The wp-Typogrify plugin has merged with the wp-Hyphenate plugin to become wp-Typography! wp-Typography is now a one-stop-shop for improved WordPress typography. It features the following capabilities (including granular control):

• Hyphenation
• Spacing control, including: gluing values to units, widow protection, and forced internal wrapping of long URLs & email addresses.
• Intelligent character replacement, including smart handling of: quote marks, dashes, ellipses, trademarks, multiplication symbols, fractions, and ordinal suffixes (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd)
• CSS hooks for styling: ampersands (class “amp”), acronyms (class “caps”), numbers (class “numbers”), initial single quotes (class “quo”), and initial double quotes & guillemets (class “dquo”).

Please update your bookmarks.

hey guys, i just got my new iPod Touch 2nd gen for my birthday today, jail broken and everything, but i can't seem to find open ssh in Cydia, I've tried search. Nothing. Please help me how to find, is there another source to manually add to download it? cannot go to installer and look because it's closed and you cant seem to view it if you hadn't previously seen it before July 1st.

Thanks.

(EDIT) Maybe i didn't successfully install Cydia. Could this work? -

1. Open MobileTerminal.
2. Type su, tap return. On the password, type alpine, tap return.
3. Type (without the quotes) "apt-get remove cydia", tap return.
4. Respring your iPhone.
5. Repeat steps 1 and 2 to return to the command line.
6. Type (without the quotes) "apt-get install cydia", tap return.
7. Type (without the quotes) "killall Terminal" to exit terminal.

My good friend Mark Mason twisted my arm once again and talked me into doing a recorded call with him for his new PodCast he’ll be publishing soon (July 15th) on his “Late-Night Internet Marketing Podcast.” In that call we talk about 3 Steps to Internet Marketing Success and I liked the idea so much I wanted to write a blog post expanding on what we talked about in the call.

(Go to that URL and sign up for the PodCast though! Mark may not be a full-time Internet Marketer, but he makes nearly as much money as I do online just with his Internet Marketing Business. I won’t disclose his income from his offline job, but his offline income is about twice as much as my online income, so that may tell you why he is a part-time Internet Marketer

It didn’t take me long at all to come up with the 3 most important things you must realize in order to find success online, but once we were done with the call I realized I could have gone on and on and on about those things and I could have added to them.

As obvious as some of these may seem and as often as you may have heard others state the same thing, the following are EXTREMELY important points to understand if you want to find success online!

1. Pick an Internet Marketing Business Model and stick with it - Ask any “newbie” to Internet Marketing what his or her biggest problem is and 9 out of 10 of them will say “Information Overload.” The root of this problem almost always comes from one thing: The person not knowing which business model to adopt and/or trying to do too much at once. It is GOOD to diversify (which I talk about below) but NOT in the beginning.

You need to start out with one business model! It doesn’t matter if that model isn’t the most profitable. You don’t have to do that one model for the rest of your life. But someone who is just getting started is going to have a VERY hard time being successful if he or she is getting confused by trying to figure out multiple models at once, which WILL happen 99% of the time!

Instead, pick one model that seems “doable” and DO NOT even think about another model until you have figured that one out and had at least moderate success with it!

2. Don’t be afraid to invest in knowledge and tools, but be selective - I’ll be the first to recommend a good product. As Andy Beard once stated, Information Products are kind of like outsourcing research and the more knowledge you have the better, but if I’m learning I’m not going to buy every product that is presented to me whether it’s good or not. I WILL however buy every product recommended to me from reputable sources if it is focusing on the business model I have adopted!

The problem is that there are alot of savvy, veteran marketers out there who know exactly what is going through the minds of “newbies” and they leverage that and talk alot of people into buying xyz product when they don’t really need it!

Bottom line: If your business model is Niche Marketing (for example) and a reputable source recommends a good niche marketing product, buy it if you can. BUT if your business model is Niche Marketing and someone recommends a product on PPC, DON’T buy it, you don’t need it!

There are alot of good products out there and you should be investing in your business by purchasing solid products that will help you improve your skills in the business model you’ve adopted, but don’t let smooth talkers get any money from you in exchange for a product that is simply going to confuse you and put you off track!

3. Outsource as soon as you can afford to! - You may be surprised how much work is outsourced by successful business owners, both online and offline. Using myself as an example, I outsource ALL of the design work in my business, most of the technical/coding and writing work and paid services do much of my other work. I’m basically left with writing blog posts like this one, writing emails to my lists and working on future sites and products.

If you do all of your own graphics, coding, writing, product development etc. success is going to take a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time to find you!

I know you may not have much, if any, money to outsource. That’s fine, I didn’t when I started either. But there will come a time when you can! For the first year or two you should be reinvesting every dollar you make back into your business. This will speed up it’s growth dramatically. If you and/or your family is relying on the money you make online and it’s very little, get a job! I know it’s hard to hear that and accept it, but it’s what should be done.

4. Diversify once you’ve mastered that business model - Diversification is job security as an Internet Marketer! If you rely on one mailing list, one adsense account, one Adwords account etc. what happens to your income if that account is suspended or something else happens? It ceases to exist, that’s what happens!

It’s very important to stick to one business model AT FIRST! But once you have at least moderate success with one business model you should move on and learn another! EVEN IF you make MILLIONS with the first business model you adopt, which is unlikely, but possible. I STILL recommend adopting a 2nd and eventually a 3rd and more. You NEVER know what might happen!

I’ve heard of more than one situation where smart businessmen lost 6 and even 7 figure businesses do to their business not being diverse!

5. NEVER give up! - This doesn’t really qualify as step 5. It’s something that you need to understand at ALL times! From day 1 you need to realize and accept one thing. You WILL fail! It’s inevitable. No highly successful person succeeded all the way to the top.

Failure is part of success just like a cough is part of a cold. When you fail you shouldn’t be surprised. You should be happy that you’ve reached one more step toward success.

I’ll say it again: You will fail! You will fail again. You will fail again and you will probably fail again after you failed the first 2, 3, 4, or 5 times.

EVERYONE FAILS! The difference between those who succeed in the end and those who don’t is those who succeed in the end didn’t quit when they failed the 1st time, the 2nd time, the 3rd time or any other time!

In closing I’ll leave you with one of my all time favorite quotes:

“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things...the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough!”

–- Randy Pausch

Those brick walls are the failure we all come across!

img credit: Zara

· Rivals believe she wants a shot at the White House
· Republican opinion split on timing of move

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate who electrified her party's campaign last year, has resigned as Alaska's governor in a decision that has fuelled speculation she is positioning herself to run for president.

After a sometimes rambling speech in which she compared herself to American soldiers wounded in battle in Kosovo, and said only dead fish go with the flow, Palin's critics accused her of a "flaky" decision and walking away from her post.

Palin, who built strong support among conservative Republicans as John McCain's running mate last year, said she will step down in three weeks because she can contribute more away from politics.

"We know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities," she said.

But Palin also hinted at continuing political ambitions when she repeated a quote she attributed to General Douglas MacArthur: "We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction."

For someone who is supposedly stepping back from politics, Palin's resignation speech was weighty with policy specifics which prompted speculation that she is positioning herself for a 2012 presidential bid or seeking another office which would move her from distant Alaska to the heart of Washington politics.

But coming during Independence Day, the move raised questions among some Republicans who accused her of attempting to escape falling poll numbers in Alaska as a series of economic problems and ethics investigations take their toll. A prominent Republican strategist, Ed Rollins, who directed Ronald Reagan's election campaign, said Palin had made a serious mistake. "She was a shooting star who dimmed in recent months and now she's crashed," he said.

Another Republican strategist, Tony Blankley, disagreed and said Palin appeared to have made a smart move to position herself for a run for president.

"It looks like she's moving down a path toward it," he said. "It frees her up. The normal rules don't seem to apply to her. She's a fascinating character who seems to do things her own way."

Blankley said that it makes sense for Palin to resign as governor if she is seeking higher office.

"This is going to be a pretty tough time for incumbents the next couple of years in America with everything going to hell, and this may be a pretty good time not to be in office," he said.

