Daniel Ellsberg on Wikileaks

Unconditional Responsibility meets Total Compassion

From the bleeding edge of the "The meaning of life is to improve the quality of all life" battle front:

Jeff McMahan wrote in "The Meat Eaters" about the question of our moral responsibility when it comes to our ability to control predators in nature, and he later followed it up with "Predators: A Response" , responding to the commotion of absurd and offensive comments the article had received (from people that obviously hadn't read the article, or who didn't pay attention while reading it).

Thank you, Jeff McMahan, for doing all that legwork.

Peaceful Valley Boulevard and Rumblin

Joshua Klein on pitchfork.com in his review of Neil Young's Le Noise album about my two favorites:

"In fact, for all its hushed restraint, the eerie "Peaceful Valley Boulevard" is a real highlight, a paean to a doomed America that plays like a tragic lyrical descendent of "Pocahontas" and "Cortez the Killer". Young may be famous for his maelstrom guitar, but in this case the apocalypse sneaks up on us with a whisper, Young's voice steeped in decades of watching the world go to hell. "When will I learn how to heal?" he later implores in "Rumblin'", knowing full well that the damage has already been done."

NPR is streaming these tracks, and in fact the entire album, until October 5th.

Order is an addictive illusion

Nuff said.

Ringo Release 0.6

*****

RingoJS 0.6 was released on September 30, 2010.

• API Documentation
• Downloads

Here are the major changes since release 0.5 :

• Significant improvements in the following modules
  • ringo/httpclient
  • ringo/httpserver
  • ringo/parser
  • ringo/subprocess
• Moved core/* module s to ringo/utils/* namespace, no more extending of standard JS objects.
• Improved jsdoc support, new ringo-doc command line tool for creating static API documentation.
• CommonJS compliant unit testing .
• Fixes and added tests for skins (templates)
• Improvements in webapp framework:
  • New static middleware for serving files
  • Improved and redesigned Request and Response objects
  • Redesigned skeleton application
  • Redesigned error/notfound pages and middleware
  • AsyncResponse for fully streaming, asynchronous responses
  • WebSocket support out of the box
• Allow Ringo to run with modules bundled in ringo.jar file
• Add static API documentation for core JavaScript modules and Java classes

A full list of commits since 0.5 is available on GitHub .

The following people directly contributed code to this release:

• Andreas Bolka
• Robert Gaggl
• George Moschovitis
• Simon Oberhammer
• Robert Thurnher
• Hannes Wallnöfer
• Garry Yao

A lot more contributed ideas, bug reports and code on the mailing list . Thanks to everybody!

*****

Hannes Wallnöfer and Andreas Bolka did some benchmarking, comparing this RingoJS release to NodeJS. Of course, this is just looking at one particular aspect of the overall picture, but it is a nice and representative example of the stability of JVM based ServerJS deployment:

Predictions of an ugly IPv4-to-IPv6 transition

Iljitsch van Beijnum in "There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly" on ars technica:

"While IPv4 and IPv6 are very much alike to users and applications; 'on the wire', the protocols are completely separate and don't interact. In routing, we call this the "ships in the night" approach. (Hopefully, at least one of them has radar.) The advantage of this design is that there is no need to change existing IPv4 infrastructure——IPv6 is simply added as a new protocol. All the limitations and mistakes that are part of IPv4 are left behind. The problem with this approach is that the first person who wants to turn off IPv4 has to wait for the last person to add IPv6."

Running out of IPv4 address space, no ubiquitous DHCPv6 support, no IPv6 NAT, too much IPv4 NAT, the threat of DNS whitelisting, and no Plan B, oh my!

Link Love for Javascript

http://promotejs.com/

>>> Bungee jumps for all congressman, free!, no strings attached