Didn't we do this game several years ago? The NY Times is reporting that a grand jury is open trying to get logs and information about how's publishing to the nyc indymedia. This time we have the luck of hosting servers with Calyx who had the good sense to hire the ACLU to defend them. Calyx has been great service and donations to indymedia and folks looking for a colo provider should consider them.
For information about the RNC protests in New York you can call (212) 400-7458.
Gaba and I, along with some friends have setup a call in line for people wanting to know about events and breaking news from the protests in new york. We did it with asterisk, festival, and some funky perl scripts.
It pulls rss feeds for events and breaking news converting them in to audio that people can hear from the streets.
For anybody interested, there is some more information on the wiki page about the project.
I've been trying out my gmail account. It's a cool system, allows for some interesting faceted classification. It's interface for filters is immature, but given the quality of everything else, i expect it'll improve.
What worries me is the space limit. I know, 1 gig sounds like a lot, but i've been storing my email offline, and apparently i get a lot of email. In the three day's i've averaged 4.33 megs of incoming email per day. That means that my gmail account will be full in 230 days, or the beginning of April. One of the reasons i have such a high level of email is spam. Gmail appears to count my spam folder as part of my quota.
The spam filter is pretty good, it seems to have a lot of false positives for emails in Italian, which may reflect how the italian's emotion intensive way of writing emails and communicating follows some of the same attention grabbing methods of spam. To a lesser degree i've also had false positives on the email from Uruguayans, which would make sense, they are mostly decedents of italian immigrants.
It's interesting how cultural norms of interaction play in to spam filters. What would be abusive in one culture is normal in another, and the other way around, i know italians and rioplatenses (people from buenos aires and montevideo) who complain about 'cold people' who are anti social and don't exhibit their emotions in a way which can be read. If we train our emails for the norms of anglo culture, then we can unwittingly exclude culturally acceptable communication as spam when it happens in other cultures. Perhaps the filters should be parallel by language instead of combining them.
First they did pro-war rallies, now Clear Channel is organizing Straight is Great: Hetrosexual Pride marches. And they accuse us of mixing our media and protests....
It seems that forwarding a copy of all my email to my gmail account makes me look active, and apparently they give out the ability to invite new people based on activity. So i've got 5 new invites waiting to go out for anybody who wants one.
Today we got the forms set up to build papercrete "logs". That is, instead of pouring our papercrete in to forms which we move up the walls as we go, we are pouring long one foot by one foot by 10 foot 'logs' which we will stack up to make the walls. We've got the vertical posts up on the big cabin, but we don't have the beams up because we haven't found a way to get the biggest 24 foot long 4 by 12 from town. Most of the wood we're using we milled from trees on the property, but this one needs to be good, and we didn't have anything approaching that size.
Back to the logs, the idea is that we could pour these quickly, have them partially dry, and then stack them up. To keep them from breaking, we've tried laying in some willow branches. If we could find cheap bamboo we'd use that, but we've got willow on site, so we're using that instead. Over dinner we were debating how long we'd have to let the 'logs' sit before we could pick them up and move them. I took a bunch of photos but we need to recharge the camera batteries before i can upload the photo.
Gaba has moved over the cabin blog to cabin.protest.net and we've got some talk floating around about creating an alternative / off the grid construction wiki.
Oh, in other news, i've created a gmail account, so if you wan to email me, try anarchogeek@gmail.com.
Tonight we got back to the cabin after spending the week at the VOIP for social change sprint. It was lots of fun, we learned how to use and configure asterisk and we outlined a number of interesting applications with plans about how they will be implemented.
Just to check out the system we'd been using i tried to connect to blaine when he said he'd gotten the asterisk to PSTN gateway to call normal phones via a gateway provider. Low and behold, it worked, i could call blaine on his cell phone from my laptop in the mountains over the high latency starband satellite connection.
In the morning the first thing i'm going to do is sign up for my own number and account and have a phone here. There was a real world wait of about 1.5 seconds, which made it a little worse than a normal phone call, but better than CB where you had to indicate you were done talking.
Seth Godin has published a nice little plug about how Eggplant did a good job with the ChangeThis.org site. It's nice to see Eggplant getting more organized and doing top quality work. I think part of what it took was moving from a virtual organization to one which has folks working out of the same office at least a couple times a week. Interesting what it says about the virtual telecommuting world of the future.
Some O'Reilly connected folks have put together an extension for Kwiki to allow SubEthaEditing of wiki pages. This is really cool. It would solve the problem of concurrency and collaborative writing problems which come up with high activity wikis. One thing i noticed, which i hadn't know about before was the see:// syntax which drops in to SubEthaEdit to connecting to a server.
