Some books
Some books I recently bought and that I'm reading now:
Ess, Charles & Fay Sudweeks (eds.) (2001) Culture, Technology, Communication. Towards an Intercultural Global Village. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Henwood, Flis & Helen Kennedy & Nod Miller (eds.) (2001) Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies. York, UK: Raw Nerve Books Ltd.
Jones, Steve (ed.) (1999) Doing Internet Research. Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. London: Sage.
Mann, Chris & Fiona Stewart (2000) Internet Communication and Qualitative Research. A Handbook for Researching Online. London: Sage.
More books in the Books and Print articles section.
Nov 2, 2001 @ 12:25 » no comments » Research
Quote
Hilarious quote of the week comes from an article in The Register:
"Microsoft stated, if I were to bypass the any parts of licensed documents, then I'd have four 900lb gorillas on my back," said Hedrick. "That's OK. I carry an elephant gun."
Nov 2, 2001 @ 18:55 » no comments » General
Final corrections
Yes, nothing much new here for a while... I've been logging stuff to put up here though, but you'll have to wait a little longer still... working on getting the final corrections on my forthcoming book done, title: The Words That Took Us There. Sounds familiar?
Nov 14, 2001 @ 10:07 » no comments » Research
One of those sites
One of those sites you continually forget you already knew, but still one of my favorites: Postmodern articles @ Elsewhere.org.
Nov 20, 2001 @ 11:05 » no comments » General
Shadowmarch
I forgot how I ended up there in the first place (I think I clicked a banner on some gamesite; as a rule I force myself to click on one banner every month), but Tad William's Shadowmarch site's been on my radar for a while now. I haven't read any of William's books, frankly, I hadn't heard of him before. That's probably because I'm not much into epic fantasy.
The site however is not just about the author and his book(s), but it actually tries to serialize the novel online, for a fee. You get the first 5 installments for free, plus a lot of background information, author info and a forum, but you're supposed to pay for reading new installments that appear online every 2 weeks. I'd be interested to know whether this site is actually paying off for the author and if unauthorized copies of the episodes make the rounds (probably, since it appears to be plain HTML, but I didn't search for it). I guess it all depends on the fans of the author and whether they feel they should be doing the decent thing and get a subscription. I know that if a site (like this one) gives me the impression of being a sincere effort of the author and not just some publishing house's scheme and especially if there's some interaction with the author or some regularly updated info by the author, I'm much more inclined to pay for the service. It's like shareware: if I really like the program and if the author does a decent job on their website, manuals and background info and if the price is decent as well, I don't mind paying.
I'm not certain I'm going to subscribe to Shadowmarch though... I'm still not much into epic fantasy. I think I even liked the "look behind the scenes" of the author and the processes of writing and thinking about characters more than the first couple of episodes of Shadowmarch. Maybe if Tad were to serialize his everyday life as a writer, a literary textual soap about a writer's life, maybe then I'd sign up. Just a thought ;-)
Nov 20, 2001 @ 12:28 » no comments » General
Greymatter
Yep... some cosmetic changes happening, so some things might look a bit askew right now, but this should change soon.
On a more fundamental level I'm considering changing my blogging program. It's a bit of a hassle to only have access to your blog from your own computer, but then again, I chose Blog because I want to have total control over my own data and not have it sit on some service's computer. Well, I found a pretty wicked Perl program that is total freeware, that will run in your /cgi-bin so that you have both total control over the program, the data _and_ you can access it from anywhere. I'm finetuning the thing now, which is quite a lot of work, since the program is so versatile. If you want to have a little peek at what's happening click here, but be advised, the content is temporary and goofy :-)
Nov 22, 2001 @ 14:23 » no comments » General
A new beginning
First post on the new system!
Well, it took me quite a bit of fiddling, but the New and Improved Blog is up and running, and looking pretty spiffy! I decided to change from Fahim Farook's client side only Blog (thanks a million for that great little program Fahim, I'm sure eventually the client-server version of Blog will pan out just as good as, if not better than this) to Noah Grey's fabutastic Greymatter.
