Tony's Blog

Saw this in the mailing list, I don't think there are more details yet:

 

 

Wired has a good article about the recent Twitter hack.

 

"President-Elect Barack Obama was among the most popular requests from Digital Gangster denizens, with around 20 members asking for access to the election campaign account. After resetting the password for the account, he gave the credentials to five people.

 

He also filled requests for access to Britney Spears' account, as well as the official feeds for Facebook, CBS News, Fox News and the accounts of CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez and Digg founder Kevin Rose.  Other targets included additional news outlets and other celebrities. Fox won the hacker popularity contest, beating out even Obama and Spears. According to Twitter, 33 high-profile accounts were compromised in all.

...

Someone used the Obama account to send out a message urging supporters to click on a link to take a survey about the president-elect, and be eligible to win $500 in gasoline. A fake message sent to followers of the Fox News Twitter feed announced that Fox host Bill O'Reilly "is gay," while a message from Britney Spears' feed made lewd comments about the singer. "

 

This should be a great experience.

It looks like MGM put Koyaanisqatsi on YouTube for anyone to watch.  Amazing and mesmerizing film with an equally epic Philip Glass soundtrack.  YouTube doesn't really do this justice but its better than nothing.  If you like it check out the sequels Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi or similar film Baraka.

Tonight 10pm to 2am PST on Coast to Coast AM Art Bell will host his annual new years prediction show.  This is a call-in show with predictions for events in 2009, and is notorious for ridiculous and crazy callers.  You'll hear everything from elaborate government conspiracy to alien contact coming in 2009.

Going on now in Germany is the Chaos Communication Congress, you can stream presentations live or watch recordings (hopefully this will be more complete as the conference goes on).  Some talks which sound interesting to me:

 

Hacking the iPhone by members of the iphone dev team (creators of the various iPhone jailbreaks)

Blinkenlights Stereoscope (check this out, it's awesome)

 

Steam has a holiday sale with big discounts on most games.  I'm going to pick up the id software superpack for $35.

Caught a rerun of this Nova episode today, it's a great story about competitions in low temperature physics.

Tonight 12-2am on KBOO is a special Christmas edition of Dr. Zomb's Stereo Obscura.  This is a great avant-garde / experimental radio show on Portland's community radio station 90.7 FM (and streaming on the net).  A couple interesting things I've heard on previous shows:

Venetian Snares - Black Sabbath

Dion McGregor Somniloquies

I'll have to put together a better description later but my custom blog feed is pointing to a pipe which grabs an Amazon wish list and Tumblr blog.  It's a bit of a hack and seems to take 15-20 minutes to update.

 

Update: It seems to do some funky stuff with publishing multiple times, probably because Amazon doesn't give the time a wish list item was added so I hack in the current date.  I've disabled the pipe for now.

If you do any development with Amazon's web services be careful about working on your wish list.  I setup a list and sent it to my family for some holiday gift ideas.  When I view the list on Amazon's site its careful to show me the quantity received as 'hidden'.  However I was playing with some Amazon REST web services to enumerate my wish list and noticed Amazon happily returned for each item a QuantityReceived element with value 1.  Were they really showing me what items I would receive?  I added a new item to the list and the web service confirmed that quantity received was 0.  Oops.

 

I can understand why this happens, the web service doesn't know when I'm retrieving the list or someone with a legitimate need for quantity is retrieving it.  I think it's kind of funny, I guess this is the digital equivalent of rooting through your parent's closet to find where the gifts are stashed.

KEXP's fall membership drive is in full swing and one of the events is a countdown of the 903 best albums of all time, as voted by listeners.  Check it out, they'll be going through albums all week and should post the list at the end.  Also check out last year's top 90.3 albums of 2007 list for some great albums from last year.

The 33 1/3 book series chronicles noteworthy albums in modern music history.  Check out the series here and add any of the albums to your music player of choice, they're all absolutely fantastic.  More details on wikipedia too.

If you have a zune pass and need some content check out these lists from Pitchfork Media:

 

 

 

 

Top 100 albums of 2000 - 2004 part 1 and part 2

 

There will always be disagreements about the order but overall these are excellent albums.

 

You can get audiobooks and music from the King County library here.