Friends

http://img.metro.co.uk/i/pix/cartoons/nemi/Nemi140709_600x194.gif

Metro

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/poor_mans_stega.html

Hide files inside pdf documents: "embed a file in a PDF document and corrupt the reference, thereby effectively making the embedded file invisible to the PDF reader."

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011431.html

http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=139

Well, at least it beats those Evony ads…

Sept. 28, 1972

http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2009/07/lets-get-away-from-this-model-of-space.html

http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2009/07/found-while-mindlessly-trawling.html

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/?p=1626

I’ve been pretty heavy on the snark lately, for which I apologize. At some point I’ll have more to say about why, but for the moment I need to let that ride. But in the meantime, despite my complaints, take a look at what I go home to.

Have I mentioned that it’s pretty good to be me?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011430.html

This is a golden age for British science fiction, chiefly thanks to a wave of writers who are tackling an area their American rivals tend to leave well alone--far-future set, space-operatic, hard sci-fi. Americans tend to set their sci-fi in soft (ie, scientifically unsupported) near futures.

As it happens I think most of the British writers Jeffries singles out are worthwhile indeed, and some of them even do a good job of establishing the plausibility of their far-future tech. (Others neutralize readerly skepticism with artful handwaving, which is just as valid a technique. SF is not futurology.) But Jeffries' evident belief that SF set in "near futures" is "soft (ie, scientifically unsupported)" is simply daft--as if a review of Unforgiven were to begin by dismissing those classic John Ford films because they were all set in Czechoslovakia and starred the Marx Brothers. Unforgiven is still a good movie, but one might plausibly wonder whether the reviewer had actually seen any other westerns.

http://www.dorktower.com/2009/07/14/muskrat-ramblings-updates-and-down-the-line/

http://www.dorktower.com/?p=3940

I’m trying to get back to three strips a week. While I’m still pushed for time, I’ve been really unhappy with the flow of the strip while I pulled it back to twice a week (even if that was only intended as a temporary thing during Louisa’s first year). We’ll see.

In some bad news, Comics Buyers’ Guide has had to cut back on expenses due to the economy, and alas, alack, one of those expenses was Dork Tower. The editor says this is hopefully just a temporary thing, and given the feedback I get from the CBG staff and editors, I’m hoping so as well. Yet, for the first time in ten years, Dork Tower is exclusively a web-only strip. Or “webcomic,” as I guess the kids are saying these days.

This is a paradigm I’ve yet to get used to.

This is also a business model I need to figure out. While I’m notoriously unmotivated by money, the fact that there is now a Daughter involved and a College Fund to be funded puts a spin on things that wasn’t there five years ago.

On the plus side, while there are still massive slowdowns on the Gamespy server, at least the move to the new server is expected to be VERY soon.So hopefully the site should be super-fast and super-spiffy super soon.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wwdn/~3/dywjQEDwr6k/the-clockwork-century.html

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001282.html

Are you familiar with the term "meta"? It permeates many concepts in programming, from metadata to the <meta> tag. But since we're on a blog, let's use blogging to explain what meta means. If you've read this blog for any length of time you've probably heard me rant about the evil of blogging about blogging, a.k.a. meta-blogging. As I said in Thirteen Blog Cliches:

I find meta-blogging -- blogging about blogging -- incredibly boring. I said as much in a recent interview on a site that's all about blogging (hence the title, Daily Blog Tips). I wasn't trying to offend or shock; I was just being honest. Sites that contain nothing but tips on how to blog more effectively bore me to tears.

If you accept the premise that most of your readers are not bloggers, then it's highly likely they won't be amused, entertained, or informed by a continual stream of blog entries on the art of blogging. Even if they're filled with extra bloggy goodness.

Meta-blogging is like masturbating. Everyone does it, and there's nothing wrong with it. But writers who regularly get out a little to explore other topics will be healthier, happier, and ultimately more interesting to be around-- regardless of audience.

Triple-meta alert! That blog entry was me blogging about blogging about blogging. See? Painful. I told you.

Generally speaking, I am not a fan of the meta. It's seductive in a way that is subtly but deeply dangerous. It's far easier to introspect and write about the process of, say .. blogging .. than it is to think up, research, and write about an interesting new topic on your blog. Meta-work becomes a reflex, a habit, an addiction, and ultimately a replacement for real productive work. It's something I think everyone should watch out for, whatever walk of life or career you happen to have. In fact, I've come up with a zingy little catch phrase to help people remind themselves, and their coworkers, how toxic this stuff can be -- meta is murder.

Yes, you read that right. Murder. I mean it. If enough productive work is replaced by navelgazing meta-work, then people will be killed. Or at least, the community will be.

Joel Spolsky had a great example of how meta-discussion can kill community in our latest podcast.