Blankley also said that Palin faced particular difficulties trying to juggle a national campaign with being governor of Alaska, several time zones from Washington. Palin will need to spend time in the capital developing relationships with key Republican strategists.

Palin remains a frontrunner among Republicans nationwide as a potential presidential candidate.

But other Republicans were more critical, including John Weaver, a long time confidant of McCain.

"We've seen a lot of nutty behaviour from governors and Republican leaders in the last three months, but this one is at the top of that," Weaver told the Washington Post. Palin's resignation was swiftly criticised as "flaky" by her Democratic opponents who said it was part of a pattern of "bizarre" behaviour. The Democratic National Committee said she is "leaving the people of Alaska high and dry ... or she simply can't handle the job now".

The timing of the announcement led some critics to accuse her of trying to bury the news of her resignation. But given that almost nothing else was going on, it might have been a move to dominate the news bulletins, as it forced Michael Jackson's death from the top slot.

Palin addressed the ethics investigations launched to examine her alleged misuse of office by saying that taxpayer money was being wasted and deriding them as part of the "superficial political blood sport" against her since she shot to prominence as McCain's running mate.

Palin will hand power to her deputy, lieutenant governor Sean Parnell.

Republican favourite

Sarah Palin's rise through politics was rapid after her election as a member of the council of the small Alaskan city of Wasilla in 1992. Four years later she was Wassilla's mayor before going on to chair Alaska's oil and gas conservation commission and then becoming the youngest elected governor of the state in 2006.

Two years later she was spotted by John McCain's presidential campaign team as he searched for a running mate who could bring on board conservative Republicans who were suspicious of his more moderate views.

While Palin reinvigorated a lacklustre campaign, there were growing tensions with McCain as she was seen as positioning herself to advance her own ambitions at his expense, particularly as it became apparent that Barack Obama was likely to win the election.

Since the campaign, Palin has remained a favourite of Republican conservatives at a time when their party is largely leaderless and lacking a strategy to win back voters.

• Sarah Palin
• United States
• Republicans

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

This week there was a good post by Michael Kolowich of ChannelOne Marketing titled, “Ten Ways Marketers Drop the Ball in Video Marketing.”  Michael offers some good advice as far as what not to do upon deploying a web video marketing project.  I thought it would be a good idea to summarize and elaborate a bit.

You’ve either made these mistakes in the past or seen others make them. Let hope that if you are a reader of ReelSEO, you aren’t making too many of these web video marketing mistakes

Common Web Video Marketing Mistakes Marketers Make

Here is a my summary of the 10 common mistakes that marketers make deploying an online video or web video project:

1.) Video Deployment as an Afterthought

As Kolowich writes, ”Very often, the production of a video is driven by a big live event, a trade show, a product launch, or a live presentation… Only after the event is over does the attention shift to distributing the video on the Internet. That’s too late.”

Ill add here that another common mistake I see related to this is what I call, deploying video for video sake.  Yes, online video is HOT…  But don’t just produce and deploy videos online without a video marketing and video deployment strategy.  Not only will this not work, but this just adds to all the crap video content that is out there these days, and I, for one, am sick of seeing it…

2.) Using Outdated Video File Formats

All too often folks deploy web video by merely posting a video file up on their site such as a WMV, MOV, or even a RealMedia file format.  I’ve seen many times folks save a video as an SWF by itself rather than using an SWF player to play a video file.  That is better for usability vs. posting a WMV since flash swf’s are basically ubiquitous and can be played everywhere.  However, the better method is to use Flash swf as a video file container for playback.  FLVs, MP4 (M4V), etc..  are all great formats and can showcase video in excellent quality (assuming you don’t make mistake #3).  If you want to get even more advanced and take a look at what some folks think will be the future of web video deployment, check out our article on Ogg Theora and HTML5

3.) Failure to Have Videos Properly Encoded

As stated above, FLVs and MPEG4 .H264 can help to showcase your video online in excellent quality – IF the video file has been encoded properly.  The right combination of resolution, bit rate, frame rate, keyframe frequency, and deinterlacing methods are required to encode your video properly for the web. Add to that the fact that there are various applications available for video encoding with many different settings and the fact that users are watching your video with different connection speeds, and it is crucial that you encode your video properly.

4.) Not Using a Video Host or CDN

Most web servers are just not optimized for video playback.  Additionally, the bandwidth required to play a video, especially one that is popular, can cause issues with sites run on that web server.  There are many different solutions available to host videos these days.  I wont go into all the solutions here as we tend to cover these on a daily basis at ReelSEO.  However, your best bet is to leverage a CDN or a video hosting provider for deploying video on your site.  Depending on your budget, CMS, and strategy, some solutions may be better than others.

5.) Failing to Optimize Videos for Search

Do we really need to go into this one?  Well, this is the reason that I started ReelSEO.  I cant tell you how many times I spoken with companies and individuals that have spend tremendous effort and resources deploying online video only to ask one of the most important questions in terms of strategy, last.  Namely, “How do I get users that would be interested in watching my videos to find them.”  Oops.  That’s one reason why we are here.  If you want some tips to start, we’ve collected a ton of Video SEO tips here.

6.) Using YouTube the Wrong Way

We all know that YouTube in many cases is an excellent vehicle for increasing reach with your videos.  That being said, there are many best practices to keep in mind when distributing your videos to YouTube, especially if you expect to drive traffic back to your own website (see mistake #7).  We’ll be featuring some tips in the near future from our friend and expert, Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR, who is currently finishing up a powerful book on the subject of YouTube Marketing.

Additionally, using YouTube as your video host has all sorts of implications even though it is “free.”  We will talk about this another time but one potentially negative implication that immediately comes to mind is with regard to ranking.  If you put the video up on YouTube (owned by Google, with a PR of 9), guess who will outrank your site in Google for that video?

7.) Not Leveraging Calls to Action

Calls to action are an effective way to leverage your video when your purpose extends beyond branding alone.  As Michael puts it

“Once you’ve engaged and touched a viewer with your message, they often are left asking, ‘So what do I do next?’”

What purpose do you have with your video marketing if it isn’t to have entice viewers to follow up with you in some way? Issuing a call to action is extremely important, especially if you are posting your video to video sharing sites like YouTube.  Even when you do post to video sharing sites, there are effective ways to issue calls to action within your video and in the case of YouTube, within your Youtube user channel.

Consider creating creative calls to action within your video.  How you do this will of course depend on the goal that you have in mind as well as the type of business that you might be promoting.  If you are selling a product or service, try including a unique promo code in your video that you can track when users make a purchase.  This is not only an incentive to get the viewer to inquire more, but is a good way to track and measure the ROI of your video marketing effort.  Other ideas include teasers, contests, etc…  Even a call tracking number within the video sometimes works.

If you have control over the video player, consider including interactive features within the video player.  For example, the ability to fill out a quick email inquiry from within the video, hyperlink overlays, etc…

Beyond calls to action, dint forget the importance of showing your brand within the video.  This can be done with watermarks or even just showing your website URL in a lower-third.

8.) Failing to Take Advantage of Social Media

How you seed a video is important and using social media is one great way to kick start your video marketing effort, especially your video appeals to a special-interest community.  Even YouTube sees the importance of this and recently launched the ability for users to notify twitter and facebook accounts when a new video is uploaded to their account (see YouTwitFace).

” Tweeters, bloggers, and Facebookers love to be the first to talk about new video programs in their area of intere.st” – states Kolowich

In addition to proactively notifying social communities, don’t forget to allow viewers of your video to do the same (see mistake #10)

9.) Failing to Leverage Email Marketing in Conjunction

Michael includes this as a common mistake for web video marketing and I hate to say it, but…  Ive made this mistake.  I suppose it is time for me to take the time to dive into this….   There are even options available these days to directly include a video within your email marketing message.

Video messages can inherently lift click-through rates for email campaigns. And email campaigns can have a profound effect on the distribution of a video.  There is a growing body of knowledge about what to put in your email message to encourage click through.  Hint: plain text links saying “watch our video” are not the answer.

