Jono Bacon has released his book “The Art of Community” under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license, which means you can download and read it legally.
If you like it, follow the author’s advice:
- Firstly, buying a copy sends a tremendous message to O’Reilly that they should continue to publish books (a) about community and (b) under a Creative Commons license.
- Secondly, it will encourage O’Reilly to invest in a second edition of the book down the line, which will in turn mean that communities around the world will have a refreshed and updated edition that is available to them.
- Thirdly, aside from the voting-with-your-feet side of things, it is just a really nice book to own in print. It is really well made, looks stunning and feels great to curl up with in a coffee shop or on the couch.
Via Pedro Custódio
I don’t recall exactly when I saw Blade Runner for the first time. I remeber seeing it when I was very young, on national television, with my mother, who by the way, introduced and exposed me to Sci-Fi at an early age.
Years passed until I watched Blade Runner again, I was 19 and this time it was the Director’s Cut on DVD, one of the first I bought. Watching this movie at this age is something of a life changing event, you have a different sensibility, understanding and maturity which is indeed needed to appreciate a movie like Blade Runner. I have friends that until this day don’t understand the greatness of Ridley’s masterpiece.
I became a fan, of the movie, of the wonderful Vangelis soundtrack (which btw I’m listening right as I write this), of all that derranged world / universe and necessary darkness needed to make it work. I read Philip k. Dick’s book that was the source for the adaptation “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and even got the excellent Blade Runner game from Westwood.
Blade Runner is a 27 year old movie, but it still manages to be up to date, which is incredible. In todays movie industry, movies are made like fast food, ready to be consumed and disposed of. But BR is more than a sci-fi flick, for me, Ridley’s Blade Runner (along with Gibson’s Neuromancer) defined the concept of Cyberpunk in perfection and set grounds for a whole generation of sci-fi works.
The latest iteration of Blade Runner is the Final Cut, which it’s the only of the 7 BR versions that Ridley Scott had complete artistic control. This is also known as the “25th Year Anniversary Edition” since it was released to celebrate BR’s anniversary. This is probably the most common edition to be found on stores, and it’s one of the best to watch. The image and sound has been remastered and there’s a Full HD version on Bluray. Still, if you really want a crash course on Blade Runner, get the 5 Disc Collector’s edition with the Final Cut, the 1982 Theatrical Version, the 1982 International Version and the 1992 Director’s Cut. This pack also includes the excellent documentary Dangerous Days which tells the compelling and controversy story of the movie’s production. Amazon.com has it for $21.99 and it’s region free, meaning you can watch it everywhere, and while you’re at it, get the 25 Year Anniversary Soundtrack, you won’t be disappointed.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Until a few weeks ago, the netbook market / scene was a bit of a unknown thing to me. I lacked the information mainly because I was never attracted to small notebooks and netbooks felt into that “class”.
What made me change my mind? Well, my wife often mentioned she would like to have a smaller notebook than her 15.4″ Dell to take to school. That and a trip we made this vacation 
I needed to take a computer and my 17″ Macbook Pro was out of the question since I would need it to check maps, info and e-mail on the go. So, a few days before this trip we went to take a look on the local Vobis / Worten and evaluated the offer.
The Asus EEE PC 1008HA was indeed the most balanced of them all, taking in perspective what we both needed: a light netbook. I was still split between the Asus and an Aspire One, but the Asus had Wifi N and a bigger hard drive, not to mention the screen quality that is amazing.
But enought chit chat, here’s my take and notes on the Asus 1008HA:
Pros
- Very light, only weights 1.1 Kg
- Stylish design, similar to a MacBook Air
- 160Gb HD
- WiFi Draft N and Bluetooth v2.1
- Functional Keyboard
- Multitouch Touchpad
- 6 hours unplugged computing with Super Hybrid Engine (Asus’s energy managment app)
Cons
- Plastic sheel feels cheap and fragile in some areas
- Windows XP bundle
- Non Removable Battery
- No easy access to RAM and HD
- 1.1 Mpixel Webcam has a crappy framerate
The Netbook behaved very well on the go, the battery time is amazing and it seems to last forever, and it’s a good thing because there’s no way to use a second battery. Due to the Seashell design, Asus limited all the expansion on the machine. The battery is not user removable neither is the RAM or HD. To replace these three components you need to disassemble the machine.
