Amazing video argument against the movie 300 for being racist and homophobic. I’ve defended 300 and Frank Miller in the past as being partially ironic and completely ridiculous, but the video’s creator did a great job with the title cards, and it really summarises the stereotypes that are present in the film, whether they’re dangerous or not. Link

The audio is Rage Against the Machine, it’s actually pretty exciting. (Found with Miro)

Coming off of two days of planning and executing a giant hard drive and OS upgrade to my MacBook. Luckily everything went well so all my careful backing up was probably unnecessary. Now have a comfy 160gb hard drive and Mac OSX Leopard.

Best part: Leopard means I can finally run ies4osx, an amazing hack that downloads old versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (5, 5.5, 6 and 7) and runs them in emulation inside your Mac OS. Any web designers/developpers out there shouldn’t even think about it. Run, don’t walk. (I was previously using the original Linux version, ies4linux, which worked well but forced me to use Linux : P )

Worst part: Above. The Photobooth app in Leopard now offers a 4-shot grid, officially ending the tyranny of the so called “real” photobooths of the world.

As part of my ongoing work for GlobalVoices, I recently designed and coded a GV-like site with the specific goal of covering foreign blog reactions to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, called Voices without Votes. The VwV site is a mix of original posts by GV authors about what people in other countries are saying about the elections and links to foreign posts about the elections along with the first ~50 words as a preview.

Despite what seems like a clearly good motivation and practice, some people have big issues with this, likening it to a pathetic practice called ‘splogging‘ (spam blogging, wikipedia link). In the Wordpress IRC channel (a chatroom, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) some guys got pretty upset about the idea and I had a debate with them about copyright and aggregation of blogs (aggregation means getting content from varied sources and showing them toghether). This resulted in ‘markr’ posting a lengthy critique of VwV’s aggregation practices on his blog, HERE.

Most of his arguments stem from misconceptions about VwV or about copyright law, but some are sincerely just expressions of his dictatorial attitude towards content. I left the response below as a comment on the post, but am reprinting it here for posterity and for those who read my blog and not his (note: his full response is viewable on his page, only the parts I wanted to respond to are below. Skipped parts are mostly him telling the story i told above).

WARNING: This isn’t for my casual readers. It’s long, detailed, political and there are absolutely no lolcats anywhere to be found.

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