1. 09 June 2006

    943 days ago

    Dynamic time based finder for ActiveRecord

    Holy shit, ruby rocks. (self-link).

    Kjell Olsen943 days ago

  2. 07 May 2006

    The Power of Nightmares

    976 days ago

    In a rightful binge of documentation, I went right from Why we Fight to The Power of Nightmares, written and directed by Adam Curtis and produced by the BBC.

    Curtis explains how radical islam and neoconservativism have both arisen from disenchantment with mid 20th century liberalism. The liberal idea of the great society had failed, leaving people the world around empty and vapid, but without comprehension of their meaninglessness. The two groups may be construed as enemies, but really live and die in each others arms.

    The conception of the west as a possibly a negative influence on islam society was conjectured by an egyptian studying for a time in small town 50s america. Islamists sought to overcome the western influence beginning to be exerted upon the middle east by the western powers. The Jahiliya, or reversion to pre-Mohammed ideals in the arab populace.

    Neocons wanted to found America anew upon the foundation of myth, namely that of freedom. Reservations about modern liberal society led Leo Strauss to philosophize that liberal politics led directly to nihilism, and for a nation to generate meaning in the world it needed to be bound by a greater good than that of the individual. Freedom, and it’s deliberate proliferation by America.

    When arab freedom fighters and american neocons colluded to expel the soviets from afghanistan, the religious fantasies of both islamists and neocons were fulfilled. The americans championed their freedom and the mujahideen their islam. The policies of american invasion continued, and the islamists embarked upon a terribly circular and deadly struggle to turn democratic middle eastern states to strictly islam governance.

    With the failure of islamists to construct islam nations by means of aggressively killing those nations populace and undermining whatever support they may have had to begin with, they decided to mount an attack on the greater destructive force – america.

    With terrorism focused on american embassies and culminating in 9/11, neocon politicians had stumbled upon a mightily persuasive societal myth1 – that of a coherent structure of terrorists, bent not only on the destruction of america, but also of freedom, the neocon idea of a greater good, the glue they needed to keep america from degeneration.

    But Curtis asserts that such a structure doesn’t exist in reality. It is only a powerful tool leveraged by politicians, affording them power beyond that which their constituencies would otherwise grant them. Al-Qaeda is no more than a name given to a fantasized organization imagined by the american government in 2001, in an effort to prosecute Bin Laden under laws written decades earlier to prosecute mafia crime.

    This inexistent notion of a coherent and stable terrorist rebellion against the powers of freedom and liberty have led america into a disillusioned and myopic state of affairs, trusting unprecedented powers to those who monger said nightmares to an overly sedated populace.

    In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda. Whilst the 20th century was dominated between a conflict between a free-market Right and a socialist Left, even though both of those outlooks had their limitations and their problems, at least they believed in something, whereas what we are seeing now is a society that believes in nothing. And a society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything, and, therefore, we label those people as fundamentalists or fanatics, and they have much greater purchase in terms of the fear that they instill in society than they truly deserve. But that

  3. 11 November 2005

    1154 days ago

    DrugReporter: Bush and Blow

    The reason corporate America backed Bush Sr. is because “he’ll do whatever the big boys want. And so will his son.”

    When asked about censorship, Bush replied that there “ought to be limits to freedom” when it comes to criticizing him personally.

    You get close to, and turn up something bad on Karl Rove, that will get you killed right there. Mr. Fly, an unnamed source

    Bush is a lying disgusting criminal fuckwit scumbag.

    via Kjell Olsen1154 days ago

  4. 07 August 2005

    Ender's Game

    Orson Scott Card

    1249 days ago

    Somehow I managed to pick great books to read on my vacation. Ender’s Game is a fun novel about the life of a child prodigy bred in a military program to find a commander to win a war against the buggers, aliens from a far away galaxy who threaten the entire human existence.

  5. 08 July 2005

    1279 days ago

    The Democratization of History

    Millions of us have online journals—or, at minimum, send email—where we can take notes about what we’ve experienced, visible to anyone who is interested. Millions of us carry cameras with us wherever we go, allowing us to record events as they happen. Millions of us are now historians.

    via Kjell Olsen1279 days ago

  6. 10 May 2005

    1338 days ago

    Home Power Magazine - Your Small Scale Renewable Energy (RE) Source

    On how to live off, or mostly independent, from the grid.

    via Kjell Olsen1338 days ago

  7. 21 April 2005

    1357 days ago

    FEMA Concentration Camps: Locations and Executive Orders - Friends ofLiberty (undated) 3sep04

    All the power in the hands of the government is starting to bother me, with their wingnutty ways and the republican tendency to stand behind anything Bush says, but putting an unbelievable amount of power into the hands of Bush himself, without the checking and balancing of congress and the judiciary? That can’t be a good thing.

    Hope it’s a fake like some of the folks at metafilter say (see the via link). But ohhhh.

    via Kjell Olsen1357 days ago

  8. 18 April 2005

    1360 days ago

    furialog

    iTunes power user skillz:

    My music collection is far larger than my Powerbook or iPod can accommodate, so my encoded selection rotates as new and revived interests push other things out of the active 20GB. Much of the time I use iTunes in Browse mode, listening to individual whole albums in the same way I would have pre-shuffle-era. But increasingly, and especially during periods when my listening isn’t so dominated by new releases, I also use iTunes’ Party Shuffle mode, fed by a Smart Playlist that filters out non-music genres, cuts out tracks that are too short (<1:30) or too long (>5:22) for my shuffle attention-span, and via another playlist reference excludes anything that has been played recently (i.e., in the last two weeks, or the last 10 hours of music, whichever list is shorter). If I’m in an especially random mood, I have an Applescript that goes through the upcoming Party Shuffle selections and eliminates repetition of artists.  

    Although on very rare occassions I do rate tracks manually, for the most part I find that it is more effective to treat the rating as a temporary variable representing my actual behavior towards the track, instead of an attempt to measure my subjective assessment directly. In my case, the rules are approximately these (I’ve left out some of the more logistical obscurities):  

    I love how concrete this is. I should do it like this, and maybe rate the song in the comments subjectively.

    Automated payment of artists who’s work was downloaded, but not paid for. Sweet script to do it all without lifting a finger.

    via Kjell Olsen1360 days ago

  9. Also somewhat recently

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