The Daily Thing

Lets say you’re working on a web project and you only have a certain number of pixels wide for some text. Maybe you’re tired of the traditional greeking and want to do something different to show your designer flair. My friend have I got the site for you, blindtextgenerator.com

blindtextgenerator.com does what similar sites do by allowing you to pick the number of paragraphs that you want but it does so much more. See what your font would actually look like in pixels, change the greeking to Kafka, Panagram (the quick brown fox), a-z A-Z 1-9 (great for picking font families and faces), or even use an excerpt from the play Cicero in original or english.

Open up the advanced options and you can even choose from a palette of regular fonts found on the web, change the font weight, style, line height, font size and then, when you’re all done, grab the css for it right there on the page.

Google unveiled it’s Knol service yesterday – a Wikipedia-eque service that allows users to write topics and post photos on a specific topic for money.

WSJ.com: “By trying to provide such content, the service is likely to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, whose articles tend to rank highly in Google search results.

In an interview, Cedric Dupont, a product manager for Knol, described the service as a way to improve Google’s search results by making the ‘information in people’s heads’ searchable. While Knol entries won’t be given any preferential treatment in Google’s search algorithm, Knol entries that are highly ranked by users could surface higher in search results if they are established to have quality content, he said.

Google’s service differs from the user-generated Wikipedia online encyclopedia in a number of ways. In particular, rather than stick to one article on a topic, Knol will allow many articles — making it as much a collection of individual blogs as an online encyclopedia.

Users also attach their names to Knol entries. Others can comment on, but not edit, their work. (Wikipedia allows some users to edit others’ entries.) Users can also elect to run ads sold by Google on their entries and can share in the revenue from them.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said it ‘is a bit early to tell’ whether Knol will generate the sort of content that would make it a Wikipedia competitor. He said it seems ‘far more like a collaborative blogging platform’ that he expects will generate ‘a lot of opinion pieces rather than encyclopedic content.’

Google’s service is just one of a number that try to make it easier for users to self-publish articles and establish their authority online. But many such services have struggled to gain scale and to give users incentive to post content.”

If you’re interested in publishing your own Knol check out the Google Know page at http://knol.google.com/

Here’s a funny photo I found on Flickr and a couple of possible captions. What captions would you make to go along with this photo? Post them in the comments.

“From the minute he pulled up out front Tom suspected his day was about to get worse.”
“Ed’s Marine…something to take spray paint off a boat?”
“(Ramon the gardener to Pedro) Leaves we rake. Clothes no.”
“Well atleast she didn’t find my bowling ball.”
“(The Husbands friends) Now all we have to do is wait for him to put a ‘For Sale’ sign on it and we got a cheap boat.”

Photo by steviebreech via Flickr.

Holy crap! The Bush Administration is going to shut down the web page that gives stats on what the economy is doing?!

http://www.economicindicators.gov: “Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (http://www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008.”

Ok…ok…enough is enough. They don’t have money to run a website that I can run for $95 a year but they want the biggest budget ($3.1 trillion) in the history of the United States passed?

Pirate Bay isn’t shut down but took a major hit today as 4 people were indicted for copyright infringement.

The Local – Four indicted in Pirate Bay case: “Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström, are suspected of organising and running The Pirate Bay, and thus “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws,” according to charges filed by senior public prosecutor Håkan Roswall.

According to the prosecutor, their work with the site has meant that they “promoted other people’s copyright breaches.”

The charge sheet includes 33 cases of alleged copyright infringement, of which twenty involve music, nine are movie-related and four refer to computer games.

The prosecutor has called for the accused to pay damages of 1.2 million kronor ($185,000) to the Swedish state. He has also asked for the suspects’ computers to be confiscated.

Evidence gathered by the prosecutor includes information provided by the suspects as well as interviews with staff at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency (APB), a non-governmental organization representing the entertainment industry.
“

Following on the heels of Facebook who opened the door for developers to begin making widgets and programs to work on the Facebook platform last October, MySpace has announced their own developer platform will go live next week letting potentially thousands of developers begin writing code people will be able to use on their Myspace page.

washingtonpost.com: “Interested developers will be able to sign up on the site to receive information about the MySpace Developer Platform, announced in October. Then next Tuesday, the developer site will become fully operational and feature documentation and API tools to build and test applications for MySpace, the world’s most popular social networking service.

Although over the years MySpace has allowed, on a case-by-case basis, some external developers to put their widgets on the social networking site, the upcoming program potentially opens the door to any coder by providing open APIs and makes it possible for developers to generate revenue from those applications.

‘This gives developers deeper access to our community through APIs so they’ll be able to build richer applications and also gives them an opportunity to build their business directly on MySpace. It’s a natural step in the evolution of how we’ve worked with third party developers,’ said Amit Kapur, who has just been appointed chief operating officer after being in charge of business development for several years. “

Personally I think this is about as useful as a discarded pee soaked diaper. MySpace is already so full of bloat-ware and e-trash it’s less than useful and more than annoying. But that’s just my opinion.

