A great list of monospace fonts helpful for text editing and coding.
Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan
Smoking gun memo revealed, and while Blair is in a shitstorm, the U.S. media leaves the gloves off Bush.
Read the memo here.
Flash is Ajax, or Flash versus Ajax, at the Ajax Summit
O’Reilly Radar: it’s moved major parts of its interface to DHTML.
The Darth Side: The Tao of Sith
…Wait a moment. Do you even know the difference between the light side and dark side of the Force?
It must be understood that the Force is, above all, singular. The so-called “sides” arise from differing matters of perspective. (If you study the way of the Sith you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on one’s point of view.)
The opposite of the singular Force is the all-encompassing void of death. Time began with the Force, and will end in desolation. This is the way of things, and an inevitable consequence of the flow of events from the past into the future.
Without the inertia of the fall toward the abyss, the Force would have nowhere to go.
For in the chaotic tumble toward doom the stuff of the worlds enact loops of complexity that change the grade from life to death, introducing valleys, peaks and cycles. Between creation and destruction comes a flutter of improbability, a brief sonnet of meaning against the noise of time. Life!
It is the causal contagion that ties every ounce of us together through the network of the Force, our actions resonating against our almost-actions and our non-actions in a web of fleeting possibility that spans this galaxy and beyond. The beat of a child’s heart detonates supernovae, the beat of a bug’s wing tilts the orbit of worlds.
We are all connected.
Anyone who awakens to the Force knows this. The divisive issue is what to do with this knowledge.
When you can run the mechanism of the universe forward or backward, scrubbing through possible histories with a thought, a theme develops. You cannot escape it. Death, death, death. It is the final destiny of all things, great or small, matter or idea. But there is astounding beauty in the arts of the not-death, the filigree dances of life’s loops as it spins from light to void. If you are human, it moves you.
It should move you. But this is what the Jedi Order denies. They preach that the heart of a beast cannot judge the destiny of a galaxy. They preach dispassion and detachment, a condescending compassion for the damned. They stand by the sidelines and watch history happen, intervening only in trivia that offends their effete sensibilities.
Every Jedi knew the cycles of civilization, and every Jedi knew an age of barbarism was nigh. And yet they did nothing.
In contrast, the way of the Sith is predicated on a love for man. We have inherited the godhead of the galaxy by colonizing its every world. Though lesser species might have flourished given infinite time, it was our kind who got there first. We have won this galaxy with thousands of generations of our blood and our dreams. We call the others “primitives” because we are their kings.
And we will not sit idly by as it all careens toward a morbid interregnum. Inspired by our passions we will act to bridge the gulf between civilizations, shortening the period of disorder by decisively maintaining connections between societies from one side of the galaxy to the other. We will weather the storm.
Hate! Love! Misery! Joy! These are paths to the dark side, for to invest in the emotional life of civilization is to care about its fate. To care is to suffer, and suffering is real.
The Jedi were mere spectators.
They jabbered amongst themselves as a committee, no one of them wielding enough power to see through my master’s veil, their light resting on the shoulders of three. In contrast by the Sith way the Force is gathered and concentrated in a single individual, making him a catalyst for vision. With Jedi arts a gifted one can see the next moment — with Sith arts a gifted one can read the decade. The Force is focused through my master so that I might by way of his preternatural alignment also brightly see the many forked face of destiny.
Because of this the Dark One traditionally exhibits a bewildering confluence of humility and potency — the bleak peace of one who has seen the endless doom at the end of time and returned with an oath to steer life well.
The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster: The Tao Of Sith
Wow. Who is writing this?
Playlist reviews Yahoo! Music Unlimited
Non-profit news organization – voice of San Diego
I like what I see at The Voice of San Diego. Steve Outing wonders if non-profit reporting is the saviour of journalism.
A favorite Firefox extension – JustBlogIt
I’ve been JustBlogIt with Philly Future and paradox1x.org for a while now. It allows me to post easily to either with a simple right click. Check it out.
From mass market to niche nation
…Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler? In fact, says Mr Anderson, the idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent phenomenon: before radio and television, he notes, countries did not operate in “cultural lockstepâ€?. And the notion of shared culture is already in decline, thanks to the rise of cable television and other forms of market fragmentation. The long tail will merely accelerate the effect. There will still be blockbuster movies, albums and books, but there will be fewer of them. The companies that will prosper, says Mr Anderson, will be “those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches.”
Blogrolls or not?
…Certain behaviors are rewarded with links in weblogging; certain behaviors are not. It’s just that a certain class of weblogger (white, male, Western, educated, charismatic, pugnacious) has defined the ‘winning’ behavior in weblogging and what must be done to ‘earn’ a link, and this is what we need to change, if change it we can. We have to start valuing the poet, the teenage girl, the middle aged gardener, as much as we value the pundits, whether political or technological.
Bottom line: I want to be respected, I want to be heard, I want to be seen. I want to be visible, but I don’t want to be you.
But I digress, and badly. I’ve been chastized on this in the past, and how I am taking much of this personally. “But”?, I respond, blinking in puzzlement, “It is personal.”? Still, this was about blogrolls and whether to drop them or not, and how this could impact on the hotshot lists and will this end up making everything better – or, at least, more equal.
My short answer is: I don’t know.
She may claim not to know, but she gives thought provoking points for keeping or removing them. Do blogrolls contribute to less voices being heard? Do they encourage the worst or best in us?
For the longest time I had my personal blogroll off the front page of the site. I’m now convinced to put it back there, along with my favorite links. I feel, however, that in some cases, blogrolls can help solidify and surface communities and are a very important tool to do so.
Related: rebecca blood reflecting on her idealism. via dangerousmeta.
“It is vital that you enhance the inter-departmental syngergies of your operation,” I said. And then I killed him.
Just another post by Lord Vader. Death Star construction is picking up…