Author Archives: Ben

SOPA Roundup

Posted on 1/21/2012 by Ben

Here are a few smart things people are saying about SOPA and PIPA. Jeff Atwood gets at the key political takeaway: So yes, join us in fighting the obvious insanity of legislation like SOPA and PIPA that threaten the open, … Continue reading →

Posted in Copyfight | Leave a comment

Coal Energy Drink: Keeps You Running Until It All Runs Out

Posted on 10/1/2011 by Ben

Posted in Environment, Humor, Video | Leave a comment

The Paradox of Backyard Hens

Posted on 9/8/2011 by Ben

James McWilliams on some problems with keeping backyard chickens. For those without the fortitude to self-slaughter, keeping older hens as companion animals is also an option. This choice, too, has a downside–one that applies to the chickens while they’re laying … Continue reading →

Posted in Animal Rights | Leave a comment

Rushkoff on Unemployment

Posted on 9/8/2011 by Ben

Douglas Rushkoff has a great piece on CNN about whether we ought to view unemployment as a problem. This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson’s RICH Economy, written thirty years ago and seeming more prescient all the time. America is … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

What I learned from reading the Android user manual

Posted on 9/3/2010 by Ben

I love my Nexus One Android phone and, in general, I’ve found the user interface to be very intuitive. However, I recently discovered that there’s a 340-page user manual for Android. I decided to read the whole damn thing and … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers and Internet, Free Software, Technology | Leave a comment

“I’m Vegan” Documentary Shorts

Posted on 8/11/2010 by Ben

My friend Eric Prescott has posted the first five of his I’m Vegan profiles. Eric traveled the country and filmed interviews with vegans from all walks of life. There are many more to come and they’ll all be on Youtube … Continue reading →

Posted in Animal Rights, Vegan | Leave a comment

Memory will be the real performance bottleneck on your VPS

Posted on 11/30/2009 by Ben

This well-done benchmark comparison of several Virtual Private Server vendors gives me warm and fuzzies that I chose Linode for my new hosting provider. However, the benchmarks chosen mostly test CPU performance and the bottleneck when hosting a dynamic web … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers and Internet, Programming | Tagged performance, web-programming | 4 Comments

‘We Are All Connected’ (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

Posted on 10/25/2009 by Ben

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Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

Posted on 10/25/2009 by Ben

Posted in Video | Leave a comment

Implementing Markdown with Regular Expressions

Posted on 7/9/2009 by Ben

Jeff Atwood has a post about something I’m intimately with, implementing a subset of Markdown using regular expressions. After years of tweaking and user contributions, the regexps in the Markdown Vim syntax file are now so complex, even I don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Leave a comment

New Hosting

Posted on 6/2/2009 by Ben

I’ve finally finished moving this site to a new hosting provider, which was one of the things keeping me from posting lately. Expect blogging activity to resume shortly.

Posted in General | Tagged administrivia | Leave a comment

Posted on 1/11/2009 by Ben

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Posted on 12/20/2008 by Ben

The RIAA is halting file-sharing lawsuits and instead hopes ISPs will do its dirty work for it. The new tack seems even more nefarious to me. We need collective licensing.