I recently saw this video of author and journalist Michael Specter. He makes the argument that recent fear mongering over science in our society will be the ultimate undoing of us. While rather extreme in claiming that, I agree that there is way too much distrust in our culture over Science. People misunderstand what it is and compare it to a religion with falsified rhetoric and anecdotal claims.
If you sit down and watch this video, I highly recommend that you do, I think you’ll see the point Mr. Specter is trying to make rings very true in our culture.
I’m fortunate enough that my company will be sending me to Drupalcon 2010 this year. I couldn’t make last year’s Drupalcon in DC for various reasons, but I’m going to make up for it this year. I think the hardest part about going to one of these conventions, especially one that is as robust as Drupalcon, is that there are so many sessions and things to do that you really wish you could clone yourself. To start, there are a number of major players (people that are highly influential in the Drupal community) that will be attending and there is a lot of networking to do, not to mention the information packed sessions.
Drupalcon 2010 San Francisco
One session I’m really looking forward to is “How Drupal Works: An Architects Overview” by, Jeff Eaton. I met Jeff about six months ago during a training session Lullabot had provided for the group of people I work with and I’m hoping to hear a lot more about Drupal during this session. Even though I’m not a back-end developer, I’m still very curious to see an overall view of how Drupal works behind the scenes.
Another really important session I want to see is “Drupal 7: What you need to know.” Drupal 6 has been around for about 2 years now and the latest version of Drupal is coming out later this year. Not everyone is going to be making the transition from 6 to 7 right away but I still think I’ll be dabbling in Drupal 7 right away. After all, it is the future of the CMS. This session is being run by Angie Byron (Web Chick) who I believe has worked with Google and is a major core contributor to Drupal.
With all of that said, that’s just a brief snippet of some of the events I’m looking forward to. There are a number of others that involve Drupal theming and using certain modules that I haven’t mentioned, but I’ll be sure to detail them on twitter and blog about them once the conference is over.
I recently subscribed to last.fm for about 4 bucks a month. You get a few cool features that present your musical data in unique ways. One of them is a utility that combines pictures of your most listened to artists into a collage. Here you can see all the music I’ve been listening to over the last two years. There are also utilities to create timelines and tag clouds that are visually intriguing.
I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated but I just wanted to announce the recent site I’ve finished. http://www.commerce.gov/open
Department of Commerce
The site was built on Drupal and it is apart of the Open Government Initiative mandated by the Obama administration. Feel free to check out the site and add any feedback you may have regarding the new initiative.
I’m going to be reorienting the content of this site in the next coming weeks to reflect an open government perspective. I will also be focusing on web development, and most importantly Drupal.
A lot of people are heated over the government changing their policy on cookie usage. Most notably the ACLU. I’d like to try and clear this up for all the conspiracy theorists and paranoid people out there.
The reason they are using the “tracking” cookies and why they want to change the policy is important. Government websites are notoriously out of date and the reason they can’t take advantage of newer technologies is the policy against using persistent cookies. Now that the policy is possibly going to be changed the government plans on overhauling all the government websites to use the latest web technologies to better serve the public (you). This isn’t a big brother scheme to control your life. The only things these cookies tell the web servers are:
your IP address
any information YOU supply to the site (name, email, phone number)
when you visited and how long
This practice is no different than Google, Facebook, Twitter, or even this site. You can call it tearing down freedoms but it’s just a fact of modern web technology. These cookies are essential to how the web works and they enhance user experience.
I can’t wait for this to come out. Looks like I’ll have to upgrade my rig. Doom 3 was groundbreaking when it came out I can’t imagine what games are going to look like in five, even three years.
Above and Beyond is probably the hottest trance act on the scene right now. Every week they mix trance from all around the world, hence the name. I’ve pointed out this session in particular because it’s got a great mix of Dirty Vegas’ song Tonight. Check it out below. If you don’t want to download the whole set you can watch the YouTube video below too.
This is the ultimate way to stealthily share your most sacred torrents. It’s a pretty ingenious design too. The service converts your torrents into png files then you can decode them and download them later!
You save the png yourself. You can post it anywhere. People can decode it, but it can’t be searched for… it won’t turn up in searches for those torrents, unless you provide text that matches.
Moon in the window and a bird on the pole
Can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal
Clap hands, clap hands05:41:45 PM July 29, 2010from Gwibber
