Category Archives: Uncategorized

After to moving to DC the beginning of August, I’ve focused in on my beat:  how laws and regulations affects IT operations.

I described how Anne Marguiles is approaching her role as the CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, focusing on innovation, privacy and security.

I reported on the amendment of the  Massachusetts data protection law.

I wrote  a digest of some of the debate in the blogosphere, positing that standards aren’t security, when it comes to PCI compliance and Heartland’s data breach.

Prompted by the work of a contributor, I asked what online privacy expectations exist for social media use at work?

Afterwards, I published a series on social media and compliance, focusing first on online privacy regulations, then the ECPA and online privacy and finally drafting a social media and online privacy policy.

Recently, I blogged about how a Twitter security hole highlights need for a social media policy today.

It’s been a great first month in Washington. I look forward to the return of Congress in September.

Serious science fiction fans are always hungry for new authors, perspectives and worlds. Cory Doctorow, no stranger to science fiction fandom nor authorship, recently pointed out a terrific post at DavidBDean.com that listed websites where one can find DRM-free science fiction to slake that cyberliterature thirst.

The following list combines the best of the online resources for DRM-free science fiction suggested by the BoingBoing community with the excellent “13 DRM-free ebook sites” resource by Mark Gladding at Text2Go Blog.

Baen Free Library
You’ll find around a hundred or so free ebooks here. There’s also an Annotated Baen Free eBook Listing, which includes scads of CD-ROMs that shipped as promotional materials, all neatly zipped up for download.

Craphound.com
Cory Doctorow has made gobs of his science fiction novels and novellas available online for download. I enjoyed Little Brother, though fans of classic space opera are likely to be left somewhat mystified.

Double-Dragon-ebooks.com
Nearly 500 DRM-free science fiction ebooks, most of which are new to me, for good or ill. Ratings from the community should help both the visitor and myself to judge what might be worth downloading.

Ebooksjustpublished.com
The clever Charles Gladding, of Tumbywood Software in Australia, set this website up to track ebooks as they’re published. He has a commercial incentive to do so, given that his Text2Go software is made to convert text to speech for use on a portable media player, but as that’s a rather useful service,  I raise my virtual goblet to him and thank him for the useful site. The most recent posting sent me to “Beasts of New York,” a “children’s book for grownups.” Thanks, Charles.

Escapepod.org
There are over 200 episodes of the Escapepod podcast now, many of which feature great short scifi stories. Episode 205 even includes a full cast dramatizing “Rogue Farm” by Charles Stross.

Feedbooks.com
Probably the most attractively designed website of the bunch. Great catalog, plenty of DRM-free science fiction ebooks. I downloaded a PDF of Charles Stross’ “Accelerando” tonight, in fact.

Fictionwise.com
DRM-free doesn’t mean free-free. Fictionwise offers nearly 5,000 ebooks, each with user ratings. An ebook will cost you anywhere from $0.99 for old or obscure scifi to $18 or so for a novel hot off the presses. If you join their “club,” savings are even more pronounced. Tons of classics and new offerings in there.

FreeSFonline.de
Terrific links to scifi work from 2009. Ethics upfront: Doesn’t link to pirated copies.

Futurismic.com
“A website for people interested in the future and the effects of science and technology on the present.” You’ll find new scifi in the fiction section.

Gutenberg.net.au/sfproject
The Australian iteration of Project Gutenberg has an exhaustive list of DRM-free science fiction

iO9.com
Top-notch science fiction blog. Not specifically oriented towards DRM-free scifi but posts often point to such work.

Kalkion.com
“Kalkion is the collaborative effort of passionate science fiction writers who have come together for a noble cause.” News, resources, jobs, blogs, community.

Manybooks.net
Hundreds of science fiction novels, in just about every electronic format you might desire. I downloaded Scalzi’s first novel tonight.

Only-Free-Fiction.com
A bit limited but worth a quick browse.

