I'm going to try out ubercart with drupal. I've tried an older version of drupal's e-commerce package when the site was on 4.6, but there seems to be some good comments about ubercart so it might be worth a try too.

update: oops both are for drupal 5 :( another reason I should have stayed at drupal 5 for a bit longer. apparently within 1-2 months both should be ported to drupal 6. they're waiting for the final CCK & views (so I read)

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Alia Kiama

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Swept off the Map: Surviving Resettlement and Eviction in Bawana JJ Colony by Kalyani Menon Sen and Gautam Bhan is a documentary look at the demoliton of "the Yamuna Pushta ‘jhuggi-jhonpdi’ colony, a string of settlements home to around 35,000 working class families - more than 150,000 people – some of whom had lived here for over three decades" to make way for a "riverside promenade with parks and fountains" by the Yamuna river, marketed to the tourists who visit Delhi.

this should be an interesting read, as I read about similar demolitions whilst I was in Delhi - it even happened to businesses; even large well built shopping centres. the book is available @ Yoda Press in India.

The Economist has a report on digital nomads. since it looks like I'll be heading back to Australia, I'll no longer be one of these :) perhaps whilst on short trips. it's been great for the past 4 years though, but I've been missing home and friends so it'll be good to have a base again. it's amazing how long you can live without a fixed address though. moving from country to country - hotels and short term rental apartments. most of my life is now on the internet - might sound strange, but it's a good place to backup your files, as well as posting dvd backups back home. I read the first article about Nomad Cafe and this rings true. in many places I've been to cafes and there've been people logged in to their laptops.

I've just been reading articles on the human network blog by Mark Pesce. all have been interesting, particularly the Unevenly Distributed : Production Models for the 21st Century where he talks about the death of television and film industries in their current distribution method. also mentioned were the examples of Ronda Byrne's online / streaming version of The Secret and the success it has brought her. as well as the "League of Peers" movie Steal this Film - Part 1 which is a documentary about file sharing and the troubles faced by Sweden's leading BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

just read about this on the toplap list :
Clojure was developed by architect / programmer Rich Hickey who has worked on projects such as scheduling, automation, election displays, fingerprinting, audio analysis, machine listening.

"Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection."

aliak.com site was hacked on thursday night 06/03/2008 - apparently the whole server was hit so many sites were affected. it was around the time of the terrorist attack of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem

I made a couple of flairs on facebook and sent to the girls

so I don't forget ... here's the events coming up at Uganda & Sira. I went to Music House today and bought some more Israeli / Jerusalem based music. the guy in the store told me about Uganda and Sira, a couple of places in Jerusalem where you can see / hear live electronic & experimental music.

Uganda myspace page

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Sira events :

this is great! I installed this greasemonkey script to import Facebook events into Google Calendar by P. Organisciak, so now it's easier to add events to the site! I'm not using the drupal events module any more as it had a problem creating thousands of repeating events (which should have ended), so I linked one of my google calendars - the aliak.com one - into the site instead. plus this way events are easier to import and people can use it easier with their own google calendar (if they have one). perhaps the drupal module works better now I've upgraded to version 5. but adding manual events is a pain - very time consuming which means I miss a lot of them. the google calendar allows me to add them simply from gmail as the emails arrive and now with a single click from Facebook also! I just add the url and adjust the text as I prefer. cool!

a video by Nam June Paik (RIP) - this would be fairly easy to do using isadora these days. though a different story if you consider how he made it!

Nam June Paik - Ryuichi Sakamoto; Replica, for keyboard Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjxG_k0VDo

http://www.spoems.com/tag_paik.html has a collection of his video works

I was checking out the NZ Audio Foundation website again today and came across a link from an email on the AF-l about funding from Damian from Frey. it's an interesting argument. I think Australia is similar to New Zealand in this way, but also at a glance I think New Zealanders have the creative support advantage over the Australians, or so it seemed to me at least, as they have MANY! support organisations helping the artists. will have to do some more research to see if my assumptions are founded.

aliak.com is being upgraded this week. some links won't work until the upgrade is complete as I've disabled some modules. the 'look & feel' of the site is currently using a default template which will also be upgraded. the RSS / XML feeds should still be working. thanks for your patience

status:
11/02/2008 - the site is now running drupal 5.0. tomorrow night I'll upgrade to the most recent drupal 5. some of the modules have been reinstalled but you may see some errors until the upgrade is complete.

