Hoje é dia mundial da poesia

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I’m not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there’ll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

— Charles Bukowski

Grande surpresa! Google Chrome no topo dos browsers

Hoje estive a dar uma vista de olhos às estatísticas do blog e para minha grande surpresa o Chrome ascendeu ao topo da lista dos visitantes do último mês (e eu não utilizo o Chrome, pelo que não há bias!)

Browsers

  1. Chrome 37.26%
  2. Firefox 24.78%
  3. Internet Explorer 22.62%
  4. Safari 11.64%
  5. Android Browser 1.11%
  6. Opera 0.99%

Sistema Operativo

  1. Windows 73.83%
  2. Macintosh 17.32%
  3. Linux 3.31%
  4. iPad 2.02%
  5. iPhone 1.29%
  6. Android 1.20%

Resolução ecrã

  1. 1280×800 17.65%
  2. 1366×768 15.28%
  3. 1024×768 13.20%
  4. 1440×900 9.50%
  5. 1280×1024 6.80%
  6. 1920×1080 5.86%

O Novo formato do Jornal Público

É só para dizer que não gosto muito deste formato “quadrado”… prefiro jornais ao alto, estreitos, que se possam dobrar ao meio e ler ao bocadinhos conforme me dá prazer. O novo formato do público segue novas tendências, mais modernas… mas eu sou assim resmungão. Talvez dentro de uns anos nem me lembre do formato do Público ou de outro qualquer jornal impresso, de tal forma estarei habituado a ler online… mas até que a memória me atraiçoe fica o meu desabafo. Fora o formato venha o conteúdo. Continua a ser de há muitos anos o “meu” jornal (apesar de muitos pequenos aborrecimentos que tem e coisas que não tem).

#pl118 – Updated Statistics on the Portuguse Copy Levy discussion

#pl118 Tweet Count

After almost 22 days of fight against the #pl118 it’s time to update some statistics. First, we have the daily tweet count of the #pl118 hashtag on twitter.  It’s interesting to notice that it seems to show a 10 day cycle, although this can’t be taken as strong evidence of anything as more data points are needed.

#p118 tweets by hour of day

Second we can see the daily distribution of tweets about the #pl118 copy levy that the government is trying to pass. As natural, discussion follows the circadian rhythm of Portugal with almost no tweets during the 3am-7am period. If you’re interested in participating in this vivid discussion, the best time of day is between 17h and 20h and between 22h and 24h. It’s also curious to notice the bump around lunch time when people seem to use their break to tweet their opinions on the #pl118.

#pl118 Tweets detail by hour of day

This final stat show’s the above two plots condensed into a single image. You can see how the tweets on the #pl118 stack up by hour. You can see that they are pretty much stacked in hour groups probably reflecting moments of strong discussion when new information is available and then rapidly fading away.

Note: Data for Jan 29 was only available up until around 8am.

The coming war on general computation

The video of Cory Doctorow at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress during the last days of December of 2011 is a must see to anyone interested in the Copyright wars and the attack on general computation. After yesterday’s blackout it is important to see this.

Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation

The copyright war was just the beginningThe last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.And general purpose computers can cause harm — whether it’s printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other “trust” mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can’t inspect or terminate, that run without users’ consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don’t want them to.The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.

The full transcript is also available.

#sopa, #pl118 and #pipa half baked stories…

It looks like SOPA has been put to sleep for while, but that doesn’t mean much when there’s also PIPA (Where do they get these names?). PIPA is not as known as SOPA but basically does the same thing, allowing DNS censorship.

Around the burg the #pl118 is a bit dormant and most of the online traffic as been from retweets of scattered texts. Although there’s many users online (according to some sources Twitter gains 11 new accounts per second), there are lots of trolls and hashtag surfers.

I’m working now on a “social graph” of the #pl118 tag and the main results show a strong hierarchical structure of the network with this theme being highly centralized in very few individuals. Remove those nodes and probably the meme is gone. New individuals need to join the fight against #pl118 to make the conversation more sustained and robust.

(The above pic is from the #pl118 graph. It’s not complete, so in the next few days I’ll maybe have a more details.)