven’t already.
