citizen428.blog()

Step 1. Be bored at worked.
Step 2. Get attracted by a discount airline‘s commercial in your favorite online newspaper.
Step 3. Discover that flights to Bucharest are incredibly cheap and decide to go there for a weekend in April.
Step 4. This is the crucial step: Don’t pay attention while booking the flight and choose the wrong date for your return flight, so you end up booking 1,5 weeks in Romania.

Summary: Christian and me will go to Romania from April 20th until April 30th. Wish us luck/fun/whatever.

Sweetmorn, Chaos 61, 3173 YOLD

Yesterday we played two games of 1000 Blank White Cards at the Metalab which was quite a lot of fun. The cards we created ranged from “Emo Cheese” (which cuts itself), “MySpace down” (which of course lets emo cheese melt) to the even more bizarre “Milchschnitte frisst U-Bahn” (sorry, I couldn’t possibly translate this to English). If you want to spend a nice evening with your friends, 1KBWC definitely is an option which you should keep in mind.

Sweetmorn, Chaos 51, 3173 YOLD

While reading netzpolitik.org yesterday, I found a link to an article on the OpenNet Initiative Blog, explaining how the filtering of Google.cn works. Now let’s have a closer look at some of the blocked sites:

site:hrw.org
site:hrichina.org

Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China. Who is surprised that they get blocked? Nobody? Guessed so…

site:rfa.org

Radio Free Asia describes itself in the following way: “RFA is a private, nonprofit corporation that broadcasts news and information in nine native Asian languages to listeners who do not have access to full and free news media. The purpose of RFA is to provide a forum for a variety of opinions and voices from within these Asian countries.“

site:tsquare.tv

A pretty informative site about the incident on Tiananmen Square in 1989. You really should try to see the documentary, it’s probably the best I’ve seen so far on this topic.

http://64memo.com/

The Tianmen Massacre Memorial Museum. I haven’t read any of the articles on this site yet, so it’s hard to tell how exactly they are dealing with the subject.

site:news.bbc.co.uk
site:voa.gov

Ok, the BBC and Voice of America may not be the most objective news sources one can find in the world, but blocking them seems a little harsh.

site:boxun.com
site:peacehall.com

Both domains will lead you to the Boxun News Network, a site writing a lot about censorship, free speech and similar topics.

site:freechina.net

After having a look at the goals of The Free China Movement, it should be pretty obvious why the Chinese government wants this site blocked.

site:geocities.com

Free web hosting == free expression? It seems so…

site:falundafa.org
site:epochtimes.com

After having been at a conference with participants from these groups I have to say that I don’t feel any sympathy for them, but that definitely isn’t an excuse for locking them up and censoring their sites.

site:savetibet.org

It should be pretty obvious why this got blocked.

site:topforum.com

A dynamic index of Chinese forums websites.

site:laogai.org

Since 1992 the Laogai Research Foundation is trying to gather information on Chinese penal camps and other “systemic human rights violations in China, including public executions, organ harvesting from executed prisoners, the coercive enforcement of China’s population control policy, and persecution of religious believers.“

I guess that sites like the China Labour Bulletin and related worker’s movements get filtered as well, but I can’t personally confirm this currently.

Boomtime, Chaos 27, 3172 YOLD

Today when I talked with a non-techy friend from the Midde East on IM, the topic of free speech on the net came up. I then started telling him about Tor and how hidden services could be a solution to this. But when I sent him the links, he couldn’t open them, but instead saw the following:

We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of [insert country here].

I guess it should have been obvious that countries which censor the net wouldn’t easily give their citizens the information needed to circumvent this censorship, but still I was pretty baffled by this.

So please everyone, spread the word about Tor and consider if you want to volunteer or donate something to the effort!

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

I haven’t blogged for quite some time now, so I decided I could at least entertain you with one of my semi-regular link dumps until I’m motivated enough to write a proper entry again…

Ruby

RadRails: From a rather recent mail on ruby-talk I learned about RadRails, an IDE for (who would’ve guessd) Ruby on Rails which was built using the Eclipse RCP. Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time to play with it yet, but so far it seems to be quite nice and if you’re into Rails you maybe should have a look at this project.

eigenclass: Recently RedHanded kept talking about Mauricio Fernandez’ new blog called “eigenclass”, which talks about a lot of really interesting and advanced Ruby stuff. Definitely an interesting read for every serious Ruby programmer and everyone who wants to become one.

try ruby!: As I found out on poignant-stiffs why is at it again, which means there’s something cool coming up. Despite not involving cartoon foxes or chunky bacon, try ruby is still a really neat project, giving you the opportunity to interactively test Ruby from within your web browser. There’s also a little tutorial, so this site may very well become the first stop to send Nubies to…

Disobey

The Hacktivist: Instead of summing up what the Hacktivist is all about, I’ll just give you the self-description of the project: “The Hacktivist is dedicated to examining the theory and practice of hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience while contributing to the evolution of hacktivism by promoting constructive debate, effective direct action, and creative solutions to complex problems in order to facilitate positive change.“ – Involve yourself!

