My SOPA letter

We are against piracy, but the way the bill is written now is far too broad and would stifle innovation and freedom of speech across the internet. As far as we can see, no competent technical expertise was consulted when writing the bill, and because of that, if passed into law, it will be very likely used in broad and over-reaching ways. It is easy to pass laws restricting freedom, but nigh-impossible to repeal them later.

The organizations and corporations opposing SOPA and PROTECT IP acts include ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PayPal, Mozilla and many others. These are the companies and organizations responsible for the biggest proportion of economic growth even during these troubled times, and they are also ones that are deeply familiar with the structure of the Internet. They do not make money on piracy, they suffer from it quite as much as media companies, but they realize that the proposed legislation is technically infeasible without destroying the very foundation upon which the billion-dollar internet industry has been built in the recent years.

The major supporters of the bill are the old media companies - the same companies who tried to legislate away VCR’s and DVD players, and which continue hiding their heads in the sand and trying to legislate away progress, not unlike stage coach companies trying to outlaw the automobile. If this bill is to pass, other countries will undoubtedly not hesitate to invite our startup founders into a climate where their innovation will be appreciated and nurtured.

self-portrait diary project

MÆGNUS (Bingoriot) - Dub Circus (Dubstep/gypsystep)

(Source: youtube.com)

Dealing with cyrillic comments in your code with iconv

So you inherit some code from a russian predecessor who was coding in Windows. Predictably, the comments are in russian, and the encoding is CP-1251 (or koi-8, who knows). Here’s what you do:

mkdir conv
find . -type f -name '*.php' -exec bash -c 'iconv -f windows-1251 -t utf-8 "{}" > ./conv/"{}"' \;

view gist

then just copy the files from the new ./conv/ directory into their proper locations, run a git diff or something to make sure you didn’t mess anything up, and commit.

love is a spring at which
crazy they drink who’ve climbed
steeper than hopes are fears
only not ever named
mountains more if than each
known allness disappears

lovers are mindless they
higher than fears are hopes
lovers are those who kneel
lovers are those whose lips
smash unimagined sky
deeper than heaven is hell
Easily Embarrassed – Tales Of The Coin Spinner

New Easily Embarrassed album is out. Free download!

helloyoucreatives:


I’m not all here anymore. Amazing work by http://www.brunocatalano.com/

helloyoucreatives:

I’m not all here anymore. Amazing work by http://www.brunocatalano.com/

Soundcloud -> iPhone app -> airplay speakers. This changes everything!

Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.