All this makes me wonder why there isn't a cross platform and free version of SubEthaEdit. It feels like we're in another situation where it's free enough, like moveable type.
Today gaba and i stopped by the VOIP sprint for the non-profit world being held in San Francisco. I spent most of today talking about various applications of VOIP for political campaigns.
We outlined four potential use cases:
What i discovered is that there is a fairly sophisticated open source PBX application, Asterisk and a voip wiki with a wealth of information. With Asterisk you can do a number of interesting things. What does is basically a voice router, you can setup voicemail boxes, automate call trees, automatically call numbers, cross between standard phone calls and VOIP calls. It's got it's own configuration / simple scripting language called dialplan but allows you to drop other programs using a cgi like interface at any point in the call process.
As with all new technologies the first adopters are often the porn / sex industry. With VOIP it appears that is also the case. Normally the porn industry is not so good at sharing their technical solutions due to stiff competition and a general culture of privacy. But that's not always the case. One of the publishers produces 'adult movies', sex books, and Asterisk / VOIP books.
After about a month of having no working battery for my laptop i decided that it was worth it, and i bought a replacement.... i'm so happy, my laptop can sleep, remembers the time and date, and i can use the battery to look for wireless access points...... ahh i'm a happy camper.
I'm not a big snake person, especially the snakes which hiss and rattle then try and bite you with their poisonous venom.
In the few days we've had a bunch of rattle snakes hanging out around our cabin. The first one Shane heard while walking back to the cabin in the dark. We got out the flashlight and Tim picked it up with a rake and put it in a garbage can. The next day we dropped it off about 4 miles up the valley.
Yesterday Gaba and I were unloading the truck and she noticed another rattlesnake. We followed it around looking for the rake to catch it also. Somehow the rake disappeared and with gaba and i alone, we were less keen on getting close to it. Eventually it went in to the pile of cement bags. The next morning when we went to look for it, we couldn't find it. We hoped that it had just go away.
It didn't.
Today we went up to fix the spring box which was clogged up. We got it working, but more work needs to be done. When we were driving back down to the cabin we saw our friend the snake in the middle of the road. I looked at Gaba and said, why not. We drove over the snake, expecting it to be splattered out in the road behind us. To our surprise, the snake did not die quietly. It in fact spun around and quickly skirted off of the road. We turned around and tried to make another pass, but the snake had made it in to the brush near the cabin. We found the snake, slightly worse for the wear, moving around. We pulled the truck up next to it, and used a shovel to chop it's head off.
Apparently my vegetarianism doesn't extend so far as not killing scary venomous snakes who have taken to hanging out really close to my home. I won't eat it, but i don't have a problem killing it, if i do it myself.
Then, tonight as was getting up after dinner to clean up, I heard another rattle in the dark. I slowly walked away from the direction of the noise, and went in to the cabin. I looked for it with a flashlight, but couldn't find it. Just as i was about to decide i'd made up the noise, i heard it again. It was real. I just gave up, went back in to the cabin.
A few minutes later Shane and his daughter Rosa drove up. I went out on the porch and yelled over to them. They walked very loudly, taking hard steps so the snake would feel the vibration in the ground, and rattle when they were close. They made it over to the cabin and Shane went back out, found the snake, and convinced me to come out to help capture it. After a long time of trying to pick it up on the end of a long stick. We discovered if we kept a garbage can between us and the snake, it would strike the plastic and not us. It hissed and hissed and rattled... it's 11pm but there seemed to be plenty enough heat that it was very active in moving around. Once we got it in the garbage can, it circled and kept hissing. Tomorrow we'll drive it even further away and let it go.
In preparation for the RNC protests, the Indypendent newspaper of the NYC IMC is going to print 200,000 copies for it's early August copy and 100,000 copies for it's late August issue. Damn that's a lot. I hope they're able to live up to the distribution nightmare involved in getting all those copies out to people.
Toya from indymedia brasil and recently SF has started blogging. It's all in portugese with a few random spanish and english words thrown in. Her most recent post is about the huge debate flowing back and forth on indymedia lists over the last two days about the text of a feature for www.indy about Chavez and the Venezuelan Recall Referendum.
Gaba wrote up a piece with photos of how we've been making papercrete walls for our shed we're building to house solar panels. Unfortunately it's all in spanish. The photos tell most of the story, If i were less lazy i'd write a version in english.
I forgot to blog while i was in south america, still need to write up something about the ourmedia conference, uruguay, hippies and indigenous in Sao Paulo, and a very long flight with many nights on spent sleeping in airports.
One good thing, is we got a wireless router now, so we can go sit on the porch or a hammock and still be online.
Oh, and gaba started a blog about our alternative construction project with papercrete. We're planning on creating a wiki with information about alternative construction and how the project progresses.