Cela fait plusieurs jours que j’hésite à faire un dessin sur ce thème qui occupe pourtant la une de tous nos quotidiens depuis le début de l’année. Le sujet est tellement sensible qu’il engendre invariablement des réactions passionnées dans les commentaires dépassant souvent largement le contenu des notes ou des articles (on le comprend). Alors j’ai parlé du froid, des soldes, de la nouvelle année… Aujourd’hui, je poste quand même ce dessin assez léger et un peu périphérique au conflit. Je compte sur vous pour laisser des commentaires respectueux (et modérés).

Par précaution et parce que je ne tiens pas à le retrouver sur des sites plus orientés, merci de ne pas reprendre cette illustration sur vos blogs ou forum.

Après avoir fait sensation l’an dernier avec son Meteor Slim, sorte de roman graphique carré en noir et blanc, construit comme un morceau de blues, Frantz Duchazeau visite un nouveau genre de musique : la country ! Avec Les Jumeaux de Conoco Station, à venir mi-janvier chez Sarbacane, il met en images une aventure carrément allumée, farcie de péquenauds, où les personnages clefs, fameux jumeaux, sont un pur hommage aux deux horribles hillbillys les plus connus du Net. Complètement barré !

Même format, même traitement en noir et blanc, avec des pleines pages de décors de toute beauté, Les Jumeaux de Conoco Station font la différence avec leur prédécesseur grâce à un ton plus détendu et rigolo, et des péripéties à peine croyables, plus savoureuses les unes que les autres. On trouve des parents zombifiés, des persos idiots – certains se pissent dessus, d’autres pourtant proches de la tradition sont plus ou moins homos –, bref, la brochette de personnages hauts en couleur sert un scénar riche et enthousiaste avec le grain de folie qui manquait à Meteor Slim. Si le blues n’est pas la country, là c’est sûr, Les Jumeaux de Conoco Station sont aussi plaisants à lire que beaux à regarder. Quoique...

Les images sont © Sarbacane, Duchazeau.

Comment réguler la population et accroître la productivité ? En inoculant des bombes à retardement dans le corps des enfants bien sûr ! Sur 1000 injections, une seule sera mortelle. Et des fonctionnaires se chargeront de porter aux intéressés, âgés de 20 à 24 ans, leur Ikigami, sorte de préavis, annonçant la mort sous 24 heures. Ça promet !

Nouveau thriller psychologique dans un style très réaliste, Ikigami risque de provoquer de jolies sueurs froides et d’alimenter les débats sur le net, à la façon de Death Note, à l’origine de nombreux clashs existentialistes très passionnés. L’auteur, Motorô Mase n’en est pas à son coup d’essai en matière de récit psychologique ; on a pu découvrir chez Akata-Delcourt les quatre tomes de Heads, une série scénarisée par Higashino Keigo, où un homme lutte contre une double personnalité meurtrière, qui squatte son corps à la suite d’une chirurgie expérimentale plus que douteuse. Ikigami arrive en France fin janvier chez Asuka, alors que la série, en cours, compte 5 tomes au Japon et une adaptation ciné. Une des séries événement de ce début d’année.



Les images sont © DR.

À quelques jours des 80 ans de Tintin, le site Ain’t it cool croit savoir que le duo Simon Pegg / Nick Frost, à qui l’on doit les déjantés Shaun of the dead et Hot Fuzz, incarneront Dupont et Dupond dans la trilogie Tintin, réalisée par Steven Spielberg et Peter Jackson. Info qui reste à confirmer, on se souvient qu’une source proche du dossier s’était emmêlé les pinceaux dans le nom des réalisateurs

One of our New Year’s Resolutions here at the AllMusic Blog is to help you, the loyal readers, stay on top of today’s exciting and dynamic music scene. We pledge to scour the airwaves, trade journals, blogs and the world wide web seeking out only the hottest, freshest young talent and delivering it with no delay and no fancy packaging to distract you from what really matters. The music! Count on getting the Hot Damn Jamz every week - maybe you’ll discover your new favorite band. Read on for the first installment…

Memory Cassette
Hissy, lo-fi disco with robotic female vocals (discogaze?) is all the rage these days, and Memory Cassette do it as well as anyone (Italians included).

Betty and the Werewolves
Three cute as a button girls (plus hirsute drummer) bash out post-punk indie-disco floor-fillers in the style of a cuddly Comet Gain.

Let’s Wrestle
Creating knuckleheaded and hilarious indie rock with little regard for frivolous things like singing in tune or playing more than three chords, Let’s Wrestle hits the jerkpot with “Tanks” and the soon-to-be-classic “I Wish I Was in Hüsker Dü”.

Young Fathers
After hearing “Straight Back On It,” all doubts about whether or not an Edinburgh-based hip-hop group can deliver are blown away — no wonder Young Fathers were named one of NME’s acts to watch in ‘09.

La Roux
“The Red-Haired One,” as her name means in French, looks like Tilda Swinton’s kid sister and gives edgy pop divas like Robyn and Lily Allen (with whom she’ll be touring) a run for their money with the sweet-but-sharp “Quicksand” and “Reflections Are Protection.”