19/02/2008 - the site is now running drupal 5.1. only a few patches to go ...

14/03/2008 - the site is now running drupal 5.7

15/03/2008 - the site is now running drupal 6.1
there seems to be an issue with page caching in firefox on windows (to reload the page - press Ctrl -Shift-Delete or Tools menu - clear private data, then reload the page)
IE on windows seems ok
also posting articles from a mac seems broken! :(

some Hakim Bey & related links gathered from the MLA forums

Hakim Bey's website - hosts his articles including the well known Temporary Autonomous Zone. The Ayahuasca Reading is interesting, especially since it sounds like it was written in the late 1940s / 1950s? at least written about events during that period. it was originally appeared in the Psychedelic Review in 1965 and Hakim Bey read a reprint of it from the Psychozoic Press on a New York radio program in 1994. interesting since Ayahuasca has become 'flavour of the year' so to speak, with even hollywood stars heading off to South America to experience it.

Rak Razam, a journalist from Australia, recorded his experiences in the video below
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3a3nt_rakaya-soul

Rak:aya soul
Uploaded by panoramabox

Robert Anton Wilson's obituary by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey)

"Moors of Holy Ireland, we must all learn Basque" - an interview with Hakim Bey by Sasha Miltsov. they talk about the future, how things seem to be repeating themselves, how "attitudes are informed by reformism. They are not informed by a critique of capitalism or even of technology". that "that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action!", about artists and their popularity and influence on real estate prices, and about "the idea of separatism and secession", in particular in relation to America.

"So America is isolated economically: we don't produce anything here anymore – we cant be self-sufficient in terms of industry. We don't make shoes here; we don't make umbrellas, pencils. We make entertainment and information. We don't even make the fucking computers! We produce the ideas that occupy the computers. That's why artists are so important right now – it's one of the few things that we actually produce. So the arts are hot, some artists are successful – this whole area around here is full of artists, and they drove the real-estate prices up. So, now you can't move into this county for less then 250,000 dollars. Thanks to the artists! You wonder why people get angry at artists – it's not our fault – we're just looking for low rent but the real-estate developers are following us, sniffing our butts wherever we go to find out where the next beautiful cheap real-estate is going to be ..."

dpwolf has finished his thesis - you can download it from his site - it's called Vidgets: The Development and Use of Interactive, Network Based Video Works by David Wolf (dpwolf)

I've downloaded it but haven't finished reading it yet. he makes cool live video performances using isadora and quartz composer and the music is made with controllers and max / msp. I'd been to a workshop of his the previous year and that's how I started trying out isadora. (obviously he's more advanced than me ;)

I noticed page 138 has a photo which looks like a capture from a video I took of his & Somaya's performance at electrofringe 2006. I thought I had a photo but can't find it but I have a video. and the other photographer in the room was on the other side of the room as I recall. small world.

Watch the video

I saw "South Coast" a documentary about Brighton (UK)'s hip hop community by Will Jewell last saturday night at the Jerusalem Cinematheque as part of the British Film Festival. I thought the film was a great balance of original roots of hip hop, respecting the US origins, whilst highlighting the original crews from the local Brighton community and featuring some of the up & coming artists also. a great snap shot into Brighton hip hop. it feels similar to Australian hip hop in some ways.

I wrote some names during the film so I could find out about them later. (hard to read my writing so hopefully I have these right!)

- poets vs MC night / battle
- young joe
- koaste - great beats and words about local issues / life
- cassiah (?) and danny - the park scene in the film
- deliverance
- brighton graf jam
- monkey sons
- remark
- slip jam - regular venue for around 5.5 years
- mc jam
- buzz
- brighton hip hop festival
- req 1

from what I can gather, their community is really healthy. they seem to have a few crews / people who are organising regular gigs & festivals. having a regular venue helps build a community I think, so they're lucky in that regard. and it seemed like a friendlier atmosphere as compared to london - people in the film commented on this as well. more laid back / beach town and being a smaller city I suppose.

after the film I asked Will if he could say something to the Australians as I'd upload it to show some of them so there's a message from him (the director) at the end.

there's a couple of minutes of the film shot whilst viewing it - sorry about the quality & fact this is pirated. there's hebrew subtitles overlayed.

mp4 video file : http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-SouthCoastBrightonUKHipHopDocumentaryByWil...

flash video file : http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-SouthCoastBrightonUKHipHopDocumentaryByWil...

or the blip post to play in a webpage : http://blip.tv/file/622825

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http://southcoastthemovie.co.uk is the film's website - they have videos/articles etc there.

