Two Interviews with Julian Assange Worth Watching

Posted Fri, 07/30/2010 - 12:59 by Ben Stanfield

Democracy Now, an independent media group, has posted a long interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. It's so interesting watching this interview, and the second one below, to see how thoughtful and careful Assange is when answering questions.

Salon's Greenwald's Report on the Lamo/Manning/Wikileaks Story

Posted Fri, 06/18/2010 - 20:13 by Ben Stanfield

If you only read one article on the saga leading to Bradley Manning's arrest, make it today's Glenn Greenwald story for Salon.com. It's a riveting story, and casts serious doubt on the character of just about everyone involved in this story except Bradley Manning including Adrian Lamo, Kevin Poulsen, Wired.com, and the US government.

Bootstrapping the DNA Hacker Movement

Posted Mon, 06/14/2010 - 22:51 by Ben Stanfield

I've donated $65 to the OpenPCR project on Kickstarter. The idea is to build a cheap and open source PCR machine to enable hobbyists to perform PCR in a garage without spending thousands of dollars on expensive equipment.

The way Kickstarter works is interesting. They're aiming to raise $6000 before the July 23 deadline. If they get enough pledges before then, then all those who pledged will have their credit cards charged. If they don't get enough pledges, then no money is taken from the pledgers.

You can donate below, or just keep an eye on how close they're getting to the goal.

White House Drupal Modules

Posted Wed, 04/21/2010 - 23:27 by Ben Stanfield

Found a link to this picture thanks to @seanr1978:

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

Thorn Run Partners Website

Posted Tue, 01/05/2010 - 01:44 by Ben Stanfield

Over the past week, I've been working on the website for Thorn Run Partners, a new boutique lobbying firm in Washington, DC.

I did most of the backend Drupal work to get the site up and running. My friend Caroline did the design work, heavily modifying a theme from Top Notch Themes, who do a really nice job making Drupal themes.

I'm very pleased with the way things turned out, and happy that it doesn't really "look" like a Drupal site.

I'm posting about this here, for a few reasons:

The Kindle 2

Posted Fri, 02/27/2009 - 19:06 by Ben Stanfield
Steven Frank, in his review of the Kindle 2, says:
Anyone who has known me for more than 30 seconds will instantly see right through that as the paper-thin excuse to buy a shiny-rectangle-with-a-screen that it is. But I digress.

Ouch. I guess that hits a little close to home. That said, I'm absolutely loving my Kindle and even in 4 days have found myself reading much more than I normally do in a week. I've bought two titles for it so far, but I've downloaded some of the "classics" I've never read (War and Peace, Great Expectations, Moby Dick, to name but a few.)

Downloading Stanza is a must for converting freely available texts to the Kindle format. It'll open ZIP files, so you can head over to Project Gutenberg and download the smaller files, then convert them with Stanza in a few seconds.

Now, if I can just find a way to get the Kindle to sync to my GoodReads page, I think I'll be happy.

The Progressive Left and Drupal

Posted Tue, 02/17/2009 - 20:56 by Ben Stanfield
This interesting look at the history for Drupal and lefty politics was published in December, but is starting to get more attention now that the Obama administration is using Drupal for their Recovery.gov site. It brought back lots of good memories, and it's exciting to see the new administration embracing the legacy of lefty tech work over the past decade or so.

Nancy Scola has also written a bit about Drupal and Recovery.gov, and it's interesting to see just how far things have come since I helped build sites with DeanSpace back in 2003.

Of course, Draft Obama was built on Drupal and the CiviCRM tools that grew out of DeanSpace. And my new top secret project is built on the same, with some pieces thrown in from Sunlight Labs and others working on opening government up from a technical point of view.

I wonder how much off-the-shelf Drupal they're using, and how much will be custom developed modules. If they are developing modules or hiring Drupal contractors to develop them, I wonder if they will be released publicly. My hope is that for modules (and Drupal core changes) that could have broad use, they'll contribute them back to community. In fact, since it's undoubtedly tax dollars being spent on the site, perhaps all their development should be released to the public domain.

This is an exciting time for someone interested in the intersection of technology and governance, and I think that we have an administration that's not only willing to consider these ideas, but will help drive the technology by leaps and bounds.

Hello 2009

Posted Thu, 01/01/2009 - 16:01 by Ben Stanfield
Resolutions:
  1. Blog More. That means blogging more here, reviving MacSlash, and taking a more active part in WeLoveDC. And, it means blogging as part of resolution 3, below.
  2. Lose 100 Pounds. 2008 was not such a great year in terms of my overall health. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea to start the year, I had surgery in the spring, and then found out I was diabetic in December. I did lose about 45 pounds during 2008, but want to more than double that in 2009. It will be a lot of work, but I think it's doable.
  3. Finish all the planning and prep work to unleash my secret project on the world. You'll be hearing more about this soon. It's not quite ready to unveil, but soon it will be! I'm pretty excited about it.
So there you have it. Let's see how much of it actually happens. :)

Anathem Review

Posted Tue, 09/23/2008 - 22:08 by Ben Stanfield
Anathem Anathem by Neal Stephenson

HPC Cluster Monitoring

Posted Fri, 09/05/2008 - 00:24 by Ben Stanfield
My friend and coworker Jesse Becker has penned (err, typed) an article for Linux Magazine on using open source tools to monitor a High Performance Computing cluster from collecting data, parsing it, displaying it, and using it. Here's a brief excerpt, but check out the whole article.
The amount of data collected in even a small cluster can quickly become unwieldy, and making sense of it is the other half of "monitoring" (and indeed, the whole point!).