Andrew Sullivan: "The cries of freedom. They bring tears to my eyes and hope to my soul. The sound: it makes every human stop in their tracks and demand that this vicious oppression end."

Police in Iran shot at protesters today, killing at least 10, including the nephew of a prominent opposition leader. Today is the holiday of Ashura, a sacred observance in the Muslim calendar which honors the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. More: New York Times, BBC, and a statement of condemnation from the White House. Times Online: Is this Iran's Berlin Wall moment? I'm following Cyrus Farivar on Twitter for English-language pointers to updates, please share other links in the comments.

andylim writes "recombu.com has an article examining what's happened in mobile over the past ten years, including BlackBerry launching its first smart phone in 2002, Motorola launching the Razr in 2004 and Apple launching the iPhone in 2007. As a commenter points out, the first camera phone (Sharp J-SH04), which was released in 2000, featured a 110,000-pixel (0.11MP) CMOS image sensor, and a 256-colour (8 bit) display."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some of my favorites from CRAFT this week:

Bleach-Painted Skeleton Hoodie

Cranberry Prosecco Cocktail

Bara Brith: A Welsh Holiday Bread

Knitted Thyroid

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saibot834 writes "The German Wikipedia, the second largest language edition behind the English Wikipedia, just reached its 1,000,000 article milestone. Combined with 3.1M English articles and 240 other language editions, this adds up to a total of 14 million Wikipedia articles. Interestingly, there is a request for deletion on the millionth article. German Wikipedia has been criticized for its rules on notability, which are stricter than on the English Wikipedia. Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thelordx writes "I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Five years ago today (December 27, 2004), a vast wave of high-energy gamma and X-rays washed over the Earth, blinding satellites and partially ionizing the Earth's atmosphere. The culprit was a superflare from the magnetar SGR 1806-20, located 50,000 light years away. The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More work on CloudPipe. Yesterday's notes here.

Getting some feedback finally, though some of it has been bitter and condescending.

Please everybody. Be respectful of everyone, including yourself.

And remember: Tis the season to be jolly!

Peace on earth, goodwill to men. Ignore the grouchyness and try to find the substance. Even better if people self-edit and leave out the michegas.

Now on to the substance...

1. There is support for not normalizing the items, and that is still the plan. It's true, there's a lot of code out there that understands all the varieties of RSS and Atom. I've been saying that all along!

The reason to do fatPing is to start a bootstrap that makes everything more efficient. In this, the leadership will come from the content systems and the aggregators.

2. I've made a change to the body of the fatPing element. Instead of including the XML elements inline, I encode the text and pass it as CDATA. This means that it will make it through XML parsers that care about namespaces being declared. An example, I was passing through an item from the TechCrunch feed (they support rssCloud, btw) and they have elements from the DC namespace. My packet doesn't declare this namespace, so the Firefox XML parser declares it invalid (they're right about that). I have to encode the text because they might include CDATA elements, and that would break the XML. Let's see if this works!

3. The point has been raised that there is no "standard" way to include a <cloud> element in Atom feeds. As I said in the comments, I will not be the person to dictate that, or suggest a way to do it, even mildly. I've learned that Atom is a 300-degree stove. When I touch it I get burned. However, I am the author of an aggregator that consumes Atom feeds. If you are the author of software that creates Atom feeds, you could (just saying hypothtetically) create a namespace that contains the <cloud> element in it, as spec'd by RSS 2.0, and include it in your feed. If you told me about it, I could implement support for it in River2. That way we keep it all among implementors. There can be no doubt that you have the right to do that, and I have the right to support it. If anyone wants to get grouchy and irritable, let em!

4. To notify the CloudPipe server what feeds you want realtime notification on, send a POST to the same endpoint you call for the long poll (instead of a GET). The body of the POST is the OPML text for the feeds you want to follow. The server returns immediately while it processes the request.

theodp writes "Technology Review's David Talbot says IT's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud — and prove we can trust it. 'The focus of IT innovation has shifted from hardware to software applications,' says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. 'Many of these applications are going on at a blistering pace, and cloud computing is going to be a great facilitative technology for a lot of these people.' But there's one little catch. 'None of this can happen unless cloud services are kept secure,' notes Talbot. 'And they are not.' Fully ensuring the security of cloud computing, says Talbot, will inevitably fall to emerging encryption technologies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Part card trick, part slinky, the Flexible Love chair seems like it could be more than a novelty. The end pieces look shopbottable, but the bellows seems like it would take a lot of patience to cut, fold and glue.

FlexibleLove™ furniture incorporates an 'accordion-like, honeycomb' structure to create durable furniture pieces produced from widely-available recycled materials. FlexibleLove furniture, such as FlexibleLove Earth 16, are made from recycled paper and recycled wood waste, and are produced using pre-existing manufacturing processes in order to reduce their overall impact on the environment.

The name "Flexible Love" was derived from the concept of a 'flexible love-seat' - seating that could hold from one to as many as sixteen individuals; changing length and shape with a simple pull at each end. A honeycomb structure, used throughout the entire Flexible Love line, produces an accordion-like result that allows each piece to be extended and collapsed with ease.

