barack obama

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Links for 19 November 2008 through 20 November 2008

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Stilgherrian’s links for 19 November 2008 through 20 November 2008, gathered despite the rain:

Brisbane (Mt Stapylton): A sequence of radar images of last night’s severe storms over Brisbane.
Web moves to front and centre in coverage of Obama presidency | ABC Digital Futures: For the first time ever, a website (not a newspaper or news agency) will have the most reporters covering the White House.
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide | Google: What it says: an excellent guide to what works best for getting better Google search results.
Fireside chats in the 21st century | ABC News: “Obama not only raised far more money via the internet, he also spent far more than McCain on it. This approach clearly paid off,” says Barry Saunders in this superb opinion piece.
New task force to examine ISP level content filtering | iTnews Australia: The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has formed a task force to look into the Federal government’s controversial ISP filtering scheme. The task force meets on 26 November and expects to take “a leadership role, provide expert technical advice, and review e-security and ISP filtering proposals” to assist the ACS to develop its own policy positions.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media | Capture the Conversation: “In the world of social media, are you going to be a force for good? Or are you going to turn to the dark side – ruining your chances and infuriating those who cross your path?” Some interesting tips on building an online presence.
Industry and government work together to tackle internet terror | Home Office: The UK government announces an Internet “filtering” plan similar to the Howard government’s NetAlert scheme. The key difference is that the “bad stuff” it’s protecting us against is “websites that may encourage the endorsement or participation in acts of terrorism” rather than Conroy’s ubiquitous “child pornography”.

Links for 17 November 2008 through 18 November 2008

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Stilgherrian’s links for 17 November 2008 through 18 November 2008, thinned with cheap turpentine:

NSW Government in Exile: “NSW is mired in incompetence and corruption. No-one in or near power appears able to come up with a coherent policy or plan. So let’s start.” Aparently I’m minister for infrasructure.
HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter | Mashable: “The strength of your community determines overall what you will (or won’t) get out of the microblogging platform. What do you want to use Twitter for?” Sarah Evans offers some good tips.
HOW NOT TO: Build Your Twitter Community | Mashable: The flipside to Sarah Evans’ previous post.
What the family values folks don't get about family | denialism blog: “The anti-gay marriage folks think that family is all about fear, sex, and violence… These folks who fought for Prop 8 don’t understand the real meaning of family, of love, of comfort. For most of us, it’s not about fulfilling one fringe group’s idea of what God wants. It’s about creating a life with another, sharing a physical and emotional space with someone, rejoicing together when things are good, and holding each other when things are tough. It’s human.”
Twitter is Real Life | Aide-mémoire: The ever-thoughtful Kate Carruthers has written an excellent piece countering the “Twitter is dead” meme which seems to surface from time to time. Yes, she says nice things about me (again), but there are good bits too.
30 Hilarious TV Meltdowns, Outbursts & Blunders | ClearlyAV: A collection of 30 videos which are (mostly) people losing their temper on TV.
Green ICT Symposium 2008: The presentations for this conference, held in Canberra last Friday 14 November 2008, are now online.
SSL Certificate Tester | digicert: While I don’t use digicert to buy my SSL certificates, this handy test page is good for showing the status of SSL certificates installed on your web server.
Making money twice | 37signals: A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people). But for those who’ve mastered that, I want to talk about the next step: making money twice (or three or four times).
NYT: Obama saying goodbye to BlackBerry? | msnbc.com: The limitations on the President, both legal and security-based, mean that Barack Obama may have to give up using email. Unable to get unfiltered access to The Real World, he’ll become increasingly dependent on a worldview filtered through his “advisors”.

Echoes of America’s racial history

16 November 2008 in History, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Much has been said of the supposed racial element in the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. This map shows how deep the historical roots run.

The base area map shows in blue the counties which recorded a majority of votes for Obama. The overlay dot map shows US cotton production from 1860 — each dot represents 2000 bales. The similarity of the distribution is uncanny a century and half later.

It’s worth reading the comments on the original post at Strange Maps as people attempt to explain the finer details.

Links for 16 November 2008

16 November 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Here are the web links I’ve found for 16 November 2008, posted automatically and not.

