rants.org

If you’ve already seen Nina Paley’s excellent (and freely-distributed) feature film “Sita Sings the Blues”, then… tell someone else about this . YouTube is going to feature it on their home page starting at 9pm PST today. The full, feature-length video is already available from their site: If you like it, please consider donating to [...]

After fourteen years, my car has finally given up the ghost: I know it’s an inanimate object, but I still feel sad. 14 years is a long time. It was my first car, and hugely important to me both economically and emotionally (my parents bought it for me as a gift when I was 24 — thank [...]

The bike thief will probably never see it… but perhaps the thief isn’t the intended audience:

We’re brainstorming a grant application over at QuestionCopyright.org — lend a hand if you can. Here’s the paragraph from the foundation’s page that made me sit up and take notice (emphasis added): “Grants are also made to support efforts to strengthen areas that directly affect the context in which artists work. In 2006 the Foundation formally designated [...]

For those wondering what I’ve been so busy with the last couple of months: blog.launchpad.net/general/launchpad-is-now-open-source Everything I’d say here I’ve already said there .

I recently received this email (paraphrased), and didn’t have a good answer: I work in the federal government, writing documents that are sometimes published in the Federal Register. I saw in the New York Times a reference citing you as someone who would like to see the government use version control software. Keeping track of [...]

John Joseph Bachir and I did an interview about version control systems and open source development, way back in September of 2007. It was a great conversation, because he’s very technical but also interested in the social aspects of coding. Anyway, then all sorts of stuff happened, in both our lives, and the interview didn’t [...]

Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley’s beautiful and insanely inventive animated film, is playing in Dolores Park in San Francisco, at 8:30pm this Thursday, June 11th. If you can’t be there, don’t worry: you can either download the entire film on the Internet or order it on DVD. Nina has released the movie available under [...]

In Does the universe actually look like that?, Planetary Astronomer Mike finally satisfies everyone who looks at those beautiful photographs of galaxies in newspapers and wonders “Hmm, how much did they doctor that photograph to make it look pretty?” The answer turns out to be more complex than just “a little” or “a lot”. P.A.M. [...]

“390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.” You can’t make this stuff up.