10.) Failing to Enable Interaction & Sharing

Just as it is important to seed your video using social networking, it is just as important to allow users to spread your video to their social network.  The easiest way to do this is to allow users to share your video using viral sharing widgets and tools that are embedded within the video player.  Again, you can look at the way some of the major video player and video sharing sites already do this.  There is a reason why they have included this functionality.  They know that it helps to increase views, which then helps to increase their own visibility, pages views, monetization, etc…   Let users email, digg, tweet, share on facebook, etc…

As we’ve covered before, allowing sharing and interactivity is also a best practice when it comes to search engine optimization of video content.

Additionally, unless you have a really good reason not to allow users to embed your video (perhaps there are legal restrictions on the content) let users embed the video..

Lastly, let users comment on your videos.  There are many reasons that this is important.  One reason in particular is the fact that it can help to add additional relevant on-page text to your video landing page which will assist with search engine indexing.

Conclusion – Don’t be Afraid to Ask for Help

“With the web video landscape changing literally month by month, it’s nearly impossible for any marketer to keep up with the options and optimal choices for video preparation, hosting, and promotion,” Kolowich said in an interview. “Increasingly, it’s important for marketers to work with production partners who not only are great visual storytellers but also have mastered the process of creating and distributing highly effective video-based interactive web experiences.”

And here is my favorite quote from:

“And the next time your webmaster says “I’ve got it covered” with respect to web video, make sure he knows what he’s talking about.”

Let’s take it one step further.  You are better off at this point in assuming that your webmaster doesn’t have it covered.  Not that I have anything against webmasters, I’m one myself.  But keep in mind what Kolowich states above in that it is next to impossible to stay up to date completely with all that is going on in the web video marketing space.  Get yourself an expert or partner who specializes in this quickly growing field, and more than anything, try to avoid the common mistakes covered in this post.  Good luck!

Related posts:

• Search Marketing Expo East – Video Search Engine Optimization Recap
• Marketing With Video 2009 Report – Online, TV & Mobile Video Marketing
• Behavioral Targeting and Video Search Marketing with AlmondNet
• Book Publishers Take to Online Video Marketing
• Interactive Video Marketing To Dominate Focus for Marketers in 2009
• featured post, formats, hosting, production, publishing, social media, tips, video marketing, viral, widgets, youtube

I am a 47 years old chubby, witty, indépendant, easy going , separated, nearly fluent in English French mature women
I know a few things about Internet
I know a few good stories about men on the internet
I have enough in mind for a good book. As a tittle, I first thaught of : « Men and the Internet, the vanishing act… » but I’d rather go for : « Do you have taboos ? »
Because I am fed up being asked after 5 minutes or 5 hours the same question (whatever the socioprofessional background of men), « do you have taboos ? », meaning « full » blowjob and sodomy, because I see no point discussing the menu before entering the restaurant. I am not interested in men jerking off next door to their exhausted by kids/ sleeping wife.
To make a long story short, let me quote here a few lines from the movie "Analyse this" :
Boss Paul Vitti: I do things with her I can't do with my wife.
Dr. Ben Sobel: Why can't you do them with your wife?
Boss Paul Vitti: Hey, that's the mouth she kisses my kids goodnight with! What are you, crazy?)
I am fed up being told by married men (who take months to understand I am not gonna stalk their honorable wife-the mother of their kids or the dull non working wife they will never hurt) that I am the best mistress and that I really deserve a man of my own.
Bitter ? Not the least, I just don’t want to play geisha-always in a good mood and even less Back street anymore.
Prove me all I wrote above are cliches.
Tell me I am wrong, tell me you are not predictable .
What I expect, or rather what I don’t expect ?
I don’t expect : married cowards, hypocondriacs, tight asses, bad teeth and gums, smokers unless occasional (if they exist ?), bald guys with long hair on the side, teddy bears, whiners, cheapos…
I don’t mind bald men who shave and married men without cold feet.
My values ? So simple :
Sex, nature, creativity, food (in any particular order), what else ?
And, last but not least, I have a condition : « sexy brains », my first erogenous zone happens to sit between my ears, this is a curse, believe me…

Talk to you ?
Or, by the way, if you are young enough to know what a M.I.L.F. stands for, please, don't bother to write

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Ever try closing a series of tabs in Firefox by hitting Ctrl+W over and over until you were down to your last tab? Ever overshoot and accidentally wind up closing the whole browser and then having to wait (im)patiently to reload the browser?

There's a setting tucked away in the recesses of Firefox 3.5's configuration options that will keep the browser running after you close the last tab. Instead of closing, Firefox will simply display a single blank tab.

Here's how it works. Type "about:config" into the location bar (without the quotation marks), and then finding the setting labeled "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" (again, without the quotes) and double click that setting to change the value to false. That's it. Now when you close all your browser tabs Firefox will stay open.

[via Lifehacker]

Tweak Firefox 3.5 to keep running when you close all tabs originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Ever try closing a series of tabs in Firefox by hitting Ctrl+W over and over until you were down to your last tab? Ever overshoot and accidentally wind up closing the whole browser and then having to wait (im)patiently to reload the browser?

There's a setting tucked away in the recesses of Firefox 3.5's configuration options that will keep the browser running after you close the last tab. Instead of closing, Firefox will simply display a single blank tab.

Here's how it works. Type "about:config" into the location bar (without the quotation marks), and then finding the setting labeled "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" (again, without the quotes) and double click that setting to change the value to false. That's it. Now when you close all your browser tabs Firefox will stay open.

[via Lifehacker]

Tweak Firefox 3.5 to keep running when you close all tabs originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

For marketers, Twitter has been a dream come true. It’s an open platform growing at a phenomenal rate. This combination can allow a single tweet to be seen by thousands of potential customers. But as Twitter continues its mainstream ascent, it has been targeted by spammers and scammers, something that doesn’t help legitimate marketers or users at all.

Yet despite its spam woes, Twitter has somehow avoided an overflow of content from one of the Internet’s biggest industries: porn. Well, until recently that is. An interesting article in MediaPost describes both marketers and Twitter users noticing an increase in pr0n-related spam, and they are not liking it. The issue makes us wonder: should Twitter stamp out pornography; and how should they go about it?

Twitter Users’ Feedback on Pornography

The MediaPost piece essentially quotes some of Twitter’s active marketers on the issue of Twitter and porn. What they have to say, though, is not pretty at all. While you can guess how users react in the piece, Ben Smith of MerchantCircle sums up the problem best:

MerchantCircle has begun to offer a portfolio of local city-specific coupons via Twitter feeds. “As we have found with any new communication form, pornography and other types of issues creep in,” says Ben Smith, MerchantCircle CEO. “The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

Has pornography taken over Twitter? No, not by a longshot. Is it a growing problem? Absolutely. Things like Twitter porn trojans make it clear that Twitter is not impervious to porn-related spam and malware.

What Do Twitter’s Terms of Service Say?

We took a look at the Twitter Terms of Service, which governs user interactions with the Twitter platform. While it mentions that they can “remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine … are obscene or otherwise objectionable,” it makes no specific reference to pornography.

Compare this to the terms of service of other social media companies, such as the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which specifically states the following:

6. You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Does this mean that Twitter doesn’t care about porn? Absolutely not – Twitter has addressed pornography spam in the past and we doubt that it would let the Internet’s underground industry tarnish its strong reputation.

And yet Twitter needs to monitor the situation. Porn should not be acceptable on Twitter, especially an open platform that millions of companies and users use for business and marketing every single day. It may be a relatively small issue now, but it will grow more prevalent unless they put a stop to the problem early. It’s easy to forget just how much of the Internet is entirely porn.

First though, Twitter needs to build a search spam solution ASAP. It’s all part of the same core problem that Twitter will need to address.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: porn, pornography, twitter

We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will soon arrive in Google's Chrome browser. Already we've seen a handful of these become available including AdSweep, a PageRank checker, Cleeki, and, as of yesterday, a new bookmarking extension from Delicious. However, if you've been running the standard Chrome install (or even the public beta), new features like this are just out-of-reach.

Sponsor

If you're a developer, you're probably already running the version of Chrome released to the Dev channel, but many "regular folks" are hesitant to make this switch because moving from the stable release to the beta or from the beta to the dev release is a one-way conversion. You can't go back to an earlier build without re-installing Chrome. So how's another ordinary techie supposed to play around with all the cool new stuff coming to Chrome? The easiest way is to install a build of the Chromium browser side-by-side with your (stable) version of Google Chrome.