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An article in the LA Times calls NASA out for failing to make broadcasts on their dedicated television network as entertaining as they can be. The author, David Ferrell, complains that fascinating subject matter is often fraught with boring commentary and frequent, extended silences, making most people quickly lose interest. Quoting: "Witness one recent segment about the recovery of a Soyuz capsule upon its return to Earth. The dark, bullet-like object landed in the featureless steppes of Kazakhstan, about 50 miles outside the unheard-of town of Arkalyk. Coverage consisted of video shot from an all-terrain vehicle approaching it — mostly soundless footage of tall grass going by — with an occasional word by an unnamed commentator. 'You can see the antenna that deployed shortly after landing,' the commentator said in that deadpan tone shared by scientists and golf announcers. The camera chronicled the tedious extraction of three crew members weakened by spending six months in orbit; they were loaded one by one onto stretchers. 'Again, a rather methodical process,' the commentator noted, as if grasping for something — anything — to say. Later: 'The official landing time has been revised to 1:15 and 34 seconds a.m., Central Time. The official time was recorded at the Russian Mission Control Center . . . by the Russian flight-control team.' ... Where is Carl Sagan when you need him?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ctmurray writes "Amazon reports for the first time ever they sold more ebooks on one day than real books. My wife is an ebook-only author and reported her largest single day sales on Christmas day, and December has been her best month ever as well. All those Kindles bought for this season are being seen in ebook sales." The battle with publishers over pricing seems to be coming to the fore as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times takes an inside look at DARPA, the secretive defense agency, mentioned frequently on Slashdot, that is "changing the way we use machines — and the way they use us" in the form of a review of Michael Belfiore's The Department of Mad Scientists. Besides tracing the history of the agency, Belfiore's book expounds on the well-known Grand Challenge and its link to ever-more-automated vehicle control in civilian and military contexts, as well as other DARPA pet projects, including robotic surgery, information analysis, and the integration of electronics with the human body.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bluemanlines writes "The Indian company Eko Vehicles has announced the development of the world's first production hybrid motorcycle, called the ET-120. In a short time this motorcycle will run on the Indian streets, offering about 280 miles per gallon with a top speed of 40 miles per hour."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bluemanlines writes "The Indian company Eko Vehicles has announced the development of the world's first production hybrid motorcycle, called the ET-120. In short time this motorcycle will run on the Indian streets, offering about 280 miles per gallon with a top speed of 40 miles per hour."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader excerpts from an AP story as carried by Yahoo News about changes stemming from yesterday's foiled bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines flight: "Some airlines were telling passengers on Saturday that new government security regulations prohibit them from leaving their seats beginning an hour before landing. The regulations are a response to a suspected terrorism incident on Christmas Day. Air Canada said in a statement that new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in US airspace. ... Flight attendants on some domestic flights are informing passengers of similar rules. Passengers on a flight from New York to Tampa Saturday morning were also told they must remain in their seats and couldn't have items in their laps, including laptops and pillows." The TSA's list of prohibited items doesn't seem to have changed in the last day, though.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ant points out this two-page TechRadar article about the history of modems; the photographs of some behemoth old modems might give you new respect for just how much is packed into modern wireless devices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Universe ring...

To22 created something nearly perfect. A continuous ring, delicately proportioned, beautifully polished and seemingly flawless. There is only one tiny imperfection. A speck, no larger than a piece of dust. At a glance, it is barely noticeable. Upon close examination, it appears intentional and more clearly defined. Only magnification reveals the actual object set within the miniature interior. It is a model of the known universe. Inspired by the writing of Stephen Hawking and loosely based on the anthropic theory to22 puts our daily pursuits into perspective and reminds us that we are always a part of something bigger.

In other news, after seeing this De Beers inflated the price of Universe to an astronomical amount and are having string theorist slaves in horrible working conditions make new universes around the clock.

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Thingiverse user wizard23 designed this cool puzzle box (which he calls the "A-Mazing Box") using a custom Python script and Clifford Wolf's freeware OpenSCAD program, then printed it on a MakerBot. His script lets you import your own maze as a PNG so you can design one with a unique solution.

More:

• Make: Projects - Simple 3D models with OpenSCAD
• OpenSCAD: Constructive solid geometry CAD at long last

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One of the highlights of David and my careers as technology journalists was meeting the beautiful Julie Newmar about 15 years ago. (She and Jerry Pournelle signed wooden cheese cutting boards for us).

On Cartoon Retro, Shane Glines posted some screen shots of Julie from "The Monkees Get Out More Dirt" (1967). He says, "Look at the size difference between Julie and Davy Jones! Avatar without the special effects."

Julie Newmar as April Conquest

theodp writes "If Amazon is Santa, says Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, then the 400 folks living in RVs outside the Coffeyville, KS fulfillment center at Christmas time are the elves. Amazon didn't always lure in 'workcampers' from the RV community with the promise of free campgrounds and $10.50-$11 an hour seasonal jobs. 'Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,' explained tech nomad Chris Dunphy. 'There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious.' Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to a grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie Ve Ard added. 'They'd get there exhausted.' The work wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JingleJoe's electromagnetic field detector looks quite awesome -

This device uses a circuit that I constructed myself to detect electromagnetic fields. All flowing electricity gives off an electromagnetic field, with this device you can hear them all! They can be musical and harsh, the variety of electromagnetic sounds you can detect is limited only by the number of electronic doohickeys you own! As an added bonus it also detects ghosts.

The device has three outputs for displaying the electromagnetic fields to your human senses: a speaker, a stereo quarter-inch jack socket and an analog meter.

More info over at the Hacked Gadgets forums.

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