Podiobooks.com
If you’re going on a long drive or are a fan of audio books during your commute, Podiobooks has dozens of DRM-free science fiction novels available for download.

Project Gutenberg
The grandfather of ebook resources has many science fiction novels for download.

RevolutionSF.com
Plenty of DRM-free science fiction to be read at this “online magazine and community dedicated to celebrating the best in science fiction, fantasy, comics, anime, and gaming.”

SpeculativeFictionreview.com
Publisher and bookseller. Promotes new writers.  Books section includes downloads.

Strangehorizons.com
One new science fiction story a week, going back to 2000. HTML format, in the main, but therefore quite legible on, say, an iPhone or the like.

Tor.com
Tor, publisher of many a scifi classic, has been sending me a friendly email newsletter for many months now that featured newly published books, audiobooks and readings. I’ve also been happily downloading and reading new DRM-free ebooks that they’ve announced. While that particular option has ended, there are still dozens of stories to be read there.

A Note on DRM

You might wonder what the fuss is over DRM-free ebooks. After all, easily downloading a new novel to a Kindle over a wireless broadband connection in 30 seconds or so is an act straight out of science fiction. I’d suggest considering the scenario where an ebook publisher can exercise certain rights over content remotely, as Amazon in fact did earlier this year. Readers interested in the coalition that has raised concerns on those counts may find Defectivebydesign.org of interest.

[HT to the Daily Dish]

As I mentioned on Twitter, however, Olympus might have done well to more overtly credit the creator of “A wolf loves pork”, Taijin Takeuchi. That video is embedded below.

I retain my standard reticence to embrace commercial adaption of art. Both are technical and artistic achievements.

In this case, perhaps imitation is the truest form of flattery.

This is the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

If you know me well, you know I’ve been a devout fan of the work of J. R. R. Tolkien since I was eight, when my uncle Jim gave me the Lord of the Rings for Christmas. I devoured the book, along with the Hobbit and then the Silmarillion, reading each many times. I still enjoy revisiting Middle Earth, most recently in Children of Hurin, the revised dark epic released by Christopher Tolkien last year.

Jim’s son, Chris, however, is a genuine Tolkien scholar, particularly with regards to linguistics. When I recently shared a J.R.R.T. resource I’d found online with him and other family members, he replied with a number of other wonderful resources. Since he was kind enough to share his knowledge with me, I thought I’d pass it along to the rest of the world.

The Tengwar Scribe allows you to write text in Roman letters, select a Tengwar mode, and have the text transcribed to Tengwar. Tengwar, if you recall, is “a script that was invented by J.R.R. Tolkien. In his works, the tengwar script, invented by Fëanor, was used to write a number of the languages of Middle-earth, including Quenya and Sindarin. However, it can also be used to write other languages, such as English (most of Tolkien’s tengwar samples are actually in English). The word tengwar is Quenya for ‘letters’.” (Wikipedia)

The Tengwar Scribe is Windows-only, however, so you may want to look into Online Tengwar Transcriber, which works on any platform.

YaTT, or Yet another Tengwar Tool, allows users to transcribe both into and from Tengwar. YaTT incluldes an option to transcribe text in other applications, including special support for MS Word. YaTT was originally made for the PC but Chris assures me that there is a “Lite” version somewhere for the Mac.

Hiswelókë’s Sindarin dictionary includes a Sindarin lexicon in XML (TEI) format and two freeware applications. Dragon Flame for Microsoft Windows and Linux, embeds the Sindarin dictionary along with additional tools. Hesperides does the same for OS X. Sindarin, as you may recall, was “the Elvish language most commonly spoken in Middle-earth in the Third Age. It was the language of the Sindar, those Teleri which had been left behind on the Great Journey of the Elves.”(Wikipedia)

Finally, Ardalambion, according to Chris, is “a good resource for learning about the Elvish languages themselves; you can even find an extremely thorough, well-researched “Quenya Course” consisting of 20 lessons, plus appendices and exercises with keys.”

