PUBLIC MARKS with search wednesday

Shifting focus

Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 ~ 4:54 PM

This is the last new post that I'll be making on this blog. I decided a while back to shift the focus of my web activities, and thought it was time to formally close things off here.

Why stop posting here? Mostly just a feeling that I needed to shake things up a bit, to put some serious effort behind a few other ideas that I've wanted to work on for a while. Making a clean break just felt right.

There may still be some activity on this site as I back-fill some old posts from other blogging platforms. My goal is to eventually have this as a (more or less) complete archive of my personal blogging from early 1998 to this year. That's a background project of mine that I plan on allocating a bit more time to in 2010.

A huge thanks to Karl Dubost for hosting this blog for so long. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Karl has supported and inspired me in more ways then he may realize. That you are reading this today is due in no small part to him, so you can thank (or blame!) him.

This week the biggest dust storm in 70 years blew through Australia, and the photos of it were stunning. So on Wednesday at noon, I decided to make a photo magazine. It was published on MagCloud Thursday night. All told, it was 31.5 hours from idea to publication, and that’s with a few hours of sleep thrown in.

Three days of hacking later, I managed to get it working. 200 or so lines of Python code replaced approximately 12,000 lines of PHP. My weave server is meant for a single user

This Wednesday, Sept. 9th, the Italian artist and designer Fupete will be opening his first Parisian solo show, 'Jolly Roger.' The Since Upian artspace will be housing his newest abstract paintings and pirate-inspired installation.

WHAT: Fupete's "Jolly Roger"

WHEN: Opening Sept. 9th and will stay up through Oct. 9th.

WHERE: Since.Upian. 211 rue Saint-Maur 75010 Paris

The Venice Film Festival opened on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 with stars, movie-goers and photographers descending on the famed city. Dan Kitwood, an entertainment photographer from Getty, took the opportunity to make some aerial images of Venice.

The new Obama administration circulated a draft executive order Wednesday calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp within a year and halting all military commission trials in the meantime.

On Wednesday, the University of Toronto sent him an e-mail giving him 10 days to get off the premises.

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

With an eye toward monetization, MySpace is being redesigned beginning Wednesday with a new home page, which will be less cluttered and more hospitable to advertising. (The home page will also feature a “splash page” for an ad about the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.”) The redesign, to be done by early fall, will include a new navigation bar, search tool and video player.

A massive sinkhole near Daisetta, Texas is seen Wednesday afternoon, May 7, 2008. A zigzagging hole believed to be as long as two football fields and up to 100 feet deep continued to widen late Wednesday, threatening to gobble up nearby tanks and other oilfield equipment.

Japanese newspapers warned Wednesday that freedom of expression was at stake after cinemas pulled a documentary about a Tokyo shrine honouring war dead amid pressure from nationalists. "Freedom of expression is under threat," the Asahi newspaper said in an editorial, following the decision by four more Japanese cinemas to cancel planned screenings of "Yasukuni", by Chinese director Li Ying.

Fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws account for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the Computer and Communications Industry Association.