After reading on waxy.org about piracy and the 2008 Oscars , I found an interesting article about the limited availability of indie films on BitTorrent . I tend to have atypical taste in movies, I found this article pretty interesting. However, I don't buy one of the explanatory arguments that it offers: The very nature of...

Found an interesting research project documenting the adoption motivations and practices among companies that are using Rails. The top responses about companies' motivations, rails' features, and the companies' perceptions are, respectively: that companies desired "Increase[s] in productivity" (97.9%) that Rails is attract...

Here's a big surprise: the MPAA has been publishing grossly inaccurate research to corroborate their ridiculous claims about the cost of internet-based piracy and from where it comes. The original claim stated that 44% of the movie industry's domestic losses came from the illegal downloading of college students; the newly...

My server runs Gentoo Linux . Gentoo is a really neat distribution — it's main idea is to build everything in the system from source. This sounds like a truly odious task, but Gentoo's engineers have built an incredible system called Portage to deal with the pain of compilation. In fact, I don't think I've typed a si...

My experience with The Onion has always been positive. Most of their pieces teeter back and forth between plausibility and ludicrousness, eventually depositing the reader at the latter destination. I recall with fondness the first Onion article I read: it was so subtle and ironic that I didn't realize it was a joke until a...

To bungle some Edgar Allan Poe : THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he [ kicked my server's plug out of the wall ], I vowed revenge. Alas! So much for my 160 days of uptime. At least Jordan is a nice and helpful server poking utility (note: his pokes resurrected the server, not killed)...

Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith has performed an interesting data mining feat: correlating SAT scores to book preferences based on Facebook's college network statistics ( via O'Reilly ). He posits the findings as "Books that make you dumb" — a stupendously controversial title that's likely aimed at drawing p...