Category Archives: nrrrd

culture, musings, nrrrd

yasns

Do we really need yet another social networking site? Of course not. (Do we even need any?) But do we want one? Maybe.

Lets review the current options:

  • Myspace
    • Pros: Band profiles & page customization
    • Cons: Broken, ugly, sketchy
  • Facebook
    • Pros: Great UI, web2.0 tricked out
    • Cons: Online identity defined by your workplace or college (not hip)
  • Tribe
    • Pros: Based around communities instead of individuals
    • Cons: Only worthwhile if the bulk of your friends attend burningman

Enter Virb. Dripping with slick & hip. Profiles for bands, artists, and non-profits. Hooks right in with flickr. Easy to customize, with a built in css editor. Best part? One click and you can remove the customization of any page.

virb

friend me?

[via cameron]

musings, nrrrd

My Dad is a Mad Scientist

bookworm

For years, whenever someone asked me what my father did, I would answer “computer scientist.” If pressed for more information, I would sheepishly mumble “I don’t really understand it” and something about a non-disclosure agreement.

But now, for the highly curious (and patient), the answer is now publically available. If you have any interest in comp sci, linguistics, or how to make del.icio.us more intelligent, you may wanna check it out. For the less curious, the press release below is worth reading if only for the entertainment value of my middle-aged father pretending to write as me, his college-aged daughter.

My highly obscure dad, Alan S. Rojer, has spent recent years wandering in the wilderness of computer science and linguistics. He begs me for online promotion to help rehabilitate his status as a citizen of the infoverse.

One of his patent applications, Web Bookmark Manager (App. no. 20070043745), was recently published by the PTO and he wants the world to know. Less for the particularities of the bookmark manager than for the implicit demonstration of methodologies he’ll be hawking eventually. So anyone interested in programming methods, knowledge engineering, or bookmark management, have a look:

Even better, grab the pdf.

Truly masochistic geeks could also try his older published applications, but don’t blame me if your eyes glaze over. Mine do. But if you’re so inclined, go here, and search for rojer in inventor name:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html

He claims, not very convincingly, that products will be released this year. He has said that every year since 2002 or so.


animation, art, friends, linux/open source, musings, nrrrd

Adventure Time!

Awesome animation featuring wonderful motion, trippy yet innocent imagery, believable (if not entirely original) characters, and math-inspired exclamations like “algebraic!” Reminds me a bunch of a certain pair of brothers from back home…

This actually aired on Nickelodeon in January, as a short in a show called Random! Cartoons, a revival of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Oh Yea! featured 3 animations each episode and by the end of its run had produced 99 different 7-minute cartoon shorts by a variety of animators. If Adventure Time is any guide, this present incarnation is something to be excited about. Maybe even a reason to start watching TV again.

But perhaps even more exciting, especially for those of us who would prefer to keep the tv off, is that the same producer, Frederator Studios, does a weekly internet cartoon show/podcast called Channel Frederator. The cartoons are submitted by animators from all over the world and each week they choose the ones they like the most. The downloads are high-quality, free (as in beer), and have no commercials (at least the few episodes I’ve watched). You can watch it in iTunes, but I prefer DemocracyTV. So far, I haven’t seen anything as rad as Adventure Time, but I’ve only watched maybe 4 of the 72 and counting episodes. 72 episodes! That’s a whole lot of animation. So ditch your homework, watch some cartoons, and let me know if you find anything good!

art, comix, illustration, linux/open source, nrrrd

cute way to learn to code

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Why’s (Poignant?) Guide uses cartoon foxes and pure silliness to teach (hipsters and pre-teen girls?) how to program in Ruby— the sleek, simple, and much hyped about scripting language from Japan. Perhaps not the best choice if you’re used to O’Reilly, but for those more familiar with Achewood and Cat and Girl, the Poignant Guide could be a fun way to pick up some skillz.

activism, cambridge, event, free culture, made by me, nrrrd

Opening Up To Open Access

Free Culture talk this Wednesday:

Opening Up to Open Access Flier

Governments worldwide invest billions of dollars in research every year. Yet the results of this research— a treasury of medical knowledge— are mostly privately owned and sold only to those who can afford the costly article fees or journal subscriptions. While there have been several movements in the scientific community to fix this problem, solutions for the social sciences and humanities have not been explored in depth.

Opening Up to Open Access
A Discussion with Gavin Yamey, Public Library of Science

Wednesday, March 14, 2007
7:30 – 8:45 PM
Sever 202, Harvard University

Cookies, brownies, and drinks will be served.

Sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Public Policy and Harvard College Free Culture

For more information about PLoS, please see http://www.plos.org

flier
facebook

activism, free culture, linux/open source, made by me, nrrrd

Open Access Day & Linux Desktop Publishing

Open Access Day Bookmark (Harvard)Thursday was the National Day of Action on Open Access (I’m a bit late with this post). To celebrate, I designed some informational bookmarks for the Free Culture groups at Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern. We distributed a few hundred of them in college libraries. This was my first project using Inkscape and I am quite pleased with the application: simple, intuitive, well-documented, and open source. Vector graphics are a super way to work. One nice perk of Inkscape is the ability to cleanly export to Adobe Illustrator format, which hugely simplifies dealing with the printer.

In the spirit of the day, I used not only open source software, but also Open Clip Art and free fonts (Dustismo and Nimbus), so the project is totally free. I’m so glad that creating decent-looking desktop publishing on Linux is now painless. In 9th grade, I spent days trying to get pretty fonts to work with Gimp, and now they’re just an apt-get away. To be fair, that was 5 years ago and I had no idea what I was doing. But now I don’t need to know squat. Yay!