Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

I love the web and its ability to feed my brain (whilst sucking up my free time). The problem of course is that there is so much cool stuff out there that you just don’t know about.

For instance, on Digg I came across a nice visualization showing the edits to the “Evolution” article on Wikipedia.

I was curious to see what the source of the visualization was but there was no credit on the image. Looking in the comments for the post I didn’t find anything about the source but I did find this link which shows the public acceptance of evolution in various countries around the world. It is interesting to see where the USA sits on the chart.

Mmm, looking at the URL for the original visualization I could see that the image was hosted on Amazon’s S3 service and contained a reference to twittypic. A quick Google search turned up this site twittypic.com which monitors Twitter looking for images and video that are referenced by tweets, in the assumption that things that are referenced to by lots of people would be of interest to others. Nice idea.

Sure enough on Twittypic I found this post which referenced the original picture which was hosted at _http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/images/discover_mag.jpg_ shortening the URL turned up the Visual Communication Lab at IBM. Clicking on their projects link turned up (amongst other interesting things) history flow which was the tool used to create the visualization.

Wow, so from a Digg post I :

• Gained insight into the Evolution vs Creation “debate”
• Found out how widely Evolution is accepted
• Found a new site (twittypic) that I’ll be adding to me RSS feeds
• Found some cool tools for visualizations from IBM (check out Many Eyes)
• and added some more stuff to the web by writing this post

Love it…

I came across this t-shirt site a few months ago called Threadless, not only do they have some very cool T-shirt designs but they are all user created.

The idea is that you design a T-shirt, upload the design and if it gets lots of votes then its gets printed! Better yet if you design gets chosen for printing then you get $2000 cash and $500 of vouchers.

So since it is a bit rainy today, I created my first t-shirt design and submitted it.

_[Updated]: alas my design got bounced back as needing some tweaking so it is now in critique mode. Check it out and let me know what you think: http://www.threadless.com/critique/34044/Hello_waveform_

Oh the cuteness. This web feed shows a bunch of Shiba Inu puppies at sleep & play.

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Here are some more animal cams for you…

Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.

Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:

• Game plays: Minimum 500,000 per day
• Game types: Web-based Flash only
• Integration: Must be technically capable of SDK integration
• Traffic source: Must be 80% US & UK Traffic
• Content: Family safe and targeted at users age 13 and up
• Distribution: Must be able to report embed destination and have control over where games are distributed

I’m having visions of playing Counterstrike and seeing dynamic ads on bullet-ridden billboards in the future…

The second bit of Google news is their first images from the new satellite GeoEye-1 which will be used to update Google maps and Google Earth imagery. Apparently GeoEye-1 is the world highest resolution commercial sattelite with a resolution of 50cm ! Google sightseeing should get really interesting now and those naked sunbathers better have satellite position timetable handy.

It’s Googles 10th birthday and they have put together a neat little timeline showing major milestones during their history.

I was particularly impressed with how their home page has evolved over the last 10 years, nice and simple all the time with just minor tweaks and content changes along the way, all hiding more and more features.

One of the things that bugs me most about NZ politics is that there isn’t a political party that I actually like.

Every election I basically sift through all the FUD to try and identify the parties that seems less likely to screw things up. I then cast my votes and hope that for the next 3 years the winners don’t go off on some tangent and introduce a law or bill that I don’t want and I don’t have any input into.

So today I was rather intrigued to see a Google ad at the top of my Gmail account that read: “Wanted: Six Members of Parliament” with a link to www.icount.co.nz.

Turns out icount is a new political party that was established last month, that has very interesting twist: Basically members of the party to get to vote (via the icount website) on issues before Parliament. The icount MPs then present and vote in Parliament in accordance with these polls.

This allows everyone to have input into the government all the time!

I very much like this idea. For years I have been saying that this is they way a government should be run. I was thinking publicly accessible electronic voting booths, that anyone can vote at on any issues that they wanted to provide input on, but using the web is a good start.