Thanks for resources, cuz! There are many other wonderful Tolkien resources online too, notably the Encyclopedia of Arda, an Elvish to English dictionary and an English to Elvish dictionary.

Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: pedo mellon a minno.

Note to people commenting here: I have shared links to Elvish translators here. There’s a great Tolkein translator online here. I am not offering translation services. Thank you! .

I’m still catching up from the whirlwind of the past 36 hours. In that time, I’ve seen an editorial conference come off without a hitch,  enjoyed some recognition for multimedia conference coverage, learned from hours of company meetings, mixed and mingled with hundreds of coworkers in front of 10′ screens, talked about blogging with Brian Madden and helped moderate a social media session with Chris Brogan, Colin Steele, Mark Fontecchio and a room full of bright, engaged tech reporters, editors, IT marketers and publishers. I plan to write more about that last later.

That alone made it a significant and looong day.

Add in the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States and I’m only now feeling like I’m sidling to the edge of rushing slipstream of events in my personal and professional life, to say nothing of the larger changes on a global level. The new WhiteHouse.gov captures some of that zeitgeist, with its radically improved design and features — not to mention a new robots.txt file, as Jason Kottke pointed out yesterday.

I was fortunate to be able to watch the swearing in and the speech itself on a projected screen with the rest of my division. I’ll always be grateful that those resources were made available and that I was able to share that moment with my colleagues, along with the world’s Tweets about the #inauguration streaming along on the screen of my iPhone.

Aretha Franklin gave us a rendering of My Country Tis of Thee for the ages.

The quartet Yo-Yo Ma , Itzhak Perlman , Anthony McGill and Gabriela Montero performed an exquisite classical composition arranged by John Williams.

And then for a twenty one minutes, we enjoyed the extraordinary spectacle of shared collective excitement, hope and sustained eloquence.

(I was amused to hear that Barack had to retake the oath today after that hiccup at the beginning with Chief Justice Roberts.)

I’m still sifting through many other remarkable moments from the day and evening. Now that the celebrations have ended, the real work begins.

Tired as I am, I’m buoyed by the renewed sense of possibility I felt in the office, online and in the airwaves. My to-do list grows ever longer, both at home and at my editor’s desk. Even so, I feel a sense of hope, of optimism and of gratitude for being alive at this moment.

We live in extraordinary times.

“When inspiration calls, you don’t send it to voicemail.” – will.i.am

I introduced someone to will.i.am’s landmark song and video this morning. I’m proud to have been the one to share that campaign anthem and reflect on its significance in the election of our next president.

I shared the song and video because I heard will.i.am talk about what inspired him to compose the song and create the video on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning. I nearly had an NPR ‘driveway moment’ but kept moving through the streets of Cambridge, as I had to return my Zipcar. will.i.am heard the speech Barack Obama made after he won 36% of the vote in the 2008 NH Presidential Primary and decided to do what he knew how to do to support Obama: put the candidate’s words to music, cut a video and get it distributed.

NPR has made the interview available at Will.I.Am: A Song To Inspire A Nation.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive encyclopedia entry for Yes We Can, which includes the estimate that the video (below) has a ‘combined web total of more than 26 million viewings.’

The full transcript of this speech is available at CNN.com.

Andres Useche also recorded “Si Se Puede Cambiar” (Yes we can change), which I’ve also embedded below:

Regardless of your ideological beliefs, this viral video demonstrated the power of eloquent rhetoric, stirring composition and, of course, the Internet.

According to NPR, will.i.am will join “countless other musicians in Washington, D.C., in an HBO-sponsored inauguration concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Each artist will perform songs related to the theme “We Are One.” The concert will be broadcast or streamed live online at 2 PM EST.

Yes, we did.

364.4 smoots & 1 ear

364.4 smoots & 1 ear.

Oliver Smoot later became chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)[2] and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).