How to Install Chromium and Chrome on Your PC

First thing's first, if you haven't already installed a copy of Google Chrome on your PC, you should do so now. This new browser built on WebKit is winning converts right-and-left among the early adopter set these days, mainly for its blazing speed. From google.com/chrome you can grab the latest release or, if you're a little more daring, you can click the link to download the public beta version instead.

That was the easy part - the trickier part is installing Chromium, the open-source project that powers Google Chrome. You may have already visited the Chromium site over on Google Code in search of the download only to be confused when no obvious download link jumped out at you. Home, Docs, FAQ, Blog, Group, Terms - but no "Download." In fact, the only download link on the main page points you back to the stable version of Google Chrome. What gives?

They're probably not trying to hide the download from you, it's just a matter of knowing where to look. Developers get this but us "ordinary" tech enthusiasts may need a little assistance. You see, all the Chromium builds are all stored online at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots. If you're a Mac or Linux user, this is where you can grab your copy, by the way.

Windows users need to head directly to the link at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp. Once there, you'll notice a list of build numbers accompanied by a "last modified" date.

To get the most recent one, scroll to the bottom of the page and click through to the files listed. The easiest way to install Chromium is to download the "mini_installer.exe" file. This is a simple executable that installs Chromium on your PC.

Make Chromium Extension-Ready

Once installed, there's one more step before you can begin playing around with extensions in Chromium - you need to enable them. To do so, you're either going to need to modify the Chromium shortcut or create your own new shortcut.

Windows XP

On a Windows XP computer, you can just modify the "Target" field in the file properties. To do so:

• Go to C:Documents and Settings[User Name]Local SettingsApplication DataChromiumApplication and locate the file called "chrome.exe."
• Right-click on the file and choose "Properties." Click the "Shortcut" tab.
• In the field labeled "Target" change the text to read (and yes, you need the quotes): "C:Documents and Settings[User Name]Local SettingsApplication DataChromiumApplicationchrome.exe" -enable-extensions
• Click "OK" when you're done.
• Make sure this modified shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.

Windows Vista/Windows 7

On Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can't simply modify the "Target," you have to create a new shortcut instead. To do so:

• Go to C:Users[User Name]AppDataLocalChromiumApplication
• Right-click in the white space of that folder somewhere and click "New" on the menu that appears.
• Choose "Shortcut" from the menu to launch the Create Shortcut wizard.
• In the window that appears, enter in the following where it asks you for the location of the item: C:Users[User Name]AppDataLocalChromiumApplicationchrome.exe -enable-extensions
• Click "Next" then "Finish"
• A new shortcut will appear in the folder. Make sure this shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.

Launch Chromium and Install Extensions

Now that you have Chromium installed and modified, you can play with extensions. To install an extension, you simply click on the hyperlink for the extension which is usually labeled "extension_name.crx." A box will pop-up asking you to confirm, just click "OK."

Here are some extensions you can try now:

• AdSweep: an add-on that hides advertising on web page you visit similar to how AdBlock works. It uses JavaScript to adjust the CSS of a page and is also available as a user script.
• PageRank checker: a simple extension that shows the Google PageRank for the current web site.
• Cleeki: an extension that delivers the functionality of IE8's Accelerators to other browsers
• Gmail Checker: One of the Chromium sample extensions that displays a toolstrip that shows how many messages are in your Gmail inbox.
• Subscribe in Google Reader: Another sample extension which adds a button to the URL bar when a page has a feed that can be subscribed to. Clicking the button takes you to Google Reader.
• BuildBot Monitor: A third sample extension which shows the current status of the Chromium Build Bot.
• Chritter: a Chrome Twitter notifier that shows recent tweets in the tooltip
• Delicious: the official alpha version of the social bookmarking extension. (Note: you may have to save the file on disk and then drag on Chrome window to trigger the install instead of just clicking on the link).

Final Note

Keep in mind that Chromium isn't going to give you the same everyday experience of using the stable version of Chrome. While playing around with it, the browser actually crashed on me a couple of times - two times too many to make it worth switching over to permanently. This may just be an issue with the particular build I installed and will be corrected in a future version, but that's what you get when you're playing with cutting-edge tech.

At least I was finally able to get my hands on the extensions and really see what they were all about. And for that, it was well worth the headaches. Extensions are incredible!

Discuss

Not as Governor of Alaska, anyway: Governor Palin announced today that she will not seek re-election and, indeed, will resign her office in the near future. Her statement is here. She isn't retiring, but says she will continue "to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children's future from OUTSIDE the Governor's office."

Most observers assume that means she will devote full time to running for President. I guess so. Frankly, it seems bizarre to me, unless Palin calculates that in order to run she will have to spend most of her time in the lower 48, and the logistics of doing that while continuing as Governor are impossible.

That's all I have to say. I'm curious to know what our readers think. Weigh in via comments, but remember that your comment will only appear if you include your first and last name. We'll quote salient observations from our readers in updates to this post.

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

Seattle nerds are hereby ordered to appear in costume and with a canned-food donation in Fremont at 6:00 pm PDT today (Friday) to help set the world record for largest gathering of lurching zombies. (Zombies and silly world-record attempts: It doesn't get geekier. Xbox 360's even co-sponsoring, for pete's sake. Also, BRAAAAINS!) The pyrotechnicans among us are enjoined to keep safe.

Federal judge admonished (and that's all) for explicit material on personal site

The 21st century, believe it or not • Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, legendary for concluding his opinion in a certain high-profile free-speech case with "The parties are advised to chill," has been reprimanded after a yearlong investigation for having various explicit (but legal) photos and videos on his family's Web site.

The panel had investigated claims first made in the Los Angeles Times stating, according to the decision yesterday, "the "website" -- http://alex.kozinski.com -- included 'a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows,' 'a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal,' and 'a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.' Regarding the alleged public accessibility of the 'website,' the article reported that the Judge 'said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends.'"

Friends? Oh, well...With apologies to the jurist, who once called blogs "hateful things", we link to three for the more interesting coverage of the decision. Law.com explains the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals' reasoning. Ashby Jones at The Wall Street Journal (its Law Blog, in fact, but shh!) reached Judge Kozinski for a quote and reports that he is "pleased that today's unanimous decision reaffirms what I have said all along about my private files: They were kept on a private server and were not intended to be shared publicly." And AmLaw Daily, which does a nice job of explaining how a disgruntled lawyer started this particular ball rolling, links to the 41-page opinion, originally filed last June 5.

Californians gain access to database of lawmakers' votes

June 16, 2009 • MAPLight and the California First Amendment Coalition have prevailed in one of those lawsuits you can't believe anyone would have to file in the 21st century: Announced only yesterday, they've settled a freedom-of-information lawsuit against the Office of Legislative Counsel of California. And what do they win, Johnny Olsen? Why, a machine-readable database of state lawmakers' votes, upgrading the previous plain-text dump on the California Legislative Information site.

The two groups filed suit in December 2008 after repeated requests to the Office of the Legislative Counsel for access to the database used to create the previous plain-text site, which was clunky and very hard to search. Since then, the OLC has stepped up its game, launching a Web site that indeed provides the data -- to the two public-interest groups or anyone else visiting the site -- in a structured and machine-readable format. Thus propitiated, the CFAC and MAPLight.org withdrew their suit. Going forward, MAPlight will combine the legislative database with data on donations to California legislators, in hopes of daylighting the connections between money and political capital. And both CFAC and MAPlight will be keeping an eye on the next big legislative database, known for now as "Inquire."

Conviction stemming from MySpace suicide tentatively overturned

July 2, 2009 • There's a difference between not being convicted of a crime and being found innocent of doing wrong. Daily Kos, covering what appears to be the conclusion of the Lori Drew case, accurately states that the decision is most likely a win for free speech on the Internet... and now, please, may the grown woman who tormented a fragile 13-year-old experience "nothing but pain and anguish for what she's done." Other pertinent words in the piece by AmbroseBurnside include "vile human being," "disgusting," "people we hate or abhor," and "a true victory for all of us who love the freedom the internet allows and want to keep it safe from more government intrusion."