Filtering Pilot and ACMA Blacklist – Not just “illegal” material | Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA): EFA’s analysis of the Australian goverment&’s policy makes it clear that it’s not just illegal material being targetted for Internet “filtering”.
From cutlass to AK-47 | BBC News: A brief history of piracy through to the present day — the real kind of piracy, not “copyright infringement”.
From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents | Strange Maps: There’s been plenty of discussion about how race (i.e. the fact that Barack Obama isn’t white) affected the US election. Here’s a comparison of the map of cotton production from 1860 compared with voting patterns earlier this month. The resemblance is both uncanny and scary.
This Isn’t England | Noisy Decent Graphics: Pax Britannia! London-based graphic designer Ben Terrett notices that the UK isn’t always drawn as it should be on maps. All maps, by definition, present a distorted view of the world. But how distorted?
How This Bear Market Compares | NYTimes.com: Once more the New York Times wins with its superb infographics. Want to compare the current stock market crash with previous ones? This interactive graphic allows you to do just that, clearly and simply.
Introducing Recession: Simple Advice for Designers | Noisy Decent Graphics: While the blog is aimed at designers overall, this post is about the current world economic recession and includes links to some good infographics to help understand it, as well a rather nice FAIL photo.
Digital Surveillance Event Recorder | Jaycar Electronics: There’s just got to be some cool uses for a gadget that comes with two infra-red video cameras and records a 10-second burst of low-res video every time something moves. And it costs less that AUD$300.
Resampled Space | BLDGBLOG: Amazing but probably impossible buildings, assembled thanks to some nifty photo editing.
Anything Looks Cooler with a NASA Logo | Flickr: Yes, even mundane things.
Ethics & Principles of Permaculture browse | Permaculture Business Guild: Bill Mollison published these principles in 1980 in Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (Tagari Publications), but the “Principles for Functional Design” apply everywhere, I think.
Internet filtering and censorship forum UNSW 27 November 2008 | Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre: A free forum in Sydney later this month discusses Australia’s proposals for Internet filtering / censorship. I;ll be there.
Economics of Spam | Link: The paper “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion”, details how researchers hacked into a spam network to measure its effectiveness. This post asks whether the technique of hacking into a spam botnet was ethical.
japanese bert | Flickr: There’s an uncanny resemblance between this chap and Australian television presenter Bert Newton.

Links for 04 November 2008 through 09 November 2008

09 November 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | 1 comment

Stilgherrian’s links for 04 November 2008 through 09 November 2008, gathered via Twitter and spat onto the page with love and some lemon juice and garlic:

McDonald’s partners with earthwave to provide Australians with “Family Friendly” internet services | LinuxWorld: A company called earthwave has scored the deal to provide Australia’s McDonald’s stores with “clean” Internet links. That’s more than 720 locations.
How to nap | Boston.com: A nice overview of how to take effective nap breaks. I’d have congratulated Boston.com on using a good wide-screen format too, but discovered they’ve done it with images rather than live text on the page. Still, it’s good material.
What’s your profit : pain ratio? | Bad Language: Very apropos for me this week: an article pointing out that some clients simple aren’t worth the trouble.
Best advice I’ve heard all week | Wired Blogs: A reminder that humans are really very bad at assessing risk.
Tanner eyes web 2.0 tools | Australian IT: Australia’s federal government says it'll trial online public consultation through blogs and other social media tools. Good luck, guys, because the first thing you’ll have to learn is how to have an authentic conversation with people, rather than just parroting the party line.
Bush: “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over” | The Onion: Written when George W Bush was inaugurated in 2001, this is a scarily prescient piece of satire. Well worth a read today.
Barack Obama’s acceptance: the transcript | Crikey: The full text of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Very powerful writing.
Not Quite Art | ABC TV: The official ABC website for Marcus Westbury’s series Not Quite Art including full downloadable files of all episodes of series 1 and 2 (provided you’re in Australia).
The next President of the United States | The Big Picture: Boston.com provides yet another glorious photo essay: this time it’s images of the president-elect of the US, some bloke called Barry.
Australian Internet Censorship | halans.com: Another powerful analogy to explain why centralised Internet censorship is wrong.
6 Nov 2008 – Liberation Day | Microsoft Australia: The Australian launch event for Microsoft’s Azure services platform. I blogged this live previously, and will soon write a more reflective post about it. This page now includes the video of Steve Ballmer’s speech.
Blog censorship silences free speech around the world | Worldfocus: Thirteen/WNET, the respected PBS station in Boston, blogs about Internet censorship censorship and surveillance around the world, including a link to little old me.
What Ray Ozzie didn’t tell you about Microsoft Azure | The Register: A nice discussion of the problems Microsoft will face selling its new platform Azure when compared with Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine.
750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy | ars technica: A nice discussion of where the numbers for “what piracy costs us” come from. This is American rather than Australian, but the points are still valid.
DVD pirating costing industry $1.7b: Debus | ABC News: Australia’s Home Affairs minister Bob Debus parrots the DVD industry’s claim that illegal copying (which they call “piracy”) costs $1.7B. The bogeyman of “child pornography” is raised to make it sound even scarier.
“Mankind Is No Island” | One Plus One Equals Three: The winning film in the Tropfest New York short film competition, shot using a mobile phone and found typography in Sydney and NY.