Two years ago a virtual plague unintentionally spread across the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft now researchers want to study the dynamics of the virtual plague to see if it can help scientists model and predict the spread of real world diseases.

Ars Technica: “There were a number of features in the virtual outbreak that actually mimicked the spread of and response to real-world epidemics. A key feature was that the disease could be carried by the game’s ‘pets,’ the virtual equivalent of domesticated animals; this behavior is shared by SARS and avian flu, among other diseases. The game’s teleportation acted like air travel in allowing the disease to rapidly go ‘global.’ The humans controlling the players also mimicked the behavior of real populations during historical epidemics. As the populations of cities were wiped out by the disease, surviving players began avoiding them, and any large groups of players became scarce in the surrounding countryside.

It took only six months for the first academic analysis of the outbreak to appear in the journal Epidemiology. The article highlighted the advantages of the WoW incident, comparing it favorably to existing computer models that ‘are limited in their potential to account for changes in human behaviors during epidemics.’ At the same time, it recognized that virtual characters might not accurately track all normal human behaviors.

On balance, the analysis in Epidemiology felt that virtual worlds might provide a useful supplement to traditional models of disease spread, and suggested working with game programmers to test a variety of disease conditions. ‘Multiplayer online role-playing games may even be useful as a testing ground for hypotheses about infectious disease dissemination,’ the author said, ‘Game programmers could allow characters to be inflicted by various infectious diseases, some of which may not be visible to the player, and track the dissemination patterns of the disease in specific subpopulations.’ It looks like something of the sort is in the works. A report from the Agence France-Presse indicates that Nina Fefferman, a researcher from Tufts University, is currently negotiating with Blizzard about running epidemiological tests in WoW.”

Do you believe everything you read on Wikipedia? You wouldn’t if you knew who was changing what. Recently Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith did a little sleuthing and uncovered some very scary data on who is editing articles on Wikipedia and what they are changing.

Griffith created a searchable database tying millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated. By cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses he was able to ascertain who which organizations were editing articles.

One of the most interesting was Diebold who removed large swathes of articles by security professionals critical of the companies voting machine technology.

Here are some other interesting changes made to Wikipedia.

Republican Party Spins Post-Saddam Iraq
Someone at the Republican Party HQ changed the entry on the history of Iraq’s Baath Party from “US-led occupying forces” to “US-led liberating forces.”

Texas Attorney General criticizes (and redefines) use of ‘Insurgency’ in Iraq
In the talk section about the term Insurgency, someone from the Texas Attorney General office declares that “The violence being perpetrated in Iraq is not an insurgency… The mass media press refers to the terrorists as insurgents since to call them by their rightful name would be to admit that the U.S. and its allies ARE fighting the war on terrorism.”

Tulsa church edits “Origin of Species”
Creationists edit “Origin of Species” article to say it is an “arguably mostly fictional” work. They also add completely fictional claims that Darwin argued that “There are no limitations to natural selection” and “All species evolved through natural selection from a single cell that lived 3.6 billion years ago” which are not in any way, shape, or form in Darwin’s writings (any of them). So much for no bearing false witness.

Dell removes spyware accusations
They remove content which claims their PC’s come with lots of promotional and spyware-like software.

You can check out more of what’s being edited over at http://wired.reddit.com/wikidgame/ and read the full article by Wired Magazine over at Wired.com

A New York company has developed what they hope to be the next generation tattoo ink that makes the popular body embellishment removable with only 1 laster treatment instead of the current 6-7.

Discovery News: The process starts with pigments free of heavy metals and other toxins that can induce an allergic reaction or produce other health problem in some people. Clear plastic beads encapsulate the pigments, and are mixed in a solution so tattoo artists can use the pigments the same way they would use ink.

“The pigment is homogenously dispersed in the capsule to get the right color,” said the microcapsule developer, Edith Mathiowitz, a professor of medical science and engineering at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Once the tattoo is etched into the skin, the design is permanent. But unlike conventional tattoos, a Freedom-2 tattoo can be removed with a single laser treatment.

The laser bursts open the microscopic beads so the tiny particles of dye can be absorbed and removed naturally by the body’s immune system. Regular tattoos require six or seven laser treatments to break down the various colors of ink.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, is looking to capture the business market by releasing a tool to administrate servers and desktop machines across a broad network. This is the first time a Linux distributor has sought to directly infiltrate the office environment largely held by Microsoft.

ArsTechnica: “Landscape makes it possible to remotely deploy patches, updates, and packages. It also provides extensive support for reporting and resource-usage analysis across groups of systems. In order to provide more flexible group management, Landscape allows administrators to organize groups of systems by using tags. Launchpad also includes an auditing framework that can show a history of actions performed on the local system as well as changes made by an administrator through Landscape.Landscape has support for ’semi-connected management’ functionality, which will queue operations for systems that aren’t currently online and then perform the tasks when the system is once again network accessible. Semi-connected management makes it possible to manage systems that don’t consistently have connectivity, like laptops that are deployed in the field.”