TECHPopuli

Journalism Code of Ethics

Society of Professional Journalists: Code of Ethics.

How much of this stuff should apply to non-commercial bloggers?

Real Genius sequel ?!!

Rumor is they're gonna make a sequel to one of the all-time best geek movies.

Hackers conference demonstrates RFID tracking capabilities

One of the world's premier hi-tech conferences, the Chaos Communication Congress, has set up an interesting way to illustrate the capabilities (and weaknesses?) of RFID chips.

Wired News:

Hackers are paying 10 euros each for the privilege of hanging special homebrew RFID tags around their necks or slapping them on their laptop bags. Every few seconds, each of these "CCC Sputnik" badges reports its owner's position to an array of 35 monitoring stations, and spits out the guinea-pigs' every move over a public XML feed.

Why is the CCC, a venue more commonly associated with RFID cracks and spychip destruction devices, supporting such an invasion of its members' privacy? One of the project's leaders, Milosch Meriac, explains the motivation to create the system was to make obvious what is normally hidden in how our technology tracks us.

Dvorak was right

This week's This Week in Tech is a clip show from their first 9 episodes back in 2005.

It's fun to listen to the early days of this ground-breaking podcast, and it's interesting to hear the stories that were big back then.

Perhaps the most interesting bit is John Dvorak's analysis of Apple's change to Intel processors. His description of what it would mean, and what would happen, was just about right on. Impressive.

Electromagnetic catapult for launching material into orbit.

Ever since The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I've believed that a mag-lev catapult would be the ideal way to get things into orbit. The problem is that to do it with reasonably low g-forces, the track would have to be really long.

The solution: insanely high g-forces, going in a circle.

popsic.com:

...a high-speed accelerator that whips a projectile as heavy as 220 pounds around a circular 1.5-mile-radius vacuum tunnel. Powerful electromagnetic motors inside the tunnel will accelerate the unit, strapped to a magnetic sled, in circles until it reaches a velocity of six miles per second and then will eject the projectile from a launch ramp into space.

Now with Markdown!

Although I've decided to stick with BBEdit as my editor, a few interesting things have come out of my evaluation of TextEdit.

One is the discovery that I could add Markdown as a plugin to my blogging software, Movable Type.

I've been using Markdown in many of my webpages for a long time now. I prefer the plaintext formatting it allows.

Now I can use it to format my blog postings as well.

New version of digg.com site

digg has made some major changes to its homepage. They've moved a lot of things around, changing the layout, and navigation.

And my favorite change so far is that they've changed the "top stories" calculation to be based on a "rolling" time period. So instead of "Top stories today" they have "Top stories for the past 24 hours". This makes for much more interesting info. Now the top stories list doesn't reset every day at midnight.

It's a genre.

I'm peppy!

Evaluating TextMate

At the DevHouse Boston gathering last weekend, I noticed that by far the most popular text editor was TextMate.

I'm a LONGTIME BBEdit user. I have a lot of time invested in knowing its capabilities, building custom tools like scripts, personalized keyboard equivalents, glossary items (aka clippings), and just plain muscle-memory.

So I'm reluctant, for many reasons, to just jump to another editor. But as I wandered around last weekend, asking people why they preferred TM, I decided that I needed to give it a look.

I've been using it off-and-on since Sunday. And the jury is still out.

It has many interesting capabilities. Not the least of which is its being so smart about helping you to type all sorts of common things in building html pages, and doing php scripting. These are sorta like the clippings and scripts I've built in BBEdit, but more.

One problem I've run into though, is that sometimes it seems TM is just too smart. It will insist on auto typing something that is really not what I wanted. And convincing it to yield, has occasionally been a challenge.

For example, simply typing one quote mark is tricky, 'cause TM thinks it's helping by also typing the close quote, then moving the insertion mark in-between.

And if you're replacing some selected text, like an apostrophe, instead of deleting the selected text when typing, TM thinks you want to enclose that selected text in the quotes. That's a very useful feature when it's really what you want, but when it guesses wrong, it can be a pain.

And finally, I'm finding TM to be very awkward for my hands. Its author is a self-confessed keyboard-shortcut fanatic. There are dozens, hundreds, of shortcuts, for all sort of things. But having so many shortcuts has necessitated using all kinds of combinations of the command, option, shift and control keys. I've found it awkward for my fingers to comfortably strike some of these combos, and there's so many of them that they are hard to remember.

Eg. was that thing I did before, command-control-T? or control-shift-T?

So there's a lot of learning curve. Is it worth abandoning all my long learned BBEdit skills?

Anyway. I have TM on the 30 day trial, and I'll continue to play with it. But the initial gleam is fading. I may instead try to figure out how to teach BBEdit to do some of this stuff through scripts. More on that later.

Mac/PC Parody Ad

Since I'm a Mac guy, I'm hoping that this is not a fair comparison of iPods and the Zune. But it is pretty funny.

Puppy Love

A crudely cute USB drive.

Low tech mosquito catcher

I wonder if this thing works? I think I'll stash it away and give it a try next summer.

Human survival depends on colonizing off-earth

I've pointed to this story before, and it demands a repeat. From the International Herald Tribune website:

Humans will have to colonize planets in far-flung solar systems if the race is to survive, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview Thursday as he was awarded a top honor.

"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet," he said in a radio interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe."