Reasons to not hire Bruce Sterling into Red Hat’s marketing department

#1

    It’s a Red Hat automobile. There’s no digital rights management. When it wore out you’d just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff — stuff — not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff.

From here

Screenshot2.jpg (JPEG Image, 1024×768 pixels)

Screenshot2.jpg (JPEG Image, 1024×768 pixels)

Another screenshot of webcollage, this time in color. Maps and stuff!

I think a nicely constructed collage of maps of random
places (constructed so as to make maps of places that
dont exist) would be a nice art project.

Or, if your more agit, find a way to replace maps in
malls, theme parks, rest areas, etc with maps with
made up roads, all the names changed, etc.

Heck, just printing out your own “You Are Here” stickers
could make for some good natured juvenile fun.

Starting poking around more of the rss/rdf and related bits sites.
I think I see why people like it now. It is a land ripe for silly hacks.

Not exactly sure how all the tech/weblog cliches seem to
have ingrained into so many people fiddling with this stuff
though. I want to retch every time I see “smart mobs” or
“emergent networks” or “audblogs”. More than a little
fanaticism. But then, that can be a
good
thing.

I decided all the web based aggregators and all
the gui readers sucked. Or at least, all the ones I tried. I really
have no urge to run a app server locally I have to talk to
via a web browser. Or fire up another large gui app to read
text.

So I found rss2email
and hacked it up to deliver to local mbox files. Seems to work.
Probabaly not actually useful, but what the heck.

Screenshot.jpg (PNG Image, 1024×768 pixels)

Screenshot.jpg (PNG Image, 1024×768 pixels)

This is two two two posts in one!

So I started messing with webcollage. I hacked it up
(oh my is my perl rusty, to say the least…)
to do google image searches on random words and numbers
along with “OR diagram OR chart OR graph OR figure OR plot
OR map”. So I get back lots of well, graphs and charts and
maps and the like.

Just for kicks, I told google to only grab black&white and
greyscale images. Sample results at the link above.

Which brings to part two, which is LJ This!.
Which is a possibly handy litte bookmarklet for
posting a url into a lj entry. Aka, how I created this
entry.