Japanese Cartoon
Whether or not it’s true that Japanese Cartoon’s Cockney chimney sweep-accented singer Percival Fats is in fact rapper Lupe Fiasco, this mix of hip-hop and post-punk — which kind of sounds like Bloc Party collaborating with N.E.R.D. — is pretty infectious.

Spider and the Flies
The Horrors’ Spider Webb and Tomethy Furse step out on their own, wreaking the kind of analogue synth havoc that hasn’t been heard since the heyday of Add N to (X) (whose Barry 7 helps run the band’s label, Mute Irregulars).

Chico Mann
Taking a cue from analog revivalists Money Mark and Victor Axelrod, multi-instrumentalist Chico Mann is succeeding in his efforts to recreate Dusty Groove’s afro-beat section from scratch.

Team Robespierre
Brooklynite post-punk/dance-rock groups with synths might be a dime a dozen, but these guys sound like Japanther fused with The Faint and they name Crass and Cluster as influences, so they get some extra cred.

Playdoe
Stylish, electro-rap for new school hip(ster)-hoppers and planet rockers who appreciate tasty beats (“It’s That Beat) and tasty meats (“Meat Shack.”)

Earlier this week, there were a number of high profile Twitter account compromises that were made possible using a common dictionary attack technique. Basically, nothing was in place to keep an attacker from quickly submitting thousands of login attempts against an account, cracking the password in an evening of work.

One tool that can be used to prevent this sort of attack is to rate-limit login attempts, allowing only a few failed attempts per minute, for instance. One problem with this, however, is that it requires tracking login attempts. This is essentially a write operation, and doing this to a database on a high volume site is a major performance bottleneck.

Simon Willison came up with a nice solution to the problem that uses memcached. You can track a counter for requests from an IP and for login attempts against a particular account. Just create the key using a combination of the item you are tracking and the date it is being tracked against:

ratelimit_72.26.203.98_2009-01-07-21:45

Increment that counter for every hit, and if it exceeds 10 block the request.

According to a comment on Simon's blog, this is essentially the strategy that's been employed by the Twitter team to rate limit API requests.

Rate Limiting With Memcached

Trent Reznor já mostrou que sabe que no novo modelo da indústria musical são os fãs e não as editoras discográficas que mandam. Vai daí aproveitou para matar dois coelhos de uma só cajadada ao delegar aos fãs a tarefa de criar uma série de montagens originais a partir de mais de 30 horas de filmagens com qualidade vídeo de alta definição de três concertos dos Nine Inch Nails (NIN) disponibilizadas gratuitamente via BitTorrent.

Esta iniciativa de crowdsourcing - do homem por detrás dos NIN surge poucos dias depois de termos ficado a saber que o seu álbum Ghosts I-IV foi o álbum mais vendido em formato digital durante o ano de 2009 na Amazon - um feito especialmente relevante tendo em conta que o primeiro dos quatro volumes foi oferecido a partir do site da banda e que todo o disco foi distribuído com uma licença Creative Commons. 

Ao todo, são 405 Gigabytes de vídeos de alta definição não editados extraídos de três concertos realizados pelos NIN em 2008: Victoria (12 de Maio), Portland (12 de Julho) and Sacramento (12 de Dezembro). O “presente”, que foi anunciado por Reznor no site da banda e republicado no fórum oficial, encontra-se exclusivamente disponível via BitTorrent em formato Quicktime HDV (.mov).

Mas a decisão de Trent Reznor não foi fruto de um mero acaso ou capricho. Na verdade, a ideia inicial da banda era lançar um DVD e Blu-Ray contendo as imagens recolhidas em 3D pela equipa do cineasta James Cameron (o mesmo de Titanic) durante a digressão Lights In The Sky Tour. Contudo, tal não foi possível porque a Interscope, a antiga editora discográfica da banda que mantém os direitos sobre as canções anteriores, não permitiu que o projecto fosse à avante.

Com este brinde oferecido aos fãs, Reznor conseguiu mais uma vez resolver de uma forma heterodoxa os obstáculos impostos por uma grande editor, neste caso a Universal - empresa-mãe da Interscope. Agora é esperar para ver o que é que a inteligência colectiva de milhares de fãs fervorosos de uma banda de culto é capaz de fazer. Já foi entretanto criada uma comunidade com vista a produzir de forma colaborativa um DVD não oficial com base nessas filmagens

(foto de Kent, J segundo licença CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Ryan Block / gdgt live:
Live Palm keynote coverage from CES 2009  —  This is it for Palm.  Today's launch will either mark the beginning of the company's second coming — or the beginning of the end.  So yeah, you might say expectations are high for Nova and their next-gen hardware — or whatever it is they're showing off today.

Palm introduced a new phone today called the Palm pre, it catches them up to what's out there and looks like a solid phone - there is also a new WebOS for it, I'm going to take a close look at it - but what I think is more interesting is the colorful menagerie of Palm devices starting from 1996. Enjoy the trip down memory lane... What was your favorite? Mine is still the Palm V, a magical device at the time - I still use it for hacked up projects. I also liked the III series that took AA batteries.


VeloAce - Open source Palm based bike computer.