Of course for my electronic voting booths to work you would have to issue everyone with a nice unique and secure form of identification and this would freak out the tin-foil hat wearers. Not to mention that we have all read about the electronic voting fiascos in the USA.

Which raises questions about security for icount, I did some digging around on their site but they did not seem to have any obvious information on questions such as how they avoid vote rigging, what security policies and procedures they have, how do they know that their members are real etc.

Still icount is an intriguing idea and is likely to attract people like me who would like to have more input into what goes on in our government, not to mention the “social networking” generation for who using the web is as natural as breathing.

Found this very nice “design” site called NOTCOT.org. Its tag line is ideas+aesthetics+amusement and its interesting picture oriented layout and content certainly does just that.

It covers art, architecture, websites, advertising and the like, I always seem to be able to find something of interest here.

For example today’s links includes:

Pi10k – This experiment attempts to convert the first 10,000 digits of pi into a musical sequence. you pick the scale or ten notes of your choice and watch it go.

Stop motion Gmail – To promote in Russia Gmail, Google along with the agency Saatchi & Saatchi, manually created a giant gmail interface in stop motion.

Oslo Opera House – Construction progress of the new Oslo Opera House by Snoetta Architects. The project is based on slopes, converting the roof in a massive public space.

Staircase bookcase – A cool staircase combined with a bookcase design for a small apartment.

Check it out.

Grabaseat now has an official blog.

The intro text reads:

“Welcome to the official grabaseat blog. Here you will find behind-the-scenes information and great ‘insider’ tips for grabaseat.”

Should be interesting to see what info lands up there. Check it out at http://grabaseatnz.blogspot.com/

I’m forever running out of books to read and never quite make it to the library so my interest was piqued when my friend Tim told me about a website you could download free sci-fi from.

I was thrilled when I visited the site and found that the books were from authors I knew because to be honest, many free books are not really that good.

The Baen Free Library is fantastic, it contains a large number of free books from the Baen catalog. The site is a little hard to navigate so this link will take you straight to the download pages (hosted on another site).

I would highly recommend:

• The Honor Harrington series by David Weber
• The Legacy of the Alldenata series by John Ringo (very hardcore sci-fi military, so be warned)
• Elizabeth Moon
• Andre Norton
• Mercedes Lackey

The books come in a variety of formats, HTML, RTF etc. I have found that downloading the RTF format and then using OpenOffice to generate a PDF works really well.

If you are not using OpenOffice then download PDFCreator and you will be able to generate a PDF from Word by printing to the PDFCreator “printer” that the software installs…

Apart from the free books, you can also purchase other books in the Baen catalog from the site and get them in electronic form, quite a bit cheaper then buying the paperbacks.

The following is the currently list of authors with free books:

• Aaron Allston
• Andre Norton
• Christopher Anvil
• Catherine Asaro
• Lois McMaster Bujold
• John F. Carr
• Paul Chafe
• Rick Cook
• John Dalmas
• David Drake
• Rosemary Edghill
• Linda Evans
• Eric Flint
• Michael Flynn
• Dave Freer
• Mark A. Garland
• Scott Gier
• Roland Green
• Ellen Guon
• James P. Hogan
• Sarah Hoyt
• Karen Koehler
• Mercedes Lackey
• Keith Laumer
• Murray Leinster
• Holly Lisle
• Duncan Long
• Elizabeth Moon
• Howard L. Myers
• Charles G. McGraw
• Larry Niven
• Jerry Pournelle
• John Ringo
• Richard Roach
• Fred Saberhagen
• James H. Schmitz
• Ryk Spoor
• D. W. St. John
• Harry Turtledove
• Lars Walker
• David Weber
• K. D. Wentworth
• Michael Z. Williamson

Happy reading…

So I have a new site up and running. Its called whatistheinternet.info

The site is an easy to use introduction to what the Internet is and how it works. It will have a strong focus on security and safe surfing as well.

Currently its very basic but check it out anyway.