Greymatter is a Perl program that runs on your server and acts just like, for instance, Blogger.com does. The reason I first went for Fahim's Blog is that I wanted to keep full control over the datafiles I'm generating: I don't want them to sit on some company's server where, for various reasons, I might end up not having access to them. The downside of Blog was that you could only blog from your own computer. Greymatter on the other hand runs on my own webserver, is fully freeware and let's me have all the control over looks and datafiles as I want. Plus, it lets me blog from wherever I have access to a webbrowser. So, if you're not afraid to muck about a bit with installing Greymatter on your server and fiddling with HTML templates, then I can heartily advise Greymatter!
I've also spiffed up the look and feel of the site. Well, at least the frontpage with the blog on it. Later I'll be working on bringing the rest of the site up to the new look, but for now you'll have to deal with some incongruencies throughout the site. Sorry, but I just don't have the time now to redo all those HTML pages. Hmm... I really should have a look at PHP, MySQL and dynamically building pages with templates, because now that I have mucked about with Greymatter, I can see that the initial investment in time will definitely pay for itself.
Nov 23, 2001 @ 12:03 » no comments » General
Spamcop works... sometimes.
Well, this is just too good to pass up for the blog :) I always report the spam I receive with Spamcop and occasionally you hear something back from one abuse department or the other. Sometimes they actually tell you what they did:
Hello,
Thank you for your report concerning Spam/UCE relayed through the mailserver with this IP-adres. This open-relay has been closed.
Kind Regards,
- WorldCom NL Abuse Team
Good going! That's the way to nab those bastards... use Spamcop!
Nov 23, 2001 @ 12:15 » no comments » General
Away for courses
Well, I'm away for a weeklong set of courses, mainly methodology (oh joy!), professional skills and philosophy of science. The good thing is that we're in Twente on the campus and that the scenery is beautiful with all the leaves changing color. The bad thing is that the course material so far has not been very stimulating, but that might change over the week... maybe they're going to let us start slowly. I'm going to try and read a lot this week, so I might end up putting up some thoughts about the articles. I hope we'll have that much free time.
I also noticed (and Lisbeth alerted me to it too) that I need to do a little more work to make the layout look good for people using lower resolutions. That's something for when I get back home after all the Dutch Sinterklaas festivities are over.
Nov 27, 2001 @ 14:04 » no comments » Research
Still in Twente
Quick update on the courses: one was pretty good and was taught by a really good teacher and one was (unfortunately still is at the moment, but I'm skipping the first hour right now) pretty bad and the teacher wasn't very good at picking up on our critical but not overly critical remarks and just went on with his 'methods of explanation in social sciences 101', never mind the fact that we're PhD students. *grumble* Got some good ideas, motivation and energy out of the whole thing though, so despite the fact that I didn't read anything yesterday as I had planned, but went for a great long walk through the foresty surroundings of the campus with a couple of people and just had a good time, it's been worth it. On with the last couple of classes, then all the Sinterklaas stuff, and then back to work!
Nov 29, 2001 @ 10:21 » no comments » Research
Crash a Nokia mobile phone by SMS
An article at The Register mentions that a hacker (aka security researcher) has found a way to crash certain Nokia mobile phones by sending a SMS message with a broken User Data Header. Pretty cool if you ask me. Now how the hell am I going to get my Nokia phone patched...? Microsoft at least offers their medicine in relatively easy applicable form. What's Nokia going to offer me?
Nov 29, 2001 @ 10:37 » 3 comments » General
Virtual idols
We've seen idoru, Japanese for virtual idols before. Kyoko Date, Date Kyoko for instance was one of the first. Through an article I stumbled on a new virtual idol, Yuki Terai, Terai Yuki.
Nov 29, 2001 @ 11:03 » no comments » Research
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