Would Albert have really signed his name to this?

July 2009 > Once again, AT&T is crawling into bed with the NSA to screen computer traffic.

Last May, President Obama made an explicit pledge not to use federal government resources to spy on private Internet users. "Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority...[which] will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the President said at the time. "We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans."

Despite that pledge, as first reported by the Washington Post this morning, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters that her department would proceed with a plan initiated by the Bush administration to screen Internet content, with the help of carriers such as AT&T, but presumably in a manner that would protect civil liberties.

The "Einstein 3" plan would, among other things, route Net traffic from civilian agencies through a monitoring system designed to parse for attacks or other intrusion attempts. The Obama administration has been figuring out which pieces of that system they mean to keep. Privacy advocates have been briefed, and say there's a lot of work to do to make this system work.

Green Dam is offline and China is on the fence

Perhaps no time after July 1, 2009 > The Chinese government hasn't given up on the Green Dam project, but between diplomatic protests, inadequate notice to manufacturers, and no strategy for controlling Mac or *nix machines, Beijing appears to have put the stewpot back on the stove.

The Chinese government has not issued any new statements on the matter since June 30, although multiple sources are reporting that PC manufacturers have been allowed to go ahead with their plans to install the "Green Dam for Escorting Children" filtering software on their systems if they want to.

The question is now, do they really want to, especially in the wake of last month's University of Michigan security report from Prof. J. Alex Halderman and his team, who discovered that Green Dam may not only be un-authentic but could cause a greater security problem than it solves.

"We examined the Green Dam software and found that it contains serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors," Prof. Halderman's team wrote. "Once Green Dam is installed, any Web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process. We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg."

Loretta Chao and Ting-I Tsai, writing for The Wall Street Journal this morning after weeks of great coverage of the situation, aren't so sure that by "postponement," China's IT ministry means "doing this within our natural lifetimes." Chao and Tsai noted that "obfuscating" by Chinese officials in the press could mean that the project's simply headed for permanent limbo.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset will appeal RIAA case

Apparently until hell freezes over > Think about it: Based on trial outcome, Ms. Thomas-Rasset is a less sympathetic defendant than Lori Drew. Copycense beats its collective head against the desk on our behalf.

Asteroids: The Movie

Coming in 2010 to a theater near you > Cue the Jerry Goldsmith music, and the Genesis effect creating a brightly-colored planet. The "Universal" letters come into orbit and the cloudless planet settles into place. A triangular ship comes into focus, fires little white pellets into it, and blows it into pairs of smaller planets. First two, then four, until the screen is full of them.

How much do you want to bet? Seriously, as The Hollywood Reporter first reported, some of the team who's bringing you the GI Joe movie this year is working on a script for Universal next year for the film adaptation of the immortal Atari 1978 coin-op game "Asteroids." No casting has been done yet, and no plot points have yet been revealed (or probably yet even created).

You think it even needs a theme song? Or just BOM-bom-BOM-bom-BOM-bom-BOM with a siren or something in the background?

Friday's tech headlines

The Register

• Police serving in the UK's Crown Prosecution Service are being encouraged to prep for court testimony by doing research on Wikipedia.

• Apple may just keep coming at Psystar with the lawsuits, but the Mac-clone maker is on its way out of bankruptcy and refuses to lie down: "When life gives you apples, make applesauce." Oh my.

• Apple has applied for a patent for software that'll help bad karaoke singers improve their grasp of pitch and key. Alert Stockholm.

San Jose Mercury News

• The next time someone tells you that bloggers can't also be serious journalists (good morning, Judge Kozinski), you tell them about Alison van Diggelen, the proprietor of Fresh Dialogues. She's not making money from it, but her brand of interview-based environmental coverage is professional in just about every other way that matters. Mike Cassidy tells her story.

• Clean tech took a beating like everything else during the recession, but biofuels, better batteries, and the like saw improvements in venture-cap funding during the quarter just ended -- and confidence in the sector is up too, Tracy Seipel reports.

Washington Post

• Prisons in Maryland hope to cut down on inmates' mobile-phone communications by jamming signals near the facilities, but there are legal and technical consequences. Henri E. Cauvin has details.

Los Angeles Times

• The Performance Rights Act, which would put over-the-air radio stations on the hook for paying royalties to artists (as well as composers, which they do now), is making those stations nervous. More on that in a minute -- but first, 22 straight minutes of commercials and three replays of the latest Beyonce single!

• Some products just don't sell outside the brick-and-mortar environment: Hershey, the chocolatier, will close its online store as of July 31. There are closeout discounts over there if that kind of thing interests you.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

oO-Mars-Oo: vu sur un forum de rencontre "Vous recherchez:"
oO-Mars-Oo: 1.Homme.
oO-Mars-Oo: 2.Femme.
oO-Mars-Oo: 3.Autres.
oO-Mars-Oo: ...

Votez !

(Ogg) : maintenant, il dort cinq heures par nuit, ne voit personne, n'a pas de vie sociale ...
(OSPhob) : Bah t'as qu'a installer le controle parental !
(Ogg) : pardon )(' ?
(OSphob) : Bah tu sais, tu vas sur le site de blizzard, et tu vas dans la catégorie WoW, tu rentres tes identifiants, ton pw et tu coches la case ;)
(Ogg) : euh, il joue pas a WoW ..
(OSphob) : Ah bon ? A quoi alors ? Guild Wars ?
(Ogg) : prépa Henri IV
(OSphob) : connais pas, c'est un MMO ?
(Ogg) : -.-"

Votez !

F : alors ces soirées d'apres bac ?
S : bah pour faire simple, si on mélangeait mon sang avec de l'acide y aurait esterification...

Votez !

nutgreg: Arretez de dire que Michael était un pedophile ! C'est faux car il a été totallement blanchi !

Votez !

(Pierre_) putain faut que me trouve un bédot là!
(Pierre_) Qui roule??
* Titi is now known as Namasse
(Namasse) Pas Mous'o/

Votez !

Lou : Pfff j'ai trop chaud...
Titus : bah enlève ton t-shirt
Lou : déjà fait
Titus : Ah...
* Titus voudrait voir votre webcam. Acceptez-vous ? - (Accepter / Refuser)

Votez !

(Badnik) font chier ces parents qui laissent leurs gamins à poil à la plage
(Plonk) couche toi sur le ventre, personne verra que t'as la trique
(Badnik) :/

Votez !

Ed: Je suis tellement triste de la mort de Mickaël Jackson...
Ed: pour pas l'oublier je vais me faire tatouer son visage
A.: Lequel?

Votez !

Ethan is once again knowledgeable and provocative, this time about what it takes for a coup to get some attention in this country. He compares the media’s interest in Honduras’ institutional coup (as a guy called it last night on The News Hour) with the almost complete ignoring of various coups in Africa.

Ethan concludes (but read the whole thing):

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves – you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population – Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger...

Ethan conspicuously leaves out racism — the soft racism (as that ol’ phrase President George W. Bush once put it) of not knowing, not caring, and not bothering to develop a narrative.

(By the way, be sure to click on the link in the quote from Ethan. It leads to one of The Onion’s funniest videos ever.)

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman africa niger honduras racism media ]

And suddenly there was Flixel, a free and open-source gameengine. Very well designed, fast to step into, made for ActionScript 3 and very versatile. The engine was released only some weeks ago, but the community is currently submitting first games. Time to talk to Adam Atomic: The guy who wrote this genious piece of software. Let’s jump right in!

Flixel and a little code-example.

Why did you made Flixel? Where did the inspiration came from?

Flixel is probably my most selfish project ever! The whole idea behind it was just to make it easier for me to make and distribute the kinds of games that I like to make. After my third game I had most of the bits and pieces that I needed, and figured with maybe a long weekend I could clean it up enough that maybe other people could use it too.

Is there any deeper open-source related philosophy behind Flixel, or was is a more practical decision to do this thing?

Nothing deep I don’t think. I’ve used and played a lot of free or open source apps and games, and always like giving back. I won’t go so far as to say I believe in karma exactly... but it seems like it can’t hurt.