One of my frustrations was that there was no bundle with Linux, Asus seems to be kissing Microsoft’s ass again with Netbooks, so the first thing I did after getting home from the trip was to try to find a decent operating system for the Netbook. The candidates were:
- Windows 7
- Fedora 11
- Jolicloud
- Ubuntu Netbook Remix
Windows 7 installed very well, the only problem I had was with the ACPI and graphics card. Flashing the 1008HA with the latest bios solved the latest problem, and the other one was solved with a hacked ACPI driver I found on the web. There are still no Asus drivers for Windows 7 but the ones the system installs work rather well. The problem with 7 is that with a default configuration it ran slower than XP, consuming a hefty 450Mb of RAM without no other application loaded. Oh and it was slow as hell to boot. So, on to the next.
Fedora 11 looked beautiful for the first 5 minutes. It all seemed to work out of the box, even wireless and it booted rather fast from the CD I was using. One of the first problems I noticed was that the it wasn’t optimized for netbooks, Gnome dialog boxes were huge and often the OK / Cancel buttons were offscreen. When I tried to install it to the hard drive it failed afer creating the partitions and exited the installation program, leaving me with a damaged installation. I might try it another time but for now… next!
I was very eager to try Jolicloud but the alpha is still invitation only, and since no one on the Interwebs was kind enought to send me an invite, I only managed to try the OS without the cloud part… It seemed like a heavily modified Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It worked very well out of the box and the eye candy is very cool. Sadly for me the most interesting part of this system is the cloud… so, on to the next one.
Enter Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a netbook oriented Ubuntu, which seems to be the most common base of a boatload of netbook linux distros. I installed UNR 9.04 and guess what? Wireless and Ethernet didn’t work. It was Google time and I finally found this guy’s post on the 1008HA and exactly the same problem I had. Three commands and a reboot and Networking is back, my luck is that I also had an USB Ethernet adpter that UNR immediately recognized. After taking it for a quick spin, it seems I found a suitable OS for this netbook.
Of couse I’m not stoping here, as I’m writing this I’m installing UNR 9.10 Alpha to check if there are some significant improvements over 9.04. After that I’ll probably try another 2 or 3 distros, but I think it will be hard to surpass UNR 9.04. Unfortunately not everything works with UNR as well as it works with Windows XP, since there are no Asus drivers for Linux either. So don’t count with some keyboard combos and the Super Hybrid Engine on Linux, at least for now.
Ending this loooong post: The more I play with this netbook the more I wish that Apple would release a netbook or a smaller version of the Air (still I wouldn’t mind having an Air). I think that once you go Mac it’s hard to look back.
Notes
To get wireless working on UNR 9.04:
sudo apt-get update
Reboot
then:
sudo apt-get upgrade
Reboot
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty
Reboot only needed after modules installation. (Thanks Tiago!)
Last year, when Google released Chrome I wrote this.
Some might say it was futurology, but I say it was the most logical step of evolution. The fact is, I think I was really close on Google’s plans for Chrome.
If you want to upload modified or standard operator carrier settings to your iPhone, just type this in your terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
This way you can upload the settings via iTunes without having to install the previous beta versions that allowed this by default.
Much has been said since Facebook allowed the new “vanity URL’s” (or user url’s like I rather call it, since vanity urls is purely an american expression adopted from the vanity plates they have in their cars).
Most of the posts about this are from users bitching about the way Facebook roll out this feature, allowing the users to choose any alias to be used in http://www.facebook.com/whateveryouchoose regardless of their username, unlike Twitter that has http://www.twitter.com/username. Others rant about the fact that Facebook should have provided something like http://user.facebook.com, forgeting that Facebook has milions of users and something like that would have a termendous weight in their DNSs…
But, as always, there’s something good to learn. One of the posts I read about this subject (no link, sorry, can’t find it) mentioned a cool way to give your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, [insert your favorite social network here] URL’s to other people, that is, if you have your own domain.
In my case, my domain is odrakir.com, so I created some subdomains redirecting to the social networks I use the most:
- http://facebook.odrakir.com
- http://twitter.odrakir.com
- http://flickr.odrakir.com
- http://linkedin.odrakir.com
- http://delicious.odrakir.com
This way, I can give an url that’s easy to memorize and always mentions my “brand name”, cool enough to use on a visit card
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