Awesome Liberal Quote of the Day

"If corporations and people are the same under the law, then two corps in the same industry can't merge. That's gay marriage."

Pale Blue Dot

On the 20th anniversary of this image where Voyager 1 turned around from four billion miles away to take a shot of home that we have never seen before. It was taken on Febuary 13th, 1990, on Valentine's Day.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

-Carl Sagan

NPR Article of the image

Awesome Geek Quote of the Day

"Star Fleet is what we liberals want the military to be: compassionate, judicious, strong and above all, humane."

This one is about what some would call lies

Mike wrote a post which I was going to write a comment on until I realized I was approching multiple paragraphs in length. Instead of summerizing go read it then come back here.

Done? Excellent. One of my personal mantras is to use the right tool for the right job. Creating content for the World Wide Web is an interesting phenomenon in that so much (I would wager most) of the content created is intended for a limited audience. We want to share our lives with our fiends and familey. In the 1990's we did this with Geocities (RIP) web pages. Blogging came around so people began to blog about their cat Fluffy. Social networking came and then microblogging. 

As each technology matures its role develops maturity. I made fun of people who had my space pages, I made fun of people who blogged, and I make fun of people who use Twitter for publishing to the world frivilous things that mean nothing to anyone except for their limited audience. Sharing our lives with the world seems to be at the forfront of this technology. Does that mean traditional blogging is dead?

I strongly disagree. The right tool is needed for the right job.  Blogging is dead for the small things intended for a small audience. But how could this post exist in Twitter where I can fully embellish my thoughts? Or Mike writing his book review? Or content that is perminant. I can't tell you the number of times I searched for old posts at Lifehacker for a gem of information that I wanted. How could Bad Astronomy or 538 exist as anything but a blog? And the readership for the popular blogs seems to be growing. A blog thrives when it has a genral topic it focuses on, the information is itended for an audiance larger than a circle of friends, the information requires more than 140 characters, and the information is to have some perminance. There are now better tools to talk about Fluffy.

This evolution is somewhat aligned with the evolution of the web. It started with static web pages with one direction content devlivery. Then came what is now known as Web 2.0 where the end user contributes content. Digg and Stumbleupon are examples of this. Blogging can be as well but usually does not realise this. Most blogs are no different that a geocities page with a comment section. The power of blogging comes from multiple people contibuting to the same blog. It would be like Mike and Dan or Derek and myself having a blog together. Or Derek witing for a larger accounting blog. You get the idea.

The problem with the current state of the Internet is the "Many inbox" or "Many Island" problem. Blogs, facebook, Twitter are all seperate islands that I need to check. In order to follow Mike or Derek or Joe the Plumber I need to log into facebook, check the blog ( or my rss reader), check their twitter, check Wave, check email, check my instant messenger. Who knows what I miss from Derek because I don't check facebook that frequently. Here comes the semantic web to fix that. Or as it is also regretfully known as, Web 3.0. Google Buzz is the start of this. If I want to know what Derek is up to I look up Derek and it pulls all his posts and blogs and tweets and facebook updates into one place for me to view. The ultimate maturity of this would be to search for a topic and a semantic web browser will aggrigate all the information into one dynamic web page for me to view.

But now I drift from topic. Is blogging dead? No. The question remains what is the best tool for what you want to do?

Building a City Builder

I love Sim City. Sim City 2000 was the first computer game I bought. $55 was a lot of money back in the 1990's (I should note the absolute cost of computer and video games has remained somewhat constant). SimCity 4 is considered the prime cute of the city builder genera to this day. Sim City Societies was a joke and Cities XL, well, is not doing so hot. So some of us enthusiasts got together to make 

And I am in charge of programming the terrain engine. It is at the point where I think it is good enough to share. (Textures are a work in process)

Here is how to run the thing.

* Install the panda3d runtime (3 MB)

* Head to this webpage to run the prototype in your web browser.

Refresh this webpage and you should see the demo box below. It will warn you that this program is self signed (I made it, it is me! It doesn't have any viruses I promise!), accept the certificate and play away. Right mouse button pans the camera, middle rotates, and it is buggy as all hell.

I <3 Key of D Major

HacKey is a website which scans the music you reported to your Last.fm profile and determines what key you prefer to listen to. D major wins for me with 14%!

From Download Squad