Jason Scott's Weblog
Naturally, one might be inclined to look at a massive project one did, like a two DVD documentary on text adventures, and instead of remembering how you got there and how hard you worked and everything else, just see the flaws. I’ve had GET LAMP flaws held up to me on several occasions, actually many occasions, […]
So, very quickly. SOPA is just the latest in really stupid laws that are intended to change the very nature of online life (along with a lot of aspects of offline life) to bring the Internet in line with the “real world”, e.g., Shit. It was made by people trying to fundamentally change how this […]
Still lovin’ the job at the Internet Archive. I’m starting to forget I ever worked anywhere else and all those times I wasn’t enjoying myself. (I actually enjoyed myself a lot at the various jobs I used to have, but it was rarely because of the job itself.) I last posted that I’d added some […]
Besides adding thousands of items to archive.org and uploading terabytes of data (I’m at 28 terabytes of data uploaded since May of this year), I’ve also been working among a bunch of fronts to bring a whole raft of knowledge and history into the browseable, usable world. Trust me, a lot is getting in there. […]
There’s fast, there’s ultra-fast, and then there’s the speed at which Adrian “IronGeek” Crenshaw has rendered out and uploaded the full talks from his first annual Derbycon hacker and security conference. As it was, and due to an extremely silly scheduling conflict, I could only attend the first day of the conference, and because of […]
As is often the case with Reddit, some random user randomly linked to one of my weblog entries. In this case, the Fuck the Cloud entry. And as is often the case with Reddit these days, it smeared any previous record of hits I ever got on the weblog, ever, since I started doing this, […]
So this is what my job is and that’s pretty goddamned great. I am currently in a project to gather up scanned copies of every computer magazine or newsletter that has gone out of print. That’s what I’ve mostly been up to, and that’s where I am. As of this writing, I have put up […]
There’s good and bad in the Star Trek franchise, but certainly The Next Generation had some mighty subtle portrayals buried in among the episodes, especially as things got a bunch of seasons in. One that has always struck me, personally, is a short scene in the beginning of an episode called The Chase, where the […]
We had a little discussion on one of my mailing lists about the origin of the phrase “LOL”, which has a couple claimed fathers – but I thought I’d throw this into the mix. Reprinted from The Annals of Hygiene, Volume 6, published by the Pennsylvania State Board of Health. Official date of publication: 1891. […]
Let’s get the numbers out of the way immediately before they’re misreported. Archive Team rescued, roughly, 20 percent of all the profiles on Friendster. This took us many months and reflects the sheer mass of Friendster’s data, well into the 70-80 terabyte range, behind custom software, and which they summarily deleted from their user accounts. […]