Let's say that you become a podcaster, so you get really interested in podcasting gear. You're going to buy some mixers, and want to know what kind of headphones to use, what kinds of microphones, when should I do the A/D conversions, all that kind of stuff.

So you find this awesome podcasting gear website. And you go on there, and the first subject of conversation is who's going to be elected to the podcasting gear website board of directors. And the second subject of conversation is whether the election that was done last year was orthodox, or was it slightly ... was there something suspicious about that whole thing. And you find a whole bunch of people arguing about that. And then you find a conversation about whether all the people who came in last year from South America and don't speak very good English should be allowed to hang around or should maybe be read-only users for the first six months.

That's all you find there, and you want to talk about mixers and mics. That's why you came to this site!

But they're bored talking about mixers and mics -- they've already had the full mixers and mics conversation all the way to the end, to its logical extreme. They all have, now, the perfect podcasting setup. Except for there's this one minor little thing about whether you should use Monster Cables that people still argue about.

So all they're talking about on this so-called "podcasting gear" website is the podcasting gear website itself.

If you don't control it, meta-discussion, like weeds run amok in a garden, will choke out a substantial part of the normal, natural growth of a healthy community.

The danger and peril of meta has been known for years. We had Josh Millard, a MetaFilter moderator, as a guest on the podcast last year. He described how quickly MetaFilter realized that meta-discussion, if not controlled, can destroy a community:

Millard: Matt set up MetaTalk sometime like 8 months after he started [MetaFilter], right about the beginning of 2000, because people were talking about MetaFilter on the front page. It's natural enough. People would say, hey what's with this, hey look at the post, hey this guy's a jerk. So he started up MetaTalk and directed stuff that was metacommentary to that part of the site. You could delete something and say, hey take it over there. If people wanted to have an extended argument that was derailing a thread, they could do it there.

A lot of people cite MetaTalk as a reason that MetaFilter works. If you talk to a regular from the site they'll tell you MetaTalk is key to the success of the site because it's a sort of release valve. Talk pages on Wikipedia are a similar thing. I had the same experience as you the first time I checked those out -- it's not necessarily comprehensible to the casual user what is going on there. But for the people who are regulars, the people who develop a certain amount of passionate attachment to the sites, or really, really need to make their voice heard out of day one beyond just normal participation, you have this safe place you can let people ... let their freak flag fly, as it were, without damaging the core function of the site. You don't have big messes on the front page.

So there's a pretty strong culture of regulars who hang out on MetaTalk. Insofar as you have the big contributors and the serious regulars at any given site that make up the core of the community, there's a strong correlation between those people and the people who actually spend time on MetaTalk dealing with policy stuff and talking about user issues.

Atwood: Right. I totally get that. This is one of the things about designing social software -- you don't really understand it until you've lived through it. For the longest time I couldn't understand why people couldn't respect the rule we had to not discuss this meta stuff on the site itself. I totally get this now.

We've dealt with our meta problem on Stack Overflow, finally. OK, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to finally do what I should have done months ago, but what else is new?

Anyway, my point is that meta isn't just a social software problem. Meta is a social problem, period. It's applicable to everything you do in life.

Software developers are known for their introspection, and a certain amount of meta is healthy. It qualifies as sharpening the saw -- mindfulness of what you're doing, and how it can be improved. But it's amazing how rapidly that can devolve into a crutch, a sort of methadone for Getting Things Done^tm.

So sure, get meta when it makes sense to. But do be aware of what percentage of the time you're spending on meta. And consider: how is progress made in the world? By sitting around and debating the process of how things are done ad nauseam? Or by, y'know ... doing stuff?

Allocate your time accordingly.

http://www.bennee.com/~alex/news.php?wl_mode=more&wl_eid=1275

From the start of the experiment I was keen to ensure I was insulated from the vagaries of corporate idea development. This is why I micro-blog on many different networks and prefer sites using open APIs that are compatible with free software. Unfortunately I walked into that trap when I renewed my subscription to last.fm earlier this year.

My current preferred music player is Banshee which had admirable support for last.fm until recently. Unfortunately without the original founders and new corporate interests it looks like it will be hard to get a license key for FLOSS software, being by it's very nature open to inspection. As soon as you need a document signing on behalf of a loose knit community things get tricky. I do have a fall back solution of running the Flash radio player in my browser but it's not the ideal solution as it puts me at the mercy of Adobe's Linux support and of course isn't open source**.

I think it is time to break out the scripts and start importing data into libre.fm just in case the rules get changed again.

* Other micro-blogging sites are available but I suspect #tweets have won the naming race.
** I know it's a shock I'm running Flash. It was all iPlayer's fault. I try gnash every now and again but I can't get even get YouTube to work though it is supposed to.