Well before the US declares war on Iran, which most pundits believe will happen before dubya is out of office, I thought I would show some of the art coming out of Iran.
The Iranian Who's Who of poster design has some great works, all peppered with that wonderful arabic script…
Coming in may 2005…
With Martin Freeman (from The Office) as Arther Dent, Sam Rockwell (matchstick men) as Zaphod Beeblebrox and Warwick Davis (willow himself) wearing the marvin costume, hopefully accompanied by the original voice.
The google roundup for the most popular searches is out. No real suprises, the american corporate sluts have the first 4 most popular searches…showing that porn still is the most popular thing on the net.
It is interesting that linux is the 5th most popular 'tech' term searched for, perhaps 2005 really will be the year of the penguin…
Seems one of the martian rovers has accidentally run itself through a rover-wash. Over the past few months it has produced almost twice as much power from its solar panels as the other rover.
The scientists think it is because of winds in the crater it is currently exploring, but haven’t ruled out the possibility of martian squeegee guys…
No, this isn’t some weird story about a geek with a unusual love for microsoft software. It is a humorous look at what it would be like if your girlfriend acted exactly like Internet Explorer.
Her capability to multitask is non-existent. If you want her to perform several tasks, you have to invite one of her identical twins for each task you want performed.
Great Stuff…
The classic wired article which shed new light on the marketing and distribution possibilities created by the internet is now being turned into a book.
The creator has also started a blog to publish the research and ideas which will eventually be tied up into the book.
Found a good piece about the state of BitTorrent and other filesharing networks, and why the MPAA's decision to go on the offensive and mimic the un-thoughtout actions of the RIAA (and their ever so successful campaign to stop people swapping music) was such a poor one.
As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today's suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn't. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster's heyday. The suppression of Napster led to a profusion of alternatives - Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent.
I guess it really shows where the creativity lies, the only thing the middlemen can do is what the other middlemen have tried and failed doing.
One of the First things that got onto my blog was about peer-to-peer umbrellas, which connect through adhoc wireless networks to enable social contact etc…
Well a group of car manufacturers (including BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Renault, Fiat…actually pretty much all of the big euro companies) are working on a similar technology for their cars.
Potentially this will be able to warn other vehicles of bad traffic, accidents and rough weather in certain areas.
Wonder if you will be able to digitally swear at people for cutting you up, perhaps with some kind of automotive DDOS 
A few fantastic shots of the canadian artist, Roadsworth. A guy who makes road markings into interesting graphics, simply by adding bits to them.
Suprnova.tk (later .org) the worlds most popular source for torrent files closed over the weekend. The site had been running for some years, and often received over 50 million hits per day. But Sloncek and his band of happy @'s decided to close the site due to constraints on time.
This is probably one of the biggest hits to the torrent community, although it isnt the only one to go dark. Since the MPAA started targeting torrent sites last week (even though they only provide links to content, not the illegal content itself) quite a few of the other sites have closed, either due to cease-and-desist orders or actual raids.
Reading the writing between the lines, I believe the site has been shutdown so the admins can concentrate on their pet project, the decentralised bittorrent client known as 'Exeem'. They also probably don’t want to worry about being raided anymore…
This is what happens when these sites get noticed. I was suprised to see a direct link to suprnova in a wired article about BitTorrent about 3 months ago, but since then it has been mentioned by reuters, bbc and even the nytimes. This is far too much publicity and unfortunately made them enemy number one. Exactly the same downfall as napster…
As always this has just spread the traffic out, a note on the site of another torrent site The Pirate Bay pretty much says it all
The site might be somewhat slow, as we suddenly got a huge jump in traffic…
I doubt they are the only ones to experience this…
Well this photo pretty much sums up where I have been this weekend.
A fascinating contrast to London…cold pure beer, silent & punktlich tubetrains and no real pretense of fashion
This is probably one of the saddest things I have seen. There is actually a large group of people having a debate as to which browser Homer is using (above).
However they are all certain of one thing…it isn’t IE because it has tabs…
A couple of ubergeek mathematicians have crochet'ed a physical manifestation of chaos. The Lorenz equations are represented by 25,511 stitches which took 85hrs to do.
Wonder whats next? Julia perhaps?
The double page spread advert for Firefox is ready to run in the NY Times…It is hoped to coincide with the 11 million download mark being beaten.
Found this entertaining article about the concept of structuring your procrastination. The basic idea being that if you have a couple of important tasks to be done, then you can get many other less important tasks done while you are trying to avoid the important ones…
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
A nice idea, why am I not suprised that it is written by a university lecturer though…