How much time / effort does it cost you to maintain the project?

I’ve spent approximately one hour on maintenance since release, for the v1.1 update. This is where the karma comes in; if you give it away for free, then you can trade that karma for a little help from the self-starters who are willing to share their knowledge with everybody else. Within a day or two of releasing the framework, people had already posted tutorials for settings the package up in FlashDevelop and running MXMLC from the command line and and and...it’s pretty rad. Basically, if I had to do that stuff myself, I could never have released it. So I think it was really release it for free, or just don’t release it.

We are very curious if there are any plans to monetize Flixel now or in the future? (Don’t be shy, we are ready for everything).

Yes and no, sort of, I guess? I have some ideas, I’m gonna build some stuff with the help of some friends later this year that will involve Flixel, but I don’t think it will be anything you can buy, or subscriptions or anything like that. The trick is finding a way to monetize it that isn’t so annoying to actually set up that it just takes all the fun out of the thing... which I haven’t completely worked out yet.

What about Gamemaker, Clickteam or Torque? Do you care about the developments of the “other guys” doing tools in that field?

Unity3D is the only system that really impresses me; they mix the GUI and scripting and asset tracking and all that stuff really nicely. I think after actually making a bunch of smaller games my ideas about the fastest way to do this stuff differs some from some of the popular conceptions of how to make game-making more accessible, particularly the whole GUI aspect I think level editors, GUIs, and all that stuff is a real drag. It’s probably a little egalitarian but I think it’s actually good for people who want to develop games to kind of... meet me halfway, I guess. Plus most simple game-making GUIs encourage static art and static level design, which leads directly to really costly, slow content creation. Scripting I think encourages users to experiment with procedural design more if only to make their lives easier! For 2D games, if you can learn just a smidge of scripting and basic programming logic, and you have the right libraries, you can do REALLY amazing stuff really quickly (see the entire Processing community for example). Plus, hey, now you know how to program!

Are you willing to tell us more about features to come at Flixel? How about community driven developments?

Sure! The big stuff I’m working on soon is making it easier to insert sponsor SWFs, support for displaying traditional tilemaps, and just some general improvements and streamlining (especially for controlling render order and special effects). The community is working on a bunch of different level editors that they’re enthusiastically sharing, and they’ve already developed and released some nice stopgaps for both tilemap display and better depth control, which is pretty rad.

I also read, that you were involved in the Wii-port of Cave Story. How did you came into this project and what does this project meant to you personally (i.e. for your developing skills or things learned)?

I got involved with Cave Story Wii as a direct result of developing and releasing Gravity Hook. Tyrone Rodriguez, the head guy over at Nicalis, thought it was cool, noticed I was a bit of a Cave Story fan, and asked if I wanted to work on scaling up the boss graphics. I was a little nervous about getting involved with what would undoubtedly be yet another unreleased and subpar attempt to put Cave Story on some console or other. After doubtlessly insulting Tyrone to his face multiple times, we somehow agreed that for like $5/hour I would redo all the level graphics, with Amaya-san having the final say on everything. It turns out Tyrone had been working with Amaya-san for over a year already to figure out the right console and the right feature set for this project, and Amaya-san himself had complete veto rights. The job paid poorly, and it was really, really boring. I went through a couple years worth of This American Life episodes while tracing those tiles. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked on anything I’m so proud of! Cave Story (for PC) is the game that opened my eyes to what one person could make, and sparked a permanent shift in my life. To get to be involved with the official commercial release, and to get to have a say in how the thing looked to people who were playing it for the first time... it was just awesome.

How do you think the indie-game-community and the market will develop in the next few years?

The “indie” part will continue to mean less and less, and the opportunities for small teams with great ideas will get better and better. I hope.

Now we are still curious to learn a little more about you. Where you live, what did do, how old, etc.

Sure! I’m 27, and I live in Austin, Texas, USA with my amazing wife Bekah and my two idiot pug dogs. Right now I’m living off our windfall from an iPhone game (Wurdle) that I worked on last year with my rock climbing buddy Eric, and I spend most of my time either working on supporting that game, or (especially lately) prototyping and developing our next iPhone game, which should be announced in a few weeks. As for important career steps... I think getting a four-year degree was a good start, and opened some doors. After college I worked for a couple years as a software developer, at a place where I had some creative control over my projects and only had to put in 40 hours a week. That was a pretty big deal, as it left me some free time and didn’t crush my soul. Quitting that job to go solo was pretty exciting, but I was really bad at it for a few years. I would say the single most important step was when I finally learned enough from my failures as a freelancer to start doing it right. That was last summer, I think. That’s when the cool stuff started to happen! I made Gravity Hook, Paper Moon, and wurdle all in the same month, and a month later had picked up enough steady clients so that my wife could quit her job, too.

So this is not the first time, that you are doing games and things. What role do they play in your life?

Good question! I’ve been an art geek for most of my life, but I’ve always been intoxicated by the mixed mediums, especially comic books, movies, and video games. When you start mixing art and writing and sequential imagery and then pile in interactivity...it’s just too much! How can you not be obsessed with this stuff?

Well, yes. In that context. Do you have any games, book, movies or other peoples work, that you would recommend to people or that you really love? (We even accept famous quotes!)

Oh boy, haha where do I start? Here’s some stuff that people might not have heard of, I guess. Seems silly for me to list stuff like “Pixar movies” when everybody already knows they’re completely awesome? Anyways, some good stuff I’ve digested recently that has been nice brain-fuel:

• The Scar, by China Mieville
• The Taking of Pelham 123 Soundtrack, by David Shore (1970)
• Tekkon Kinkreet, by Michael Arias
• The French Connection, by William Friedkin

Many thanks Adam. I guess I am not the only one, that is looking forward new inspiring stuff made by you and the Flixel-community.

Text and Interview: Martin Wisniowski, 2. Juli 2009

Weblinks

• Flixel Engine
• Adam Atomic Website

Miyamoto doesn't think so, anyway.

Judging by a snatched quote from Nintendo Power magazine, Shigeru Miyamoto has said the new Zelda will be a familiar experience, despite being the first instalment specifically built for Wii.

"I don't think it's going to be that radically different," the veteran designer said (read by Aeropause, spotted by vg247).

Amid the Mario E3 madness, Miyamoto managed to sneakily confirm development of a new Zelda game for Wii. Not wanting to announce the project empty-handed, the legendary Nintendo creator produced a picture, which he said proved he is "quite far into the development of the title".

Read more...

Welcome to the two-hundred and fourteenth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the previous two hundred and thirteen.

Comic Book Legends Revealed is now part of the larger Legends Revealed series, where I look into legends about the worlds of entertainment and sports, which you can check out here, at legendsrevealed.com. I’d especially recommend last week’s Movie Legends, for a piece about Waldo (of Where’s Waldo fame) popping up in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto!

I presume Shelly did not like last week, and I don’t think she will be too pleased about this week, either!

Let’s begin!

COMIC LEGEND: John Severin was tricked into drawing the Rawhide Kid MAX mini-series not knowing what the content was.

STATUS: False

As you might recall, last week we discussed the Rawhide Kid mini-series that Marvel put out under its MAX imprint (their “mature readers only” line of comics). That’s the series that took a different look at the classic Marvel western hero and made him out to be a fairly flamboyant gay man (while maintaining his fighting skills).

The series was written by Ron Zimmerman and was drawn by John Severin, who was in his 80s when the mini-series came out. Severin had drawn Rawhide Kid stories when the character was NEW (before Marvel Comics was even known as Marvel Comics! It was still Atlas Comics when Severin started working there on the Western heroes). So it was a real coup to have one of the character’s early artists draw this new, fairly controversial mini-series.

In any event, writer Chuck Dixon made some comments at the time about the comic book. He said:

But am I to understand that John Powers Severin is drawing this wretched piece of exploitational trash? John objected to (but finally drew) a western story I wrote in which an unmarried couple were shown together in bed. (this was for the more adult-oriented ‘Savage Tales’ magazine.) Could he have willingly participated in this? I doubt it very strongly. I’ll bet he was handed a plot with no idea that the subject of the Rawhide Kid’s ’secret’ would be revealed in the dialogue.

