garykamen / blog

08-24-08

Identi.ca - The Twitter Replacement

FLOSS Weekly had an interesting conversation this week with Evan Prodromou, creator of Open Source Twitter clone Laconica. The idea behind Laconica makes so much sense in light of the continuing downtime problems with Twitter. It basically lets individuals host their own Microblogging service that connects with others’ using the XMPP protocol. What does this mean? If one goes down, the entire community isn’t affected.

Additionally, whereas the Twitter backend was built like a content management system, Laconica was built like a messaging system. The result is significantly less burdensome to the database. A working implementation can be found at identi.ca.

08-24-08

Gnomedex 8.0

Just got back from Gnomedex 8.0, easily the most interesting yearly conference I’ve been to. In a nutshell, Gnomedex combines geek culture with tech, and usually a few surprises mixed in. I usually come back knowing a bit about something I previously knew nothing about. This year it was Cyborgs.

Nathan Wade, quite possibly the most well-spoken college junior, gave a talk on how he synthesized art and technology to create “Serial Cyborg”, a wooden sculpture derived from simple MRI scans of a human head. From one angle it looks more or less like a human skull. From another, you can make out specific facial features.

The most entertaining presentation came from Ben Huh, owner of the Icanhascheezburger network of websites. His presentation was centered the website’s rise to fame, focusing mostly on the statistics of growth. And of course mixed in were some relevant, hand-picked LOLcats. While Ben did not create the original website, he is directly responsible for its monumental growth and expansion in recent months.

Given the nature of this conference, there are certainly loads of attendee-created galleries and videos around the net. Flickr seems to have the most attendee-submitted images, and Ustream (where it was streamed live during the event) has plenty of videos.

$Gnomedexers listen intently to Sarah Lacey\'s presentation on problems faced by the growing Blogosphere (credit Shashi Bellamkonda)$

Gnomedexers listen intently to Sarah Lacey's presentation on problems faced by the growing Blogosphere (credit Shashi Bellamkonda)

06-11-08

The Iowa Floods

Flooding continues across Eastern Iowa today in what they’re saying is going to be the worst in several decades, if not centuries. As is the case during most community catastrophes (which have been all too common the past few years), the Iowa City Press Citizen has devoted a significant portion of it’s website to flood coverage. These arial photos of Iowa City will give a good idea of how bad it already is.

Taking off work tomorrow in the morning to to assist with sandbagging. Water levels are expected to expand at least another five feet before the water crests next week.