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I recorded the directors talk after the film also - sorry about the audio quality - this is recorded on my phone camera. I recorded video but the zoom/quality is pretty bad so I just extracted the audio.

http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-WillJewellDirectorsTalkAfterSouthCoastShow...
or to play in a webpage : http://blip.tv/file/622851

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19/08/2008

Jerusalem Cinematheque - British Film Festival screening of Will Jewell's documentary on Brighton (UK) hip hop community - South Coast

TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
VISIT TECHGNOSIS AT: http://techgnosis.info
SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

Expand - Collapse

What is Scion City is a futuristic interactive machinima video movie series made in Second Life. the website has 6 episodes and links to different formats, an FAQ and a submit link where viewers can upload more episodes or related material (photos, documents, movies, etc) discovered about the series and Scion City. visit http://whatisscioncity.com/ for more details and to watch the films.

"Guerrilla knitting" has a couple of meanings in the knitting community - to some, it merely means knitting in public, while to others, it means creating public art by knitted means.

Rose White from yarnivore spoke at The History of Guerilla Knitting session at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in 2007 in Berlin on day 3 - 29/12/2007. a torrent video can be downloaded of the session. (open the video in VLC if you don't have another video player that can play the .mkv video file). The Chaos Communication Congress is organised by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest hacker group, founded in 1981.

Rose gave a brief history of knitting, and some of the myths held over the years about the foundations and age of knitting. She compares knitting with computer hacking referring to proprietary knowledge, pattern making, knitting guilds. Also about the commercialisation and control of patterns prior to 1960s and subsequently by Knitting pattern books and yarn companies who controlled the market

Elizabeth Zimmermann who in the 1960s generated generic pattern books which broke out of the usual mold of patterns requiring a yarn makers yarn to make the pattern correctly. Effectively she made knitting open source again! She had a TV show in the USA which brought her style of knitting to the public, and she ran knitting camps to teach others.

Rose also mentioned KnitML, the knitting XML code specification which is being introduced to standardise knitting patterns and terminology.

"The KnitML Project's main goal is to develop and promote adoption of a standard content model for knitting patterns. By developing a community-supported specification (KnitML) and providing basic rendering and transformation tools, the KnitML Project aims to make KnitML easy to use and valuable to the knitter."

Questions were raised also about knitting (patterns) and Creative Commons licencing. many patterns are not available to be used as they are still covered by US copyright so are still unavailable to the public.

Rose talks about giving back the creative power to the knitter - to allow them to modify the patterns, or not make the project exactly as per the pattern. even changing the colours used in an accompanying photo of a finished pattern is a stretch for some knitters!

Rose says, "over the past 30 years or so, there have been different individuals who have contributed to this geekier, more hands on approach to knitting - wresting it out of the control of commercial enterprises. this leads us to guerilla knitting in the end."

Barbara Walker - Rose referred to her as "a knitting engineer". "she wrote 4 books of stitch patterns, where she knitted swatches, and dissected them and included written instructions on how to knit them - stitch by stitch. and she also developed a charting system, so that next to the swatch there would be a grid showing you how to do it in pictures, so that, you didn't even have to speak her language to do it. so that many of these knitting patterns were available, not just to English speakers, but to anyone who could pick them up and look at them. so this enormous dissemination of knowledge occurred when she started doing that."

Debbie New - who creates "labyrinth knitting" and wrote a book called Unexpected Knitting, which includes experimental knitting patterns including her swirl, sculptural, free-form, swatchless, labyrinth, cellular automaton, virtual and ouroborus knitting techniques.

also featured was Dave Cole and his knitted lead teddy bears and giant outdoor knitting using cranes and telephone poles as knitting needles to knit the American Flag at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

the Simply Crafted website also lists some of these knitting pioneers as well as some freeform fibre (knitting & crocheting) artists such as Prudence Mapstone

also mentioned was the new Ravelry site - a social networking site for crafters, knitters and fibre artists, where they can "Organize projects, stash, needles, and more" & "Show off your work. Share your ideas and techniques." & "discover. Find new designs & yarns. Make friends. Try new things." the site is only open in beta stages at the moment. aso of today, they send out 500 - 800 invitations daily and there are currently 6,193 people waiting for their invites, so the site is in demand!