The World’s Most Populated Countries: Sometimes a new look on things helps changing your perspective in a positive way. That’s why it’s important to take a minute or two to think about this map of the Earth, where all the countries got resized in relation to their population.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: This comes from an open letter to the Kansas school board: “ I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. [...] Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him“. Ramen!

Relax

Unintentionally sexual comic book covers: Part 1: If you know The Best Page In The Universe you either love or hate Maddox. No matter to which group you belong, check out this collection of unintentionally sexual comic book covers and have a good laugh! (via hoodwink.d onslaught)

The Website Development Process: Learn everything important there is to know about the process of developing a professional website from platic figurines. (via BoingBoing)

Squidoo: The developers of Squidoo thought that “Everyone’s an expert on something”, so they decided to give all of us the opportunity to share our knowledge in the form of “lenses”. For all of you who are to lazy to look at the FAQ to find out what a lense is, here’s the answer: “ A lens is one person’s (lensmaster’s) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It’s a place to start, not finish. “. Interesting concept, and there are some pretty cool lenses already. (via teemow).

Setting Orange, The Aftermath 53, 3171 YOLD

You have nil shillings. You are a simple cleric, you have 10 more shillings to earn before you have proven your xpath/regexen charming skills on par with the druids. A real druid will check your work and pay you soon enough. – http://hoodwink.d/

But I’ve been working hard and tried to prove these druids that my xpath and regex skills are up to their standards. I have hopefully earned my first shilling and I’ve earned it with my very own site! So you hoodwinkers out there, feel free to leave your winks instead of regular comments from now on!

And don’t be afraid when you have nfc what I’m talking about, this link explains it all, so open your eyes and feel around…

Pungenday, The Aftermath 41, 3171 YOLD

Once again I try to avoid doing the things I’m actually supposed to do, so here’s another issue of “citizen428’s random tidbits”.

• Principia Discordia: “How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her. Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything“. I’m maybe the last person to find this decent online edition of the Principia, but stuff like this happens when you get abducted by time-travelling dolphins before being right in the middle of a government conspiracy. Or was it just the anual meeting of the Rodeo Clown Society? Fnord!
• 1000 Blank White Cards: “1000 Blank White Cards is a card game, the purpose of which is to create the cards you’re playing with.“. Personally I find this really cool: you start out with white cards, and everybody has to draw his or her own cards. I want to try out this game as soon as possible, and I’ll make sure to tell you about it afterwards…
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: This guide on writing decent SciFi and Fantasy stories is for free, but the author requested that if you like it, you should tell another aspiring writer about it, and buy two of his books. As I currently don’t have the money for the latter, I thought I can at least use my blog to reach some more aspiring writers. (via BoingBoing)
• MouseHole: “MouseHole is a personal web proxy written in Ruby designed to be simple to script. Scripts can rewrite the web as you view it, altering content and behavior as you browse. Basically, it’s an alternative to Greasemonkey, which does similar things from inside the Firefox web browser“. I’ve been playing around with this for around a week now, and I have to say that I really like it. Don’t be afraid, why is involved, so there’s chunky bacon for all!
• The Kawasaki Method and The Takahashi Method: Uncle Lecture needs you! And he surely doesn’t want your average PowerPoint food soldier, but instead he’s looking for highly trained and deadly presentation ninjas. (via I-can’t-remember-but-if-in-doubt-blame-BoingBoing)

• Random geeky stuff: moo.fx – “ a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js“; meebo – Web 2.0 Instant Messaging. Buzzwordy, but looking nice; Selenium – a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do
• Update on cool stuff™: The third episode of NCY2123 has been released and part two of When Sysadmins Ruled the World is up on Cory’s web site. Both rock as usual.

Well, that’s it for today, don’t kill any puppets while I’m away.