Anyone wanna design a new look for CM that looks passable on IE/Win? I am about ready to go back to .txt files.
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wizbango! tech
You might have found out, by now, that Google has uploaded Life magazine’s trove of photographs from the 1860s onwards onto their formidable servers. They are of decent quality – with some tags/Labels. The viewer, of course, cannot add their own notations, labels and tags.1 I would have liked to see this in Flickr with [...]
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A week or so ago Stephen Mihm had an interesting article in Boston Globe, Everyone’s a historian now: How the Internet – and you – will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. Mihm concentrated on the effect of crowd sourcing on history as a research/archival practice, but I have been thinking about the positive [...]
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One of my favorite activity in the archive was to work on the marginalia of the manuscript – mostly just trying to decipher but often thinking through the gloss it ‘added’ to the text. Thinking about digital archives, I have been keenly aware that this ‘conversation on the margins’ must be incorporated into the text [...]
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I have been seriously amiss [um] in acknowledging the [somewhat disconcerting] distinction that friends & gentle readers of CM have bestowed [in service of a meme (those things are still around? {apparently})]: It makes them think. Mucho thanks, folks. As a meme, it has some rules. Like linking to this post and listing five bloggers [...]
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Some while ago, I wrote up my thoughts on being public intellectuals in the new digital age. I had always meant my ‘manifesto’ to serve as an introduction to a larger piece on digital history – that I would try and get published. I wrote parts of this larger piece and presented it at a [...]
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While CM was being hacked, some of your correspondents ended up getting hijacked by the trendiest new web presence in town, my.barackobama.com. Within moments of the site’s inception, we began to feverishly collect friends, join groups and start movements. But now that the site is already five days old, the bloom has faded from the [...]
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CM has been broken for the last month. Maybe you noticed? And I have been in less than optimum health during that same period. I kept making stabs at fixing it – the DNS registrant mess, the hosting company mess, the recreation of the backend db mess – but, I would run out of energy [...]
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I am sure you all noticed that this site has acted flaky lately. At first, I kept thinking that it was due to my host, Globat.com not doing a proper job of, hell, maintaining ONE damn SQL db. However, on monday, I discovered that CM had been hacked by some Saudi scriptkiddie named TrusT_Me. You [...]
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In March, I am presenting on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies. A few weeks ago, we co-panelists thought about ways in which we could enhance the process of writing and discussion on the papers before the conference happens. We are convinced that our idea for the panel could [...]
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I have been thinking about digital archives in the humanities – specifically for historians – for a while now. I believe that certain technologies, under the web 2.0 rubric*, provide new and exciting ways for historians to completely rethink their notions of archive, access, and, perhaps, public knowledge itself. Take, for instance, the Mughal India [...]
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Happy 8th birthday, Google. You have changed everything. Remember. Don’t. Be. Evil.
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Today’s NYT Magazine cover story by Michael Lewis, The Ballad of Big Mike, relates a rags-on-the-way-to-riches tale about a young football player at Ole Miss. Only the most compulsive Sunday NYT readers will have actually made their way through this dull yet strangely disturbing tale of an inner-city lad weighing 334 lbs. (which figure could [...]
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Charles McGrath has written a part deux to his expose of term paper mills in today’s Week in Review section of the NYT. Let it be noted that Mr. McGrath has for some reason not discovered the Pakistani Crime Syndicate we unearthed after his article last week. The paper he commissioned this week, a comparison [...]
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On the occasion of this past Monday, I decided since everyone else was doing it, I might as well hold my own little 911 observation. It occurred to me to paint a portrait of UbL, since I’ve been working on portraiture lately (by which I mean ‘making portraits’ rather than in the academic sense of [...]
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The NYT reported yesterday in a ‘the internet might be destroying the fabric of our society’ article that students who are desperate, dishonest or rich (or any combination) can buy made-to-order term papers on the World Wide Web for as little as $9.95. A NYT editor solicited term papers on common English lit topics from [...]
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A few weeks ago, Google announced that one can download pdfs of public domain books from Google Print. Today comes another announcement about the availability of newspapers archives from 1700 to the present. Most of the stuff that I looked for in the archives was behind subscription walls but no matter. Academics have always had [...]
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Some fun with Google Trends: Islam: And they say Muslims aren’t inquisitive about their faith. Look at the top four. Those countries are _not_ in the Middle East people. I know it is hard to fathom Muslims outside the Middle East. Terrorism: Top city: Washington, D.C. And look at Region. Pakistan leads [as always!]. Sex: [...]
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I rebuild the mySql db four times. I wrote the mod_rewrites 1,0000 times. Hell will be a gigantic database with millions of entries in millions of tables. The angel will ask me to find all instances of the *./*.html and replace it with $1/$2/. By hand. When I am finished he will tell me that [...]
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Movable Type is dead to me. I am also INCREDIBLY busy. But, here is a re-birth. pure and white. So, gentle readers, bear with me as I slowly re-shape this mess into CM. Maybe I will take the opportunity to do some redesigning. Was never happy with the fonts. And now that WP is here: [...]
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