I started a new side project yesterday. You can check out one of the new tricks and tell me what you think. I basically took Scuttle and bolted XHTML Live Chat on, designed by Plasticshore. The best of both worlds, it has both AJAX and social bookmarks! Since it’s just me, it’s pretty antisocial, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Fortuately, Scuttle offers an easy import/export, so it was trivial to pull up my del.icio.us links and drop them in. It’s currently in pre-alpha phase only because there isn’t a letter before ‘alpha’. This means that not only could break at any time, it may be broken right now! I also threw in a phpBB installation to entertain you. Feel free to jump in and take advantage of the complete lack of forum rules before I’m forced to crack down on the lawlessness.

I really need to get a camera array so I can do semi-panoramic, bullet-time photography like this site’s graffitti stunts. Check them out, they’re slick. Via metafilter.

That’s right, the public has spoken. What did they say? They said, “We love transparent desktops!” In the last three hours I’ve watched the hits on this picture go from twenty to (at the moment) 367! The only way I think I could’ve made it blow up bigger is with boobies. It’s crazy. I’ve got to take more of these shots, I’ll be famous.

Check out the Transparent Screens group at Flickr for more coolness.

In light of recent events, many of us are pursuing a living will to prevent extremist family members from keeping us in a persistent vegetative state ad infinitum. However, others are pursuing a more selfless goal: helping mankind by remining in a vegetative state.

Dear loved-ones,
I make the following statement in a sound state of mind and of my own volition:

If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc.

However….

If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death.

* Debt Relief to Impoverished Nations: I will agree to stay in a PVS for an indeterminate amount of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of debt relief and debt forgiveness to developing and impoverished nations.

* Nuclear Disarmament and De-escalation: I will agree to stay in a PVS for a open-ended period of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of nuclear disarmament and de-escalation. By this I mean desisting from developing new bellicose nuclear technologies and providing significant non-military incentives for nations to avoid nuclear armament.

* Humanitarian Foreign Policy: I will demure to the pro-Life contingent’s desire that I be kept in a PVS in perpetuum if the United States aggressively pursues a humane foreign policy. This policy should be guided by the idea that this country must use its economic prowess and leverage to bring education, health care, basic services, and opportunity to the millions of disenfranchised, impoverished and oppressed peoples of the world. For example, instead of providing Bradley Fighting Vehicles or F16s to the Israeli army, the United States would open a free, state-of-the-art, health clinics in every West Bank refugee camp.

via BoingBoing.

Seriously, everyone should take the current insanity as a bucket of cold water to the head, and we should all get a living will thrown together. A quick googling turned up a free online living will site, and I’m sure it can’t be that hard.

Full disclosure: if I so much as break a leg, put me down.

Another development in the world of social bookmarks. de.lirio.us at first glance appears to be a shameless knockoff of del.icio.us, but aims to be more. While it’s based on perl, as is del.icio.us, it uses Rubric and not HTML::Mason. I was excited to find that the source is available, and this combines with Scuttle’s source and makes for interesting reading today. Joshua Schachter reportedly uses Mason for del.icio.us, and I’m interested in seeing how, if de.lirio.us takes off, it will handle the load. One of the key differences I see in de.lirio.us is the addition of a special field to entries to allow for even more extended notes. The extra field allows some HTML to be included, I’m in the process of discovering how much since it isn’t published anywhere on the site.

My biggest disappointment with de.lirio.us is the added url cruft with */rubric/*. It’s going to be interesting to see the site unfold. I can’t be too hard on it, with it being less than 48 hours old. Interestingly, I see not a peep about the new generation of imitators at the del.icio.us-discuss mailing list archives, but I suppose they’re not going to have an impact until they hit the knee of the exponential growth. They’re busy talking about the new style of visualizing how many other people have bookmarked a link in the new interface.

I was in the early stages of writing my own del.icio.us app, not necessarily for release, but someone beat me to it. It’s called Scuttle and it’s available on Sourceforge.

Seriously, what took so long? I thought there would’ve been a selection of clones by now, but c’est la vie, no complaints. I’m looking forward to browsing Scuttle’s source.

It was really only a matter of time before somebody came out with AJAX chat. It’s XHTML live chat in a web page, without page refreshes, based on the XMLHTTPRequest object. This is nice, because anyone who has tried using a chat app build in a web page knows these things can potentially be ugly and annoying. Beautiful work by PlasticShore, and you can see it in action for yourself.

I’m a new member at ALTphotos, and my new Flickr pro account is getting used thoroughly. I also checked out and signed up the new Ourmedia site, which hosts Creative Commons content for free. These sites all rock. I’m admittedly nervous about Flickr being swallowed up by Y! but I’m also very curious what they’re planning to reward their subscribers with. Free pro accounts? T-Shirts? Double bandwidth? That last one would be almost a curse; I’m struggling with my desire to extract all the value out of my subscription, and it’s hard to take enough quality photos to upload 1 gigabyte.

Drunkenblog lays out an analysis of the suspicious traits in the OSX emulator CherryOS. It’s a lot like PearPC, the open source OSX emulator. It seems there are a number of very similar function and variable names, before you profile the behavior at runtime to see it’s almost identical. And then there’s all the GPLed code in it. Not good.