Archive
79 posts
News of what appears to be a distributed, spontaneous action against the new video game “Spore” because of the DRM included with the game has been spreading around the web since yesterday (when I first heard about it from Fred Benson of Free Culture ) , and the action seems to be growing.
I’m working on a site that will launch soon that features some social networking functionality, including friend lists. We are using the Buddylist2 module and while there are some default blocks for things like “My Buddies” that show a user their buddies, there was not a similar block that would show one user another user’s buddies. We were able to create a custom view with the argument “Buddylist2: Nodes author is buddy of UID” that used the following custom argument handling code:
A recent study on social networking came to my attention yesterday and it sparked a discussing with Bevan that we vowed to continue on the blog. The study which surveyed 13,000 adults between 18 and 65 in 17 developed nations found that 58% did not know what social networking is (30% in the US).
DrupalCon Szeged is fast approaching and though we are a sponsor, I’m sorry I won’t be able to attend. A number of my colleagues from CivicActions will be there though including Doug, Robin, Kevin, Jozef, look for them in sessions and at the Day 1 Exhibition.
Via Noneck The New York Times reports that TV networks including CNN are creating one reporter bureaus to file stories, not only from far flung countries but also American cities.
I really don’t like Captchas, the squiggly words that many websites use to protect forms from spam bots. Unfortunately, sometimes they are the only thing that can protect a site from clever spammers. Yesterday I heard a great story about reCaptcha, captchas that are used to crowd-source digitizing of old print books and newspapers on NPR. If you have ever tried to use a scanner with OCR, you know that it can be pretty hit or miss.
Last night I was scheduled to fly from New York’s JFK to Seattle on JetBlue. As the storm clouds gathered and a crazy thunderstorm gathered over the NY region I called JetBlue’s automated flight status service and was surprised to hear my flight was still on time. That was at 6:10pm.
Ethan just sent an email out to the CivicActions team about an upcoming training in using OpenOffice , the Free software desktop office suite that most of us use.
Owen put up a website that uses a math problem to get people to think about a very important number, 350ppm CO2 . I just turned is math problem into a short animated video using a website called GoAnimate.com . Watch my video below:
A few months ago I joined a new coworking space in Seattle, Giraffe Labs. Giraffe Labs grew out of a Seattle group called Saturday House . Well both got a mention on John Cook’s Venture Blog over at the Seattle PI . As founder Anders Conbere was quoted: