Tomorrow, Friday, October 26, from 4:30 PM till 7:00 PM there is a Media Democracy Fair. The event is at the Concourse in SFU Vancouver (Harbour Centre) 515 West Hastings Street.

If you care about independent media, try to show up.

More information at:
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/10/25/MediaDemocracy/
http://mediademocracyday.org/2007+Events#id416092

An excellent presentation by Zak Greant:
The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Free Software

I think this is the best argument I have seen on why open source is tremendously important.

The Tyee started a new campaign, watch the movie and help them spread the word:

A new campaign from the Free Software Foundation: Play OGG

I saw An Inconvenient Truth today. If you have any doubts that we are causing a massive climate change then make sure you see this movie. And I really mean MASSIVE.

If you still have doubts after seeing this movie then your salary depends on having doubts.

One of the trailers shown before the movie started was for "Who Killed the Electric Car?", related subject, looks pretty interesting.

Every year on the last Friday of November it is Buy Nothing Day. I hope you celebrated by not buying, I missed it this year :-(

The Independent World Television has an interesting collection of videos on their site and it keeps growing. It would be great if you could watch them using the DTV Internet TV viewer (Mac only for now), but there is no RSS stream for these videos.

The good news is that you can create such an RSS feed using del.icio.us. I created a special del.icio.us user for this, bookmarked the first few videos and here is the feed:
http://del.icio.us/rss/iwt/system:media:video

There is a saying, "The map is not the territory". While there are many reasons why this is true, there is one aspect regarding maps of the whole Earth that caught my interest quite a while ago. The Earth is more or less a sphere, how do you project a sphere on a plane? By distorting it, of course. Knowing that maps are distorted projections is one thing, getting a feel for that distortion is another.

If you could animate a map by continously changing the projection point, you could get a better understanding in which ways and to what extent different areas of the map are distorted. A few weeks ago I just realized that the individual frames of such an animation could be generated by xplanet and then an animation can be created by joining together all these frames. Since you don't want to manually generate all the frames you would need a way to automate the whole process. I wrote a short Python script that generates the frames by calling xplanet in a loop and then creates an avi animation using mplayer.

Some smart cookies from Telus decided to block access for all their customers, and some, to a pro union web site (Voices For Change - www.voices-for-change.com). What were they thinking?

First of all, this is going to back fire really bad since this is a gross human rights violation. Second, this way they just draw lots of attention to Voices for Change.

Some side effects of this blocking were the fact that they also blocked 766 other sites and that smaller ISPs that are using the Telus network were also blocking their customer's access (and it was not the decision of these small ISPs).

A really nice overview (and tons of useful links): Be the Media: the state of the public webcasting platform - CommonMedia.org.