dogknob

dogknob's Journal

June 25, 2014

Here's one word for "white privilege" that might piss many of you off...

Marijuana.

"I started to see the culture in Nevada City as kind of a . . . a Never-Neverland. It's this place where there's enough capital because of the marijuana industry for people to do what they want most of the time. To be able to fund their art project, or their traveling lifestyle, or their social justice project, or their community projects . . . a beautiful house, or a homesteading project, or a farm that they want to have. What I saw after I read the book was that it's not a free and clear benefit for these people that are profiting off of this industry. The Prison-Industrial Complex isn't just the stockholders that want to build a private prison. It's not just the guards that are employed by those prisons. It's not just the people in the justice system who make their living off of prosecuting people. The Prison-Industrial Complex that is riding on the drug laws has created this abundant opportunity for people to . . . to grow weed. And I think people either don't know, or don't see, or don't want to know or see that that's the industry they're involved in. They don't want to see that for them to be able to make $200 a pound trimming, someone somewhere is paying a pretty high price. They're paying with their life or their freedoms."

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24318-a-bitter-harvest-california-marijuana-and-the-new-jim-crow

May 9, 2014

How about a slow-lane for the FCC? Got it!

No TollWeb!

Ars-Technica: Web host gives FCC a 28.8Kbps slow lane in net neutrality protest
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/web-host-gives-fcc-a-28-8kbps-slow-lane-in-net-neutrality-protest/

Daily Kos: In the ultimate Net Neutrality protest, web host throttles FCC connections
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/09/1298152/-In-the-ultimate-Net-Neutrality-protest-web-host-throttles-FCC-connections

How to throttle the FCC to dialup speed on your own website:
https://gist.github.com/m1/e5f1f190ba309b500f0a

May 9, 2014

How to throttle the FCC to dial up modem speeds on your website using Apache.

https://gist.github.com/m1/e5f1f190ba309b500f0a

May 9, 2014

In the ultimate Net Neutrality protest, web host throttles FCC connections

Source: Daily Kos

Lots of people are angry about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's Internet "fast lane" proposal that would let Internet service providers charge Web services for priority access to consumers. But one Web hosting service called NeoCities isn't just writing letters to the FCC. Instead, the company found the FCC's internal IP address range and throttled all connections to 28.8Kbps speeds.

Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/09/1298152/-In-the-ultimate-Net-Neutrality-protest-web-host-throttles-FCC-connections

Hell. Yes.

Hopefully more ISPs will join.

ars-technica: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/web-host-gives-fcc-a-28-8kbps-slow-lane-in-net-neutrality-protest/

May 9, 2014

EDIT: I'm looking for a reliable ffmpeg-friendly web host. Any ideas/stories?

Over a year ago, Dreamhost urged me to upgrade my PHP to version 5.3, which I did in the Dreamhost control panel. Today, I uploaded a script to my domain that includes some functions available only in php >= 5.3 and got fatal errors. I checked the control panel and it says I am running 5.3, but when I ran php -v in the shell I learned that it is actually version 5.2.17.

I then selected the 5.4 option in the control panel and was informed that the change would take 5-10 minutes. That was yesterday morning. Still running 5.2.17

Dreamhost offers ffmpeg on their servers, which I now need, but their version was built in 2011 and they provide no support whatsoever for it. I am decent with the UNIX shell and managed to get my own up-to-date ffmpeg working on my account, but I see that there are many other ISPs advertising full ffmpeg support.

Here's what I want (in order of importance):

1. PHP >= 5.3 (preferably higher) with no gotchas such as exec() or finfo() disabled or some other deal-breaker shite like that.

EDIT: Lots of storage (preferably unlimited). One site I run has a lot of (40-70 minute) audio files.

2. support/updates for ffmpeg and libraries

3. $$$ < Dreamhost ($12/month).

EDIT: 4(!) OF COURSE green/no-SOPA/no-FCC-TollNet/no-loose-fundamentalist-arbitrary-definition-of-what-is-porn

EDIT: See post #5 changing title to "I'm looking for a reliable ffmpeg-friendly web host. Any ideas/stories?"

May 4, 2014

It's 7:18am on Sunday morning. Wanna help me with a regular expression?

I know this is a total long-shot, but if anybody here would like to help me test the monster I wrote last night, then you can do it here:

http://regexr.com/38psn

I've spent a while trying to break it with mistakes one might make while naming a file that requires a naming convention (e.g. typos)

I'm using it to rat out bad filenames before I queue them up for transcoding in ffmpeg. The files are screened for bad extensions and bad MIME-types before they hit the expression, which I can't post here because of smilies.

There's info about the naming convention and what is supposed to match/not match at the link.

Thanks!

April 22, 2014

Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism, Democracy and the University as a Public Sphere -- truthout

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23156-henry-a-giroux-neoliberalism-democracy-and-the-university-as-a-public-sphere

4/22/14

*snip*

Higher education is one of the few public spheres left where students can learn to think, engage in critical dialogue, be self-reflective about their relationship to themselves, others and the larger world, all the while steeping themselves in the best ideas, values and skills that various modes of science, history, culture, literature and other traditions can teach them. Under neoliberalism, any public sphere that educates young people to be critical and engaged citizens is seen as dangerous to the established order. This is one of the reasons that the right hates the legacy of the '60s, because it reminds them of the power of students to question the established order and make power accountable while demanding that education function as a democratic public sphere. Moreover, education provides opportunities for those multiracial and working-class individuals previously unable to get a decent education. This is viewed as a threat to a largely white dominated public sphere.

These are some of the reasons why education is being massively defunded while students are trapped into tuition increases that decrease the possibility of poor students from going to college, while forcing existing students into a intellectual and morally dead zone that robs them of their imagination and forces them to think about their lives and careers solely in terms of survival tactics - how to pay off their loans as quickly as possible in order to be free of debt. The current assault threatening higher education and the humanities in particular, cannot be understood outside of the crisis of disposability, public values, ethics, youth, and democracy itself.

Profile Information

Member since: Tue Jun 16, 2009, 04:09 PM
Number of posts: 2,431