Posts

The recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policies are civil rights eroding and a maze of complexity in my personal opinion. Even being careful, using this bookmarklet showed me I was still leaking information despite my best intentions at plugging all the holes. So, if you value your privacy I really advise using it to make sure you’re sharing only what you want to share (and particularly now that your friends can inadvertently share information about you you wouldn’t want being shared).

Loved the BoingBoing subject for this post: Pew pew! For science! Lasers map ancient Mayan temples… ;-)

Scientists using LIDAR mapped 802 miles of dense jungle-choked terrain around Caracol in Belize… in under four days flying over the area with planes and ground pointing laser radar. Not only that, the laser mapping turned up stuff ground-based surveying had been unable to spot: house mounds, roads and farms.

So freaking cool. NYTimes: Using lasers to map ancient civilization in a matter of days

GetUp! has been campaigning for months with the nocleanfeed and EFA coalition to kill off Conroy’s Internet filter (read: censorship) initiative. Rudd has blinked and taken it off the cards for the election and is on the defensive. We just sent this rather epic video to our awesome superhero-like membership to thank the ones who took action and to urge everyone to keep up the pressure to pull the plug completely.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, check out our original CensorDyne spoof ad which started the campaign.

Really great blog post from Mark Cuban on the fact Wall Street has gone from being about value creation and allocating capital to arbitrage speculation and value hijacking .

The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market.

Watching the UK freak out over the prospect of a hung Parliament and a (gasp) minority government, while amusing I have to admit I’m never going to be sad to see the end of simple two party political systems. While proportional representation failed in Canada, I think it’s a good idea to take a queue from John Cleese’s beautifully sarcastic short on PR.

While I’m not sure anything can save the UK after living there, this would be a good start.

I’m posting this because someone I did a Hack night with hadn’t yet checked out the awesome rvm in order to muck around with Rails 3. If you’re a Rail or Rubyista you need to install it and start messing around with 1.9.x and the wonders that are Rails 3. Here’s how.

Rails is now at beta 3 which means a release candidate is right around the corner. While fundamentally more complex under the hood than 2.x (though the devs claim it’s easier to understand now), 3 provides some fundamental advantages (and some key changes) you probably need to get up to speed with if you don’t want to be left behind.

Another absolutely fantastic infographic via Information is Beautiful from CXO magazine on both how strong your password is and a nice extra layer of sociological categorization.

Mind you, I don’t think the top one is strong enough IMHO. Mine’s better… ;-)

Fantastic infographic from Information is Beautiful cutting through all the crap to give a clear picture of what each political party is forwarding in order to cut Britain’s whopping £167B deficit if they get into power. Love it for its clarity and conciseness.

I need this sort of graphic for the Australian election as well.

You kinda have to love this sort of creative interactivity. Lurv.

Solar Beat

Very music of the spheres-esque.

OMG, it is like a big audio hug.

Love the story behind it as well as how he managed to mix all the user submitted tracks. Very cool.

Long live the Sports Racers!