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Slashback: Beetle, Reading, Streams
Can you read me? Over. With both feet in the stream of continuing evolution and convergence of distributed voting, online metaknowledge and probably a few other things, Johnathan Nightingale has created a site called Canonical Tomes, lately featured on Kuro5hin.
It's a really cool way to approach the "top picks" in a given subject, and fun to browse especially in the fields you're not very familiar with: the trick is a community voting system -- visit it and pick your favorites.
It also raises the question, though, of how to avoid an early lead from remaining permanent; how do new but excellent books gain a foothold? And what about situations where the popular books aren't the best ones? Kudos to Johnathan for putting this together, now it's your turn to point out the best books in your field to others.
Gee, Wally, I can colorize you from this "Linux" machine! starlady writes "Linux.com has an interview up with the developers of GStreamer. GStreamer, as mentioned here before, is a full featured multimedia framework with functionality for everything from mp3 playback to audio and video editing."
An excerpt, quoting developer Wim Taymans: "First of all, GStreamer is a real framework. This means that it can be used for a generic media player as well as serve as the core of large multimedia render farms. The GStreamer core is built in such a way that it is media agnostic, it doesn't know or care what media data it is handling. The interpretation of the media types is entirely handled by the plug-ins."
And though everyone is excited about video, things like this will make Linux a lot more capable as an audio capturing and manipulation platform, too.
The real question is, did you get in trouble?
Regarding the dangling beetle which caused the city fathers of San Francisco some small consternation, Ms Golden Gate 2001 writes: "In case you're still fretting, or wondering, here are a few first-hand pieces of info about the stunt (I hope you guys weren't really believing what you read in the papers, now were you? ;-)
- the Bug was hung by cable and nylon webbing from a two-point suspension system (check the math -- that's not so easy: you try figuring out how to sling cable from *both* sides of the bridge to hang something nicely centred!)
- the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
- the first to be informed were the traffic helicopters
- the Ironworkers who cut it down (in minutes) thought the job was well done ("They could probably get a job as ironworkers")
- the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)
All that technology, and it's still nigh impossible to get the facts heard over the Brownian noise :-P At least this is a good forum for venting without swords!
P.S. It's National Engineering Week in Canada! (Look out below!)"
I've met some of the people involved in the beetle project and had the whole hanging procedure described to me. Let's just say, it wasn't easy and some people involved must have had balls made of steel.
As a former UBC engineer, I really couldn't wipe the smile off my face for days, not just because of the stunt but of the publicity that it caused and how it will help to increase spirit in the engineering faculty. Since i've graduated i've heard and seen less and less people come out to events sponsored by the Engineering Student Society. Something like this will (hopefully) show people that there really is more to school than just going to class and doing your homework...
I was very proud to be able to meet some of hte people involved and personally congradulate them for a job well done. Of course, I have no idea what their names are or what they look like anymore :-)
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
Couple of comments about the VW beetle hanging from the GG bridge:
the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
This isn't quite true. On the northbound approach to the bridge, coming from SF, there is a stretch of road (Marina Blvd I believe) that has a full sideview of the bridge, from maybe a mile away. By the peak of commute time, news of the event was all over the radio, so people were slowing down along this stretch of road to have a look.
So yes, you couldn't see the car from the bridge itself, but to imply there was no impact on the commute is very wrong.
the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)
Like Neal Stephenson says in Zodiac, ANYTHING you drop in the ocean will become a habitat, because that's where the fish live! Just because you dropped garbage down there and the fish start swimming around it, that doesn't make it a good, environmental thing to do. That iron and steel will be down there, rusting, for decades. For no good reason. In fact, I'm surprised they chose to snip the cables instead of pull it up, or instead of lowering it onto a barge.
--
Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.-- Cool Hand Luke