Category: Websites

Artsy

I was poking around some art related stuff last night and wandered onto the Louvre’s website, which is pretty cool.

I spent the first 5 minutes just looking at the section of the main page which showed random pictures of items from the museum’s collection. There was some really cool pictures in there.

Then I delved a bit deeped into the site and found that they have quite well constructed galleries of photos from their various collections (I got trapped by the islamic art section).

It’s all well worth a look.

New and exciting

If it’s been a while since you last visited the site, I’ve been very busy writing lots of stuff (the new setup makes publishing stuff heaps easier than my old system) and uploading lots of photos, so take a look around and have a laugh at the piccies etc.

More thoughts on copyright

The BBC has an interesting discussion piece about the appartent push by certain industry lobby groups in Britain to extend copyright from it’s current 50 years.

Regular readers will be quite familiar with my opinions on matters of copyright and IP as it pertains to popular culture, so I will forgo my usual tired tirade, but the piece is certainly an interesting and quite fairly balanced discussion of the issue.

Sticking it to China

Being someone who hasn’t let the fact that china has the world’s fastest growing economy distract me from the fact that it also has one of the most repressive systems of goverment*, I am mighty pleased to see this article in slashdot, which talks about a new piece of software which passes encrpyted packets to allow people in china (and other countries that monitor internet activity of individuals who want to read about such subversive ideas as “freedom” and “democracy”) to read pages that would otherwise be blocked by government firewalls, and to read them in a way that is theoretically undetectable.

Here’s hoping it works, and that it inspires others to release other pieces of subversive software to encourage freedom of information.

*which of course sets me apart from numerous other people, companies, organisations and governments who seem happy to turn a blind eye if there is a profit or advantage in it for them (microsoft, google, US government, we’re looking at you…).

Welcome. Aloha. Kia Ora Mate!

Well here we are at the new home of Dave and Simone’s web presence.

What this means in essence is that I will no longer be adding stuff onto our old site.

On the upside this new site has a lot more tricks and cool stuff, and won’t change address every time we move house or change our ISP.

Once I’ve put a few more things up and figured out how to configure things a bit better I will put up a post with the details of the rss feed etc.

Until then, this is what you get…

Tena koutou. Tena koutou katoa.

Oh. And I’ll put the two videos of Jack up on the site too, so you won’t be too bored while you wait for more content to be added.

Voyeuristic

Recently one of my friends pointed me to the blog of one of my ex-girlfriends, and it has raised a few curoius concerns for me.

I have found that I quite enojoy reading her blog, finding out about what she’s up to, and to some extent soaking up the intellectual output of someone who I always liked, admired, and found to be fun and intersting.

The concern I have been feeling relates to the unfortunate fact that our parting would at best be described as acrimonous, and our interactions since then have sadly slid through frigid to their current “non-existent”. As such I do find myself wondering what she would think about me reading her blog.

On the one hand she is placing her thoughts, musings and observations on display on the internet, the ultimate public display area (as am I for that matter), and as such she cannot practically or morally exert any control over who reads her stuff (unless she were to institute some sort of user log-in).

On the other hand I wonder whether there is some moral imperative for me to refrain from reading her site, given that I doubt that she would discuss any of what is on her site with me were we to meet on the street (or possibly say anything to me at all for that matter), and that while her blog is within the public domain, it is primarily intended for the benefit of friends and family, of which I am neither.

This of course goes on to raise an interesting dichotomy, as I have no qualms about reading the blogs of complete strangers which I find during my web explorations (as I have mentioned in numerous posts to this blog). With strangers’ blogs I am merely reading the pronouncements of otherwise unknown people to the world in general, however with my ex it feels as though I am somehow invading her privacy. It’s all very confusing.

It would be interesting to know what her opinion on the matter is.