Buy American? President Obama bought French game Just Dance 3 for Christmas

According to a tweet from French multinational computer gaming company Ubisoft, United States President Obama obtained their game Just Dance 3 as a family Christmas present. So much for Buy American! What's that about Do what I say, but not what I do....

The Ubisoft tweet also caught the attention of the venerable Forbes with this headline
"President Barack Obama Endorses Ubisoft's Just Dance 3 Videogame For Christmas". Forbes missed the obvious Buy American contradiction.

Digital lessons never learned for FEMA?

In the category of don't put all your digital eggs in one basket comes this digital lesson not learned for FEMA, the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to this Information Week article published on February 9, 02011, FEMA lost historical data pertaining to its "lessons learned" database due to a server breakdown and "a poor archiving plan."

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra and Dead Media Ensemble

I read about the Boston Typewriter Orchestra on a mailing list. Intriguing sounds. I wonder if we will also see a Dead Media Ensemble that works with the likes of wire recorders, lantern slide projectors, Betamax video players and maybe a 3.5 inch diskette or two to store their works.

U.S. National Archives' treasure hunting team

National Archives' treasure hunting team keeps watch over the nation's attic - LAtimes.com - This story is about how employees of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration monitor online auction services such as eBay and collector shows to look for records that have been stolen. Nicholas Cage's character from the National Treasure movie franchise would not have gotten far had he tried to sell the Declaration of Independence that he stole from the National Archives. They are watching You!

Twitter trending topics, is this a new kind of chain letter game?

A posting to the WEB4LIB mailing list reminded me of many a chain letter I've received. This one has a library twist. It's all for a good cause, raising the profile of libraries around the world by gaming Twitter's top 10 trending topics list. Here's how Jorge Serrano-Cobos of MASmedios.com pitched it:

Let me invite you to participate in a librarian collaborative global e-marketing experiment: to make #biblioteca (means "library" in spanish) one of top 10 Twitter trending topics TOMORROW!

Yes, this initiative will happen tomorrow, Tuesday August 10, 2010 for one hour, from 10:00 a.m to 11:00 (New York), or 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. (in Spain).

The idea is to have thousands of people (librarians, patrons, readers,

everybody) around the world sharing many posts during that time, achieving (through the collective strength) that the hashtag #biblioteca to scale to the top 10 trending topics on Twitter at that time.

What to talk about? Share recommendations of books, interesting librarians sites or talk about activities occurring in libraries. In short, talk of libraries just using hashtag #biblioteca. Have fun and tell it to your friends throughout the world!

No matter if you use English in your comments, but simply use the library hashtag #biblioteca, not (or not only) #library

If you want, we can arrange the same initiative for #library another day.

Just tell us and many Hispanic librarian twitters will support it.

Thank you very much in advance, and regards from Spain ;-)

Search Amazon.com for twitter marketing such as Twitter Marketing For Dummies

I was just following orders: Canadian Department of National Defense computers used to edit Wikipedia

Here's a sad but true CBC News article about Department of National Defense computers being used to edit a Wikipedia entry about about "the [F-35] Joint Strike Fighter jet and the Conservative government's decision to spend as much as $18 billion on the aircraft. Those edits included the removal of information critical of the government's plan to buy the jets and the addition of insulting comments aimed at Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff." No doubt the culprit's defense will be, "I was just following orders."

Et tu Snarkus

I read about "the rise of the ridicule" or "online snark culture" in a newspaper article by Melissa Martin of the Winnipeg Free Press on July 25, 2010. What was it comedian Rodney Dangerfield said, "Can't get no respect." The article is essentially a paen of praise for April Winchell's Regretsy.com. She mocks "the most hiedeous or head-scratching items on the handmade online marketplace, Etsy." Get it? Etsy + Regrets = Regretsy. Winchell, the article recounts, "was something of a connoisseur of really crappy art." So now she's laughing all the way to the bank with no regretsies. Did I mention she's also published a book titled Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF.

Twitter is over capacity?

Got this error screen upon checking my Twitter account:



A whale is a great metaphor for a sinking service.

Please Rob Me and the problem of geo-location records

Please Rob Me points out the obvious to those who have been practicing and preaching the important mantra of online privacy. Constantly broadcasting your location and activities online has the potential of alerting criminals that you may not be at home. My philosophy is it's always better to tell your online followers where you've been, not where you are moment by moment.

Inventing the digital dark ages one encryption key at a time

Computer scientists at the University of Washington, according to this New York Times story, "New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct" (02009 07 20), have invented a method for letting digital data destroy itself. The article by John Markoff mentions "unexplored legal issues surrounding the use of their technology. For example, certain laws require that corporations archive e-mails and make them accessible." No kidding.

The system from the University of Washington is called Vanish. Perfect name.

My new blog, The Doomsday Blog

I've been thinking about all the hype around the end of the world that's scheduled for December 21, 2012. Now if the ancient Mayans had somehow synchronized their timekeeping efforts with the Western world's calendar and had the world ending on December 20, 2012 (get it, 20122012 as some people might express the date), I might have been a believer, but then again, maybe all the big disasters are happening on December 20 and the world officially ends on December 21, 2012.

So I've decided it's a great time for me to start a new blog, The Doomsday Blog, that gives my point of view and yours on the ways and days till the world ends through both scientific evidence and fictional creations. To help put this in perspective, I'm not insensitive to real-world disasters and have supported various Canadian Red Cross relief efforts. WordPress.com where my new blog is hosted has a widget that links to SocialVibe. I've set up a widget badge to support the American Red Cross in its disaster relief efforts. I hope you'll consider making a donation if you're in the United States.

VPSVille.ca explanation of the disappeared servers

Quoting the e-mail I and all affected customers received on October 13, 02008. I confirmed that my "hardware node" was gone. I'm posting this as a public service so anyone who's thinking of using VPSVille.ca is aware of this situation.

What Happened Here, Oct 8th.

We here at VPSVille have had a few days of frantic phone calls, hair-pulling, yelling, crying, screaming, sector-recovery crash courses and angry accusations. We've also looked closely at our logs and have pieced together what happened with our recent data loss incident.

Initially we thought it might be a case of gross negligence and some harsh words and harsher threats were exchanged, but we now believe it was just an honest, stupid mistake. Inexperience sunk the ship.

One of our new employee's made some crucial errors regarding security, and this was compounded by one of our techs travelling abroad and requiring some relaxation in our usually strict access policy. One firewall in front of another and both temporarily disabled = no firewall at all.

This unfortunately resulted in some malicious SOB with no real life to waltz into an almost unprotected segment of the network through a newly installed appliance with a default password and start deleting things. Several servers actually and a NAS unit assigned to back them up. One of the servers was our control node, which interfaces between the website and the other servers. Even our mail server was affected.

Some servers were running even after their files were deleted, through some strange quirk of Linux buffering that we still don't fully understand.

Its easy to blame a hacker of course, but we do feel that an unfortunate series of events combined to make their hack particularly easy. Far to easy for a network of this magnitude and importance to so many people.

This looked like a total loss, with no way to recover the data, so we sent out a somewhat panicked email to affected users that their accounts would just be canceled and refunded. Shortly afterwords our outgoing email died.

This resulted in a torrent of email, most of it surprising friendly, and much of it understandably angry and dismayed, telling us they wished to remain customers even if their data was not recovered.

Happily we were able to restore many servers with a sector recovery service. In light of this we have not arbitrarily canceled any accounts.

All affected accounts are re-enabled and have been credited. If we were able to restore your data we have sent you an email about it (hardware nodes rapier, cutlass and spear).

We sincerely express our condolences to affected customers for this unfortunate series of events, nobody should lose data at VPSVille, its an awful thing and we feel your pain.

Things do happen in life, but this won't happen again.

- Staff