robmyers

"This Is It" is currently at the five-finger-excercise stage. 

These forms will lead to forms that do what I want, and then I will be able to work out what it was that I wanted to do. ;-)

Inspired by the scripts to find weasel words, passive voice and lexical illusions from -

http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/

I've written a script to check for artbollocks in essays or reviews.

http://robmyers.org/git/?p=scripts.git;a=blob_plain;f=artbollocks

To use it, download it and add it to your PATH. Then use it like -

artbollocks my-essay.txt

Can anyone think of any words I've missed that should be added to it?

;-)

I had to take the identi.ca bots that use my microblog-bot library offline for a while because an upgrade to status.net broke the underlying Lisp xml parsing library that it uses.

I've now fixed microblog-bot and redeployed the bots, fixing some other bugs as well (the bots will say hi to you again if you message them).

You can click through to the bots from these pages:

The Cybernetic Artworld

Random Aesthetics

http://flowingdata.com/2010/06/28/do-movie-sequels-live-up-to-their-originals/

Do movie sequels live up to the originals? Testing the diminishing returns theory using scores from an online review website.

This is a great example of the kind of meta-analysis that computers and large datasets enable.

http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/2010/07/jennifer-dalton-flag-art-foundation.html

Jennifer Dalton's show at FLAG Art Foundation analyses print and online media to depict the social forms that are hidden in the information that they present.

I can't get to New York to see the show but it sounds like excellent QA art.

application.gnu_linux.tar.gz

This is a visualization of common colour names as they appear in the main twitter stream -

This is just a screenshot, I'll show the live version when it's finished. The colours are placeholders and (although you can't see it) the animation needs improving. It's written in Processing using a Scala-based Twitter Streaming API library.If this works well I'll do shape and pattern ones. This is a follow up to "The Colour Of...", "Friending The Aesthetic" and "Random Aesthetics".

There's been another round of criticism on various blogs of the FSF's media campaigns to draw people's attention to the harm that not respecting software users freedom does. But the FSF's campaigns explaining why Microsoft and Apple's failure to respect users freedom is harmful have been successful in getting out the message that alternatives are needed. In the mainstream press as well as in the tech and tech culture media.

The FSF's critics are ignoring the fact that most of the FSF's work consists not only of the positive promotion of the idea of free software, but in practically supporting and protecting its creation and use.

The FSF does help people find free software on Windows -

http://www.gnu.org/software/for-windows.html

The FSF is making Web 2.0 alternatives -

http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social

Then there's Libre Planet, WFS, GNU Generation, all positive practical measures to expand the constituency of free software.

And you may have heard of a little project called GNU or of a licence called the GPL.

It's very easy to sit at an almost entirely free desktop and criticise the FSF for not capitulating to those who would once again remove people's freedom to use software. But without the FSF's pragmatic idealism, projects like Linux and Ubuntu would have nothing to sell out to proprietary interests.

If people believe that the FSF should be doing something different then constructive suggestions are needed that aren't simply gesture politics or capitulation. Otherwise it looks like people are just being "negative".

HOW TO: Connect an anemometer to the Internet:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/06/how_to_connect_an_anemometer_to_an.html

(I don't like Pachube's walled garden approach thought. We need a federated free equivalent, like StatusNet .)

"Binary Code View", an offline net.art show in London:

http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/04/binary-code-view-london/

How exactly do you own a net based artwork?:

http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/04/owning-online-art-selling-and-collecting-netbased-artworks/

Art from its own data visualisation (not as good as my encoding of a LeWitt literally as itself, but still fun):

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/03/fine-art-pie-packed.html

RSS feed icon pillow (want! or maybe I should make one...):

http://makersmarket.com/products/rss-feed-icon-pillow

Free jam:

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/the-four-freedoms-two-rules-and-one-jam

Theory book piracy:

http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/05/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-%E2%80%98underground-movement%E2%80%99-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/

Crowdsourcing as wage saving and as workforce disempowerment:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/crowdsourcing-and-the-new-alienating-nature-of-work/2010/06/05

"Piracy has increased my book sales 700%":

http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/blog/2010/jun/5/piracy-has-increased-my-e-book-sales-700/

A second-generation performance artist calls for copyright on performances so they can enclose the performance commons:

http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/06/05/marina-abramovic-afterthoughts-willpower-control-copyright/