Reader Gorpulon wanted to know if this was true (Gorpulon knew that Marvel denied it, but he was wondering Severin ever did).

First off, yeah, Marvel did, in fact, deny it, pretty emphatically, really.

Here’s Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada on the topic:

Every once in a while something so ridiculous comes out of a mouth of one of my fellow comicbook constituents that I just have to chime in and clear up some things. Now I realize that by me bringing this up more people will now have heard this comment than the few that actually did, but heck that’s okay.

[Quesada then repeats the above quote - BC]

Now let’s read this carefully because it’s troubling on many levels. First, let me say that I like Chuck, heck I hired him to work at Marvel Knights. I guess that’s why I’m so troubled by what he’s implying here. Must be that mix of sun and sigils.

1- That Senior Editor Axel Alonso is so unscrupulous, so underhanded that he would actually try to fool the great John Severin into doing this book. That he would lie to his talent about something so important to core of the story.

2- That as Editor in Chief, I would condone such behavior of any of my editors. That I would let my editor lie to a talent about what he or she was working on and not fire that editor on the spot.

3- That John Severin isn’t smart enough to know what he’s drawing or that he’s incredibly gullible.

Which is it? Quite frankly all of the insinuations here are pretty crappy and owing of an apology. Not to me, because at this point after hearing a rant like the one above, I could give a horse’s butt what Chuck thinks of me, but to Axel and John.

Just for the record, John was approached and told the idea for Rawhide before there was even a writer fully attached to the project. He has known from the very beginning and loved the idea from day one. According to Axel, he’s also loving all of the media attention the book is getting as well.

He also worked from full script.

Let’s take a look at some pages from Rawhide Kid #2…

Those pages sure look like Severin is in on the joke, no?

Luckily for us, in Comic Book Marketplace #98, Severin DID talk about the series…

Severin: It’s kind of weird. (laughs) I guess, yeah, I think the information is already out there. The Rawhide Kid is rather effeminate in this story. It may be quite a blow to some of the old fans of Rawhide Kid. But it’s a lot of fun and he’s still a tough hombre.

That interview was given before (or right around) the release of the first issue of the series, so it sure does not seem like Severin was unaware or what was going on, right?

I think Dixon’s point was mostly rhetorical, anyways – sort of a “He couldn’t know what was going on, because how could he have known and still done it?” type of thing.

Thanks to Gorpulon for the question, and thanks to Comic Book Marketplace (and John Severin) for the spot-on quote, and thanks to Rich Johnston for the other quotes!

COMIC LEGEND: EC Comics was told to change a black character to a white character or else violate the Comics Code.

STATUS: True

By the end of the 1955, Bill Gaines’ comic book company, EC Comics, was in pretty rough shape as a result of the 1954 creation of the Comics Code Authority.

Gaines firmly believed that the Code was designed, at least in part, to put his company out of business, as the Code had rules against titles with the words “horror” and “terror” in them, and rules about how large the word “crime” could be in a comic book title.

So within a year, sales of EC Comics had slumped dramatically.

The last traditional comic book produced by EC Comics was 1955’s Incredible Science Fiction (a series that had just begun a few months earlier, taking over from Weird-Science Fantasy) #33.

The last story in the issue, “Eye for an Eye,” had to pulled at the last minute due to objections by the Comics Code Authority.

So Gaines and editor Al Feldstein substituted a story that Feldstein had written (drawn by Joe Orlando) that had appeared in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953.

The story, “Judgement Day,” was about an astronaut sent by the Earth to examine a planet to see if it was up to snuff and worthy of joining Earth’s “Galactic Republic.”

Well, the planet of robots was found wanting, due to its treatment of different colored robots.

Then, of course, the big “twist”…

When the issue first came out in 1953, it was heavily lauded, including the following missive from a certain Mr. Bradbury…

However, when Gaines and Feldstein went to put it in place of the pulled story, they were told no, the story violated the Comics Code.

Judge Charles Murphy (administrator of the Code) said that they would have to change the astronaut from black to white if they wanted it to be included.

After being told that, clearly, the color of the astronaut’s skin was practically the whole point of the story, Murphy backed down, but said that they would at least have to get rid of the perspiration on his skin.

Feldstein and Gaines both refused, and Gaines threatened a lawsuit and/or a press conference to shine a light on why exactly the story was objected to.

The story ran as is.

However, it was, as I mentioned, the last traditional comic book published by EC Comics.

It’s a damn fine comic book story, at that, so if you’re going to close out your comic book company with a story, that’s as good as any (EC, of course, kept going, just not as a traditional comic book company).

Thanks to Digby Diehl’s excllent book on EC Comics, Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives for the information! Also thanks to cyberghostface for helping save me scanning time!

COMIC LEGEND: The address of Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum is of a building Roy Thomas lived in during the 1960s.

STATUS: True

Reader Stergios asked about a story he heard that:

[T]he mansion where Dr. Strange lives, his Sanctum Sanctorum is located at 177A Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, New York City, New York, which in this universe was the actual address of the apartment building in which the series writer at that time actually lived.

And I have heard in other places that this address doesn’t really exist and is completely made up.

Where does this address come from? Was it Stan Lee’s at the time? Or was it some other writer?

First off, the history of Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum is pretty interesting.

It appears in the very first appearance of Doctor Strange in Strange Tales #110, including the funky window designs…

And the building as a whole appeared in Strange Tales #117…

But, similarly to Namor’s home of Atlantis (as I mentioned in this previous installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed), it was never actually called anything for years.

It was just “Doctor Strange’s Greenwich Village retreat/home”…

It was not until Strange Tales #132 that it was even referred to as a sanctum at ALL, let alone a Sanctum Sanctorum….

It was not until Roy Thomas was in charge of Doctor Strange that the place got its name and address, 177A Bleecker Street.

And yes, Stergios…

A. 177 Bleecker Street DOES exist (here it is)…

and

B. Roy Thomas lived there for a time (I believe he was rooming with Gary Friedrich, but it may have been someone else).

What I would like to know from you readers out there is what issue did the Sanctum Sanctorum officially get its name? And what was the first issue to feature the address? I believe it was courtesy of a telegram delivered to Strange, but I can’t recall of an issue outside of Doctor Strange #183 where he received a telegram (and that issue doesn’t have the address on the telegram). Help me out, folks! I’d also like to know exactly which comic book pro Thomas shared the apartment with, as well! Thanks!

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comic Book Database for this week’s covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com.

As you likely know by now, at the end of April, my book finally came out!

Here is the cover by artist Mickey Duzyj. I think he did a very nice job (click to enlarge)…

If you’d like to order it, you can use the following code if you’d like to send me a bit of a referral fee…

Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you next week!

3 Comments

• At July 3, 2009, Comic Book Legends Revealed #214 wrote:

  [...] here to read [...]

• At July 3, 2009, Chris Bloom wrote:

  I'm not homosexual, but that dialogue from RAWHIDE KID makes me embarrassed on their behalf. If that's the best ...

• At July 3, 2009, Manglr wrote:

  I'll point out that the "Judgement Day" issue was also covered pretty fully in the wonderful "Ten Cent Plague". ...

Filed under: Apple, Security

Apple is apparently alerting ALI forum members that Learning Interchange account passwords have been compromised. In a message forwarded to us by several TUAW readers, Apple warns that members who commonly use the same credentials on multiple sites may be at risk. If you are an ALI account user, please consider updating any accounts that use identical credentials. Here is the Apple quote that was sent to us. We recently learned that the security of Apple Learning Interchange (ALI) members' names and passwords may have been compromised. These accounts are limited to accessing the ALI discussion board and do not contain sensitive information such as credit card or social security numbers.

While ALI member names and passwords are not linked to your Apple ID, our records indicate that your ALI member name and Apple ID are the same. For this reason we strongly recommend that you change your Apple ID password as well as any others that might have the same name and password combination.

At the time of posting, the ALI site (also linked to in the Source link) is unavailable. We do not have confirmation from Apple about this situation, although we have contacted them for a statement.

