Mike’s Digital Laboratory

But will it be viewable on the web? David Galbraith explains:

A California court order takes Wikileaks down, over a juicy story linking a venerable Swiss bank to money laundering – something that the bank possibly has no idea is a perfect web conspiracy meme….

Wikileaks went down, alright but only due to the sheer crushing power of a popular rush of visitors. Traffic generated by a backfired censorship attempt. By the way it’s back up, but you’ll have to use this ip address as at least one court seems to think it has a right to take away domain names as a method to censor the press.

So bookmark this! http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileak

Oh, I feel so rebellious! wonderful.

Update: 3/13/2008, viva la wiki revolution: this swiss dropped the case, The domain name is back. Wow, power to the people! Now you can set your browser to http://www.wikileaks.org/

So, What can you watch on GlueTube? How about an interview with Jimmy Carter. Or how about this this interview with Gary Rogowski . Is it me or is video on the web getting better. Perhaps my ISP has increased the available bandwidth. But more and more I find I am enjoying video’s on the web. Additionally the contextual nature of the web makes this so much better than traditional “TV”. Hey I can blog this. Try that with the show you just watched on the “tube”.

Continuing to learn Flex 3… What to code?, oh, what to code? Why turtles of course! So here is yet another demonstration of simple images rendered with Turtle graphics. Still an inspiration after all these years, this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve ported turtle code over to a new environment just to have a little fun. Oh yes you can have the source too!

Of course I have additional motivation. This is also a demo I have put together for a the class I’m teaching. “Building tools for creative practice” although the course is not primarily about Flex or Turtle graphics I’m hoping this might be a nice little diversion we might take tomorrow night.

What are turtles you ask? Well you might check out the original book or go see Steve Kurtz, who first exposed me to the inner workings funny critters.

Sci Fi Jungle is up! (Marianne’s new business) Check it out. T-shirts and aliens. What’s not to like?

I am writng this entry using a desktop blog editor called “Bee”.  Bee is a sample AIR application from Adobe labs. So far I really like what I see in the “about to be released” Flex 3.  The big news I assume is the introuction of AIR  (Check out the cool video).  So the same application development  environment you use to build flash apps fo rthe web can be used to build desktop apps outside the borwser. Nice.   I’m not sure if Flex (mxml and actionsscript 3) counts as a “4gl” or even “5gl” lanuage environment (so who’s counting anyway?) but it feels very state of the art to me. I like it.  By the way the way there is a reasoable FAQ for AIR here.   (Alas, I fear there is no spell checker is the Bee thing…) Ok here we go posting…