Links for 18 October 2008 through 21 October 2008

22 October 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 18 October 2008 through 21 October 2008, slightly burnt at the edges:

The twisted language of politics | Bloghound: A nice post on the hypocrisy shown in the differing descriptions of Republican US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Send an e-mail message on behalf of someone else | Microsoft Office Online: The procedure for setting up delegated email access in Office 2007, e.g. a secretary having access to their boss’ email. I think it’s rather quaint that Microsoft still uses “e-mail” with a hyphen.
Use Outlook Anywhere to connect to your Exchange server without VPN | Microsoft Office Online: This is the procedure for making individual Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”. I’m tagging this because I’ll be making this work for a client shortly.
Configure Outlook Anywhere in Outlook 2007 | Microsoft TechNet: This is the procedure for making a group of Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”.
2006 Olympic Food Stealing Champion – My Dog! | First Dog on the Moon: One of First Dog’s more delightful (as opposed to deeply cynical) cartoons.
Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?: A live feed of everyone who swears on Twitter, with a nice animated effect when a new curse pops up. Compelling viewing.

Links for 23 September 2008 through 25 September 2008

26 September 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 September 2008 through 25 September 2008, scrubbed up with a wire brush:

Australia: Twitter statistics | Laurel Papworth: Twitter usage is up 518.12% in Australia, if you believe (1) that website traffic is the relevant metric, and (2) you can possibly measure this stuff to 5 significant figures.
Wotnews Australian News Search: Wotnews used to be called Plugger, but they’re now associated with Wotif in some way. Wotnews harvests news from over 3500 different sources including mainstream publishers, niche blogs, direct from companies and government bodies as well as from the relentless stream of company announcements coming out of the Australian Stock Exchange.
Tax Plans (that’s one for you, nineteen for me) | chartjunk: Viveka Weiley’s re-drawing of charts comparing John McCain and Barack Obama’s tax plans. The difference is pretty obvious.
Text Messages Seen as Dangerously Distracting | NYTimes.com: “The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points” and many other scare-quotes.

Links for 15 August 2008 through 16 August 2008

17 August 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | 2 comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 15 August 2008 through 16 August 2008:

iUSBCam | Ecamm Network: Software to make a USB camera work with Mac OS X as a webcam, not just Firewire cameras or the built-in iSight. I haven’t tried it yet.
Down for everyone or just me?: Sick of people asking you whether some website is “down” for you as well? Point them here.
CNN: Is Obama the Anti-Christ? | YouTube: A CNN compilation of US news reports speculating that US presidential candidate Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ. The proof? That there are 900,000 Google search results for “obama anti-christ”. And this makes it 900,001. Idiots.
Oz-IA/2008: Australia’s Information Architecture conference, to be held in Sydney on the weekend of 20-21 September. I’ve been invited to go and do some live stuff. Should I?
What’s Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches | BusinessWeek: A discussion of possible causes behind complaints of dropped calls and choppy Internet connections… and of course Apple’s usual denial of any problem and no further comment.
The Unclutterer Workspaces Pool | Flickr: A group pool of folks showing off their elegantly uncluttered workspaces. My desk cannot appear here.

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen spent 90 minutes with Barack Obama in early 2007. His report on that conversation is fascinating: “He said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.”

04 March 2008 by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

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