TUAWApple Learning Interchange: Security Compromise originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Apple, Security

Apple is apparently alerting ALI forum members that Learning Interchange account passwords have been compromised. In a message forwarded to us by several TUAW readers, Apple warns that members who commonly use the same credentials on multiple sites may be at risk. If you are an ALI account user, please consider updating any accounts that use identical credentials. Here is the Apple quote that was sent to us. We recently learned that the security of Apple Learning Interchange (ALI) members' names and passwords may have been compromised. These accounts are limited to accessing the ALI discussion board and do not contain sensitive information such as credit card or social security numbers.

While ALI member names and passwords are not linked to your Apple ID, our records indicate that your ALI member name and Apple ID are the same. For this reason we strongly recommend that you change your Apple ID password as well as any others that might have the same name and password combination.

At the time of posting, the ALI site (also linked to in the Source link) is unavailable. We do not have confirmation from Apple about this situation, although we have contacted them for a statement.

TUAWApple Learning Interchange: Security Compromise originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We recently wrote about how many different sources Shakespeare used in writing King Lear, some of which he apparently copied verbatim. However, it seems quite likely that what Shakespeare did with those words created something wholly unique and valuable (at least, it's withstood the tests of time). Yet, this idea that taking the works of others and doing something with them to make them new and wonderful seems to be an anathema to the "true believers" in copyright, who insist that creativity is about being wholly original, and almost never about building on the works of those who came before. Yet, there's almost no evidence to support this. Nearly any creative work can be shown to be built upon the works of those who came before (hell, even our own copyright law is copied from others').

Law professor Peter Friedman recently had a few interesting blog posts that helped highlight this. First, he noted that the very notion of an author as the originator of a new work is a relatively recent phenomenon, and part of the Romantic Movement. However, prior to that, the view was much more akin to what we're actually seeing today with online tools of creation: "creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing."

He then goes on to discuss the blues musician Robert Johnson -- considered by many to be the "quintessential" Blues musician. However, a recent study into Johnson's work suggest that his fame and renown is basically an accident of history. Some British musicians heard Johnson's music, and since they'd never heard it before, they credited him for it, even though he was mainly copying (and building on) the work of others: Conceptions of Robert Johnson's work highlight the context dependent nature of notions of originality. Originality is yet another characteristic of copyrightability that is not always easy to delineate in actual contexts of creation. However, what might seem original to those in one context may not seem as original in other contexts. Consequently, within the context of African American audiences of the 1920s and 1930s, Johnson's work probably did not seem startlingly original in the way that it did to British and other musicians and audiences listening to Johnson's music, often in relative isolation, in the 1950s and 1960s. This later audience was largely removed from the original context of other music that was prevalent at the time Johnson produced his music or able to listen to a limited and likely biased sample of such music. For early African American blues listeners, what seemed original and interesting was very different that what seemed interesting and original to the largely white blues fans that were the major force behind the blues revival in the 1950s and 1960s. For the latter, romantic conceptions about the blues were closely tied to notions of authenticity that are often unsuited to musical creation in living musical traditions. As a result, what is perceived as original may depend in significant part on the contexts within which listeners hear music. Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music -- which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to "protect" such things.

But, today, with the rise of the internet, and the ability for anyone to perform those roles, we run smack dab into conflicting interests. People still want to create the way they always have, but the industry of the last century, that has relied on copyright law to make its product seem different and "original" freaks out about this ongoing content creation: Culture is a conversation. Every act of culture is a reply to something, a restatement, correction, modification, reworking. Lawyers are constantly debating how much modfication is required to make a work legal. Thus, you may 'create' a new instance of The Blues(TM Martin Scorsese), by shuffling the notes and words around by a set amount. Shuffle too little and you're in trouble with the law. Shuffle too much and the purists start screaming rape. Still, artists are trained to recognize what is a new song and what a version and their publishing companies have experts to deal with these matters. And there we enter the crux of the matter:

Copyright law is corporate law. Or it used to be.

Previously, it took heavy investment to publish art, music, writing, so it was always done by companies and professionals. Today, squirting anything into a blog is an act of publishing. The legalese you signed by clicking when you started your blog forbids any use of copyrighted material that you don't own. Suddenly, instead of plain ordinary citizens entitled to sing "Poops, I did it again" or tape Brad Pitt's face in a toilet bowl onto a postcard to a friend, we are all professional artists required to Create Art from Scratch. Because we are no longer just having a conversation, in which we quote from everything we have seen and heard without any thought of Creation and Originality. Your piddling little blog is a Publishing Enterprise held to the same legal standards as Time Warner Inc, except that you do not have the funds to pay for any borrowings.

You have been muzzled.

This is why people are angry. Their normal modes of expression have been turned into a crime. They know they are only safe from prosecution because they are small fry - unless someone decides to make an example of you. Thus, any time you post some photoshoppery or a musical mash-up you risk having it summarily deleted and your account cancelled for criminal cultural activities. It's nice to see more and more people recognizing and speaking out about these things. The idea that there is a single "author" or "creator" who deserves to get money any time anyone else builds upon his or her works is something that should be seen as increasingly ridiculous as people recognize that all works are created based on the works of others, and it's inherently silly to try to charge everyone to pay back each and every one of their influences in creating a new work.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

There's more than the Stampede going on in July in Calgary. While it's true that the tech scene does slow here are some events to sate the appetite. 

Google Book Settlement Luncheon - July 14. A one hour luncheon put on by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. John King, Senior Editor of University of Calgary Press and President of the BPAA, will present a session on the Google settlement and what courses of action to take as the deadline to register with Google approaches. Details on event here. The latest news on the Google Book settlement.  

Digital Painting Workshop - July 18. Digital Alberta is presenting a one-day workshop with Jaysin from DPI Studios. A quote from Jaysin's blog. 

I will be primarily focusing on Photoshop and how to use it as a digital painting tool. I’ll take students through the completion of a painting from preparing the line art to the finishing touches and all points in-between. I’ve been using Photoshop for 13 years, so I’ve got a tip or two to share that I have learnt along the way.

You can find all the details here. 

Casual Connect - July 21-23. Digital Alberta is accepting applications from game developers to attend Casual Connect - Gamers Conference. If you are interested email Rene Smid to receive an application. Applications are due by July 10. If you are chosen you receive $1,500.00 upon completion of the event and submission of all required activity reports and receipts. Last year Digital Alberta sent people from Games Cafe, Ph03nix New Media, Light Box Entertainmen tand Hire Line of Action.  

Quick Note - This program is still waiting on funding.  

 

 

Set the bar low enough, and it can only be exceeded. That's how I feel about the upcoming big-screen version of The A-Team, a 80s television series entirely beholden to the staid formula of the day and ripe for reinvention. I didn't hate the series so much as I found it routinely mediocre. My colleague Monika Bartyzel loved the series as a kid, yet still questioned the casting choices that were being entertained: Liam Neeson as Hannibal? Bradley Cooper as Face? Adding fuel to the fire, rapper The Game is being considered to play the role of B.A. Baracus, according to blackfilm.com, which quotes "a very highly reliable source in the entertainment industry."

For me, the only thing that made The A-Team watchable was the bantering between the characters, and the choices so far all indicate that director Joe Carnahan is aiming for a more straightforward action picture, based on a script by Wanted's Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. Which is crazy, like moving Miami Vice to Seattle or transforming the lead character in Get Smart into a fairly bland, somewhat competent secret agent. (Even though the latter still made money.)

The mistake would be in confusing brand recognition with brand loyalty. If you're promising fans of the TV show that you're going to deliver the same thing, only bigger and better, then you damn well better deliver something in the same spirit. I haven't seen The Game's work as an actor (Waist Deep, Street Kings) yet; is he any good? If this rumor is true, could he wear the mohawk of the immortal Mr. T?

Filed under: Action, Casting, RumorMonger, Fandom, 20th Century Fox

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

‘Rock Star’ is perhaps the most abused phrase in the history of job listings. Nobody should be looking for a “rock star” accountant, HR recruiter or janitor. Whomever is posting these jobs is grossly misinformed as to the nature of rock stardom. Or accounting. Or both.

—AvoidThisJob.com on the differences between a Rock Star and a Planet Funk Store Manager.