Collateral Murder

Assassinato Colateral from Passa Palavra on Vimeo.

This video, leaked by Wikileaks, shows the U.S. military killing dozens of civilians in the Iraq War.
In 2007, during a raid in New Baghdad, Iraq, two US military Apache helicopters mistook Reuters journalists and their equipment (cameras) with insurgents carrying AK-47 and RPG (grenade launcher).
Within minutes a group of people were brutally murdered by attack helicopters. A dozen people were murdered without showing any kind of threat. Two children were seriously injured in the attack.
The case resulted in broad repercussions, and its authenticity was confirmed by an anonymous U.S. soldier.
The site, Wikileaks, was responsible for the leak of the video.
The site proposes to make governments accountable through the public release of sensitive and confidential files. Anyone can send a file to Wikileaks. Through a strong system of encryption and anonymity, the source is preserved. Particularly notable among the leaks have been the documents referring to the Guantanamo base, data on the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the list of members of the British Nationalist Party, and even a document from the Pentagon in 2008, describing methods and strategies to marginalize the site and legally pursue all possible sources of leaks, because at the time, Wikileaks was publishing information regarding human rights violations during the invasion of Fallujah, Iraq.
The name of the video is a derived from the military term "Collateral Damage", used in reference to non-deliberate or accidental damages.
According to an internal review of the army, the helicopters attacked insurgents, and two Reuters journalists were killed as collateral damage.
The version of the video, above, was taken from vimeo.com.br, a Brazilian site, and includes subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese.

I haven't been able to verify this, but I have heard that the person who passed this video to Wikileaks has been detained. I wouldn't be surprised if that were confirmed, of course.

Supercomputing by operating system: Linux RULES THE ROOST!

From the BBC: In Graphics: Supercomputing superpowers.


Supercomputer graph, by operating system: Linux RULES THE ROOST!
a surprise? I think not....
The data used to generate the interactive treemap visualisation come from a draft of the June 2010 TOP500 Supercomputing list. This ranks most of the world's fastest supercomputers twice a year. There may be minor differences between this list and the final published list.

The graphic allows you to see the visualise the list by the speed of each machine; the operating systems used; what it is used for; the country where it is based; the maker of the silicon chips used to build the machine and the manufacturer of the super computer.

The maps were produced using the Prefuse Flare software, developed by the University of California Berkeley.

iDenTickle updated, again!

I did it again.
I added more stuff to iDenTickle, again.


This time, I added the option of updating your gNewBook microblog.

I also added a handy little "clear" button.

Also, the setup and about "windows" are now just frames that appear in the main interface, rather than distinct windows.

---

posted with Xpostulate

iDenTickle version 1.1

Well...I just couldn't leave well enough alone.
Yesterday I released version 1.0 of IdenTickle, my tcl/tk denter/tweeter tool...but I just kept thinking, it could be better.
The interface could be cleaner, with the setup stuff separate.
And, perhaps an about button, as is common, to bring up a little dialog with a bit of info, and direct the user to the homepage.
Plus buttons to open your browser to your identