February 2004

Today is Grey Tuesday:

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone (”an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.

I’ve downloaded the album, and it rocks!. If I get a few comments requesting it, I’ll mirror the album on my site.

You’ve heard of flash mobs, right?

Well in San Francisco on April 3rd, they’re taking it to the next level… Flash Mob Supercomputing:

A Flash Mob supercomputer is hundreds or even thousands of computers connected together via a LAN working together as a single supercomputer. A Flash Mob computer, unlike an ordinary cluster, is temporary and organized on-the-fly for the purpose of working on a single problem. Flash Mob I is the first of it’s kind. By bringing hundreds of people like you together in one room, we will have enough computing power to become one of the fastest supercomputers on the planet.

They’re attempting to build an impromptu supercomputer from hundreds or thousands of personal computers networked and running Linux.

I think it will be more of a novelty than anything else, but it once again brings up an interesting point. When communties come together and combine computing power, some very interesting problems could be solved. I think we’ll see more of stuff like this in the future.

I spent a few minutes today and did a little bit of work to theme my photo page. Its not exactly beautiful, and of course it doesn’t validate, but gallery isn’t exactly the most elegant system yet. But at least it looks more like the rest of my site.

So about a week ago, I noticed something really funny showing up in my referrer logs. I kept getting referrer hits from “blog.johnkerry.com”. Funny, because nowhere on blog.johnkerry.com is there a link to my site. So obviously they can’t be actually clicking over from there.

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I keep getting referrals (clicked links from external sites) from “blog.johnkerry.com”. Its starting to wierd me out.