Category Archives: web
Owning Digital Media
or Hoarding the Bits
Today, I was reading an exploration of solutions to the problem of infinetly reproducible content, and happened onto an interesting paragraph.
Tycho, the author writes:
I said, a few weeks ago of the whole DRM issue, that I thought “we needed to get away from the whole ‘owning bits’ metaphor for content distribution.” The whole DRM thing [...]
Drama Around the GPL
in the Wordpress Community
There’s a bunch of drama going on in the Wordpress community right now over the GPL.
I’ll be honest, I don’t understand the whole story–I only live at the fringe of the Wordpress world. But I follow a couple Wordpress rockstars on Twitter: GPL advocate Ian Stewart and GPL opposer Nathan Rice (honestly, Nathan’s position is substantially [...]
A New File Format for Web Fonts?
Ars Technica has an interesting article about the web open font format right now.
Here’s the interesting part:
The proposed .webfont format attempted to address those issues and presented a compromise that would work for everyone involved. It used font data in the same format as OpenType (it was capable of handling future formats, too) so it wouldn’t require any [...]
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Gnash: A Flash Alternative
I’ve been meaning to try gnash for a while. It’s an open source Flash player. I gave it a quick go tonight, and unfortunately it failed most of the tests it needed to be really usable.
Let me preface this by saying that Flash sucks. It’s a massive, inefficient resource hog that rarely integrates well with any operating system, and [...]
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Twitter as The Building Block of Something Else
I’m in the midst of reading this interesting article about the future of the newspaper and ran into this quote:
Twitter provides a crude way of displaying public leverage but it’s a start.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sentiment, that Twitter isn’t the future, but that it’s a building block, a sort of precursor to some sort of New [...]
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A Better Way to Modify WordPress Themes
In the last couple days, I’ve been getting a jones to practice my CSS skillz a bit more. But I haven’t really felt like building a whole ‘nother theme from scratch (I’ve already built two that I haven’t quite finished and never implemented–perhaps I’ll dust those off and see if somebody can help me finish them up).
In any case, my first [...]
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Wikipedia Provides Answers: Stinking badges and Freebird
I’ve always wondered where a couple massively popular quotes came from. While watching UHF tonight I thought I’d find out.
It turns out “we don’t need no stinking badges is from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre circa 1948.
And yelling “Free Bird” at a show is from Skynyrd’s live album One More From The Road.
See, that’s the kind of thing you [...]
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On Blogging (or an open response to a friend)
Recently I recieved this picture in an email from a friend.
I’ve got to say, I totally agree. I feel the same way about that stupid printing press technology, too.
It’s enabled so much crap–if only we hadn’t embraced the printing press, only the really smart people would be writing stuff in the first place.
Stupid democratization of communication.
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The New Ebay (from garage sale to Chinese electronics market)
My tape adapter died last week. Which meant I’ve been in serious Linux Outlaws withdrawl for a while now.
I looked at buying one at Wal-Mart or Walgreens or whatever, but they’re about $10. That seemed crazy to me, so I looked on ebay. I found one with free shipping for less than $2.50. I’m sure it’s a pile of [...]
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10 Free Christmas Albums
for your holiday pleasure