Wikimania goes Global

Posted on March 29th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: fly-by-wire.

Wikimania opens its web doors a crack, with translations of the site progressing in six languages. The conference is going to be *amazing*. I can’t wait. And I can’t wait to tell you all about some of the fabulous speakers we’re going to have…

Wikimania goes Global …

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Technorati goes global

Posted on March 29th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

Technorati is launching a translation initiative to maintain its interface in a dozen languages. I love it :) You can get involved here.

They need translators who know Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian…

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Breaking News : Indonesia hit by Mag 8-8.5 earthquake

Posted on March 28th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Southern Indonesia. One? two? underwater quake[s, 3 minutes apart]. Potential for a tsunami in the next 3 hours. Forbes, English Wikinews

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Nahuatl as Written makes my week

Posted on March 27th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: fly-by-wire.

“iuhqui ce loca omocuep cenca quitepexihuia” : like a crazy woman, throwing her soul over a cliff, into the abyss

This is an excerpt from a petition submitted by Leonor Magdalena to the governor of Coyoacan in 1613, in which he discusses the insanity of his widowed daughter-in-law. Provided in Nahuatl with English gloss by James Lockhart, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA, in his lovely work “Nahuatl as Written“.

What would make my month, would be getting access to a digital copy of the entire encyclopedia of Aztec society that one of the friars made while there was still a large body of living elders who had lived much of their lives under the Aztec empire — Fray Sahagun’s 12-volume Florentine Codex.

Codex Florentine will be a juggernaut next year…

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InstaSet’s sweet-smelling shit

Posted on March 25th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

I just snagged an InstaSet AM/FM Clock radio with blue display, to replace my aging red display, in the hopes that some proto-Doppler effect would rub off on me. (It must have worked; today, without even plugging it in, I was up at 7am, and literally itching for 9 to roll around so I could start making business calls… a rarity since I stopped running my own shop.)

It has a mini clockchip that’s installed on manufacture; keeps the time for three years. No setting. Has decent speakers, decent reception, no annoying antennae-extension. I plugged it in, the radio tuned in. The default alarm time was 8:25AM, fine by me. The tuner and volume-wheel were sensitive and nicely done. The buttons for switching times and modes were cheap and stuck, moving jerkily; I’m glad I won’t have to press them often. What a beautiful piece of junk.

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OurMedia arrives; Wikicommons burden lightened

Posted on March 22nd, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.


 OurMedia project, which aims to host public media of all kinds, and to provide permanent URLs for it. They have been working for months on ways to collaborate with other citizen’s media collections like the Wikimedia Commons. Previously, the effort needed to get media hosted by the internet archive was prohibitive — 10 minutes of registration, ftp, and https, and a 24-hr moratorium while submissions were vetted for suitability.

The project looks beautiful in alpha (congrats, guys!), and has a fairly active self-referential blog, including such things as highlights and trivia about the project.

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Sexy Web surfboard waxes wiki

Posted on March 21st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Surfwax Inc is a 7-year-old search portal and knowledge-tool provider with atrocious website design and a love of bizarre nomenclature, which has brought you such well-known marvels as
Nextaris, the all-in-one search/upload/store/social-networking portal, and the infamous Surfwax Scholar Plagiarism Guard.

They regularly receive praise for their featureset from such prominent critis as SearchEngineWatch’s Gary Price, and [cl]aim to offer “the best grip on information from the Open Web,” and have been offering visitors “Look-ahead” auto-complete searching for a while. Now they offer look-ahead wiki searches as well, and claim over 600,000 Wikipedia terms (perhaps this means that ~80,000 terms are not counted in the official article count; if they were including all redirects, it would be more like 900k terms).

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Picture of the Day

Posted on March 20th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.

A glorious experiment… hooking up an old rocket engine to a shopping cart. This fabulous picture highlights the metal of the engine and exhaust pipe, mid-trip, while it is glowing red with the heat. Wow! While I’m at it, all the other links in its conceptual cluster (1, 2) are also pretty fly.

Picture of the Day …

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The lost Aesthetics

Posted on March 19th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

We have gained and lost many things as a ‘civilization’, that name we give to peer-to-peer systems of organisms that satisfy a certain combination of longevity, information dissemination and preservation, discovery, and aesthetics beyond the thrill of battle. That last clause is perhaps the most recent addition to the mix; and perhaps the most contentions. (Although as far as I’m concerned each of those clauses should be contentious.)

It is interesting that, although we prize aesthetics as one of the cornerstones of civilization (when we think of that abstraction at all), among the discoveries and advances we have lost are certain aspects of aesthetics. It is not that they have been lost to individuals, but to society as a whole, and to our notion of common sense. And this is a notion that is socially-developed and passed on; these are again key properties of civilization, so please don’t nag me about how difficult it is to coordinate passing on mores and sensibilities.

In among the lost aesthetics is a universal sense of perspective, and the beauty thereof. Excessive precision is ugly (but we see it everywhere; it is the default nowadays). So is near-infinite longevity; things should naturally fade and disappear, and this should be understood from the beginning, relished, and planned for — yet we as a civilization spend much of our time building things, letting them languish, and epxressing surprise and dismay when they start to fall apart (often compounding the problem with ineffectual patches).

Comments on how we have never had such an aesthetic, how awful this conception of ‘civilization’ is, how we have never actually known civilization on Earth, and other rebuttals, are most welcome.

On a bright note, I saw a fuzzy clock for the first time today, on a KDE installation. It gave the time in words, not numbers, rounded to the nearest five. “quarter to nine“, it would read, “twenty past nine“, “five till ten“. It was beautiful.

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Wikipedia hits 500K

Posted on March 18th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

I was going to share with you a little something about Hieronima de Paiva, a Portuguese jew and Elihu Yale’s companion in Madras (now Chennai), but I don’t have time right now. Instead let me note that the English Wikipedia reached its 500,000th article yesterday, about the Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.

Articles were being written at a much higher rate then usual today, peaking at 150 per hour as the milestone approached. For comparison, the previous full 24-hr period of editing saw the creation of 915 new articles.

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