i still agree; danah boyd's completed essay.

danah boyd has finally responded to her original post that caused such a ripple in the internet culture.

i felt from the beginning that those negative responses were based on her posting's title, more than its contents. the most disgusting part of this entire thing is that its been used, its seems, by facebook members for pseudo-self-righteous indignation. its been as if those who where most up in arms over your original posting where doing so as a way of saying: "see we are better than you. but we aren't happy about."

its been truly laughable. and despite my fitting into both 'classes', my life experiences def leave me feeling more comfortable with those that hang out on facebook. so anyone who's interested my new myspace profile, for my blog and up-coming podcast, is http://www.myspace.com/uberchicgeekchick
*hugs* now go read her paper(&agree with me). lol *wink*

clipped from www.danah.org Responding to Responses to: "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" (If you have comments, please add them to the related entry on my blog. Thank you.) One month ago, I put out a blog essay that took on a life of its own. This essay addressed one of America's most taboo topics: class. Due to personal circumstances, I wasn't online as things spun further and further out of control and I had neither the time nor the emotional energy to address all of the astounding misinterpretations that I saw as a digital game of telephone took hold. I've browsed the hundreds of emails, thousands of blog posts, and thousands of comments across the web. I'm in awe of the amount of time and energy people put into thinking through and critiquing my essay. In the process, I've also realized that I was not always so effective at communicating what I wanted to communicate. To clarify some issues, I decided to put together a long response that addresses a variety of different issues.

Using ffmpeg to convert flv to mpeg2.

just a quick guide on converting an flv(flash video) to an MPEG2 video,

it doesn't cover the real benefits of doing this with ffmpeg. ffmpeg is one of the most valuable tools for any designer who works with multi-media in linux. the true benefits to this guide is that with just playing with these options you can get a handle using ffmpeg to take things apart and than even glue them together.

for example chopping a bumper out of your favorite podcast, taking sound out of a video clip, and many other things. my main use of ffmpeg, but not its most useful, is to have a cron job monitor my podcasts' directory for any ogg files that don't have mp3 files and it than auto-converts them. it also rewrites my rss feeds.

now i just have to get my courage up and actually publish my podcasts... *gulp*

clipped from fosswire.com Converting FLV to MPEG in Linux by Chris Fortunately, we have a fantastic tool in FFMPEG. FFMPEG is a collection of free software for recording, transcoding, and streaming digital video and audio. It is a fantastic tool for Linux users who need to convert. ffmpeg -i video.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320×240 test.mpg -ab : Sets the audio bitrate. Without this, it’ll be set to the default of 64kbps -ar : Sets the audio samplerate. Default is 44100hz -b : Sets the video bitrate. Default is 2000kbps -s : Sets the size. Default is 160×128px

Dell lays an ogg(theora &vorbis); supports the open standard!

ogg theora is an open &standard video codec for the ogg container.

not that i really need any pr videos. but its more that they keep doing lil things like this that make me believe that they really are serious about embracing open source. of course the day i get one of their catalogs with a linux laptop or desktop, that's when i'll know that they're serious. until then, i wish i would stop getting their vista pushers.

clipped from direct2dell.com StudioDell videos now in Ogg Theora/Vorbis Since we started posting Video Blogs on Direct2Dell, we've made sure the videos were available in the Free format Ogg Theora / Ogg Vorbis.   The team over at StudioDell has been creating lots of new videos, several about Linux, and now, they too are available in Ogg Theora, as well as Flash, WMV, and MP4.  Simply click on the title of the video you want, click on the Download tab, and choose the format you want.  All Linux distributions support Ogg playback natively without needing to download additional patent-encumbered or proprietary codecs.

GPL upheld; Skype guilty!

despite their wide spread use; open source licenses have very little, if any, legal precedence. well here's one more for the books. its an interntional case, but a firm win non-the-less. i hope to see many more of these. we especially need some in this country.

i know, first hand, how many companies just ignore the requirements of open source licences. often because they feel there is no 'power' behind enforcing our licences. so anything that helps them realize that they can't just make things better for themselves without contributing back the code.

this is an excellent case for all of us writing floss software.

clipped from www.linuxworld.com Skype found guilty of GPL violations Skype violated the licence by its failure to supply a copy of the source code to users along with the phone, and by failing to provide a copy of the GPL itself with the phone, the court said. The decision reinforces that companies must adhere to the conditions of the GPL just as with any other contract, and that "inaccuracies" aren't to be allowed, according to the court. The decision shows that companies may be held liable for GPL violations in any country, even if the GPL isn't upheld in their home country. The case was brought by gpl-violations.org, a German organization run by open source software developer Harald Welte, which aims to force companies to take the GPL seriously. Welte has said he aims to settle most cases out of court, taking companies to court only if discussions fail to make them abide by the conditions of the licence.   Continued

our lil open source web browser; she just keeps growing up.

download Firefox &rediscover the web!

*firefox is growing up* first, later today(or maybe already) version 2.0.0.5 should be available &auto-updating all of the wired. based on this message from the mozilla.dev.planning group. today will be firefox 2.0.0.5's official release day, &btw you can get RC2 here through mozilla's ftp server right now(i've been trying to get this posted for three days now) than there's firefox' next major upgrade, firefox 3, currently code named Gran Paradiso. they've just feature froze and released alpha 6. as an internet artist, web design, open source creator, &web developer; Gran Paradiso release has me like extremely psyched. they're putting a ton of work into implementing web application services into firefox 3. and, *giddy giggles*, css3. even though css3 support isn't as far a long as i'd like, they're web application services implementations are spot on. so much so that, even though its still an alpha release, Gran Paradiso has become my main web browser since so much of my time 'online' is spent working on my next open source project that Gran Paradiso just continues to impress me with every milestone they reach. indeed our lil fox, she is indeed coming into her own. and this uberChicGeekChick is joining her for the ride. in more ways than one *wink*.

yet another cross site scripting exploit.

*as an oss web developer i have to be aware of online security.* and as, in this *shivers* web2.0 world, every one should be. this latest exploit is not scary in and of itself, but because of its possibilities. this one thanks to rsnake over at ha.ckers.org

clipped from ha.ckers.org Ferruh Mavituna posted about a new tool he’s created to do XSS tunneling. Ferruh’s is in .NET instead of server side scripts. He built his tool to be a proxy, so that you could write other third party scanning tools that interface with it. So let’s say you’ve got Nikto, but you want your target to do the work for you. You can plug Nikto into this, use it like a proxy, and poof, the client is now under Nikto’s control, by way of XSS Tunneling, by way of JavaScript running on their browser. Crazy, but cool. Ferruh’s also got a nice writeup and video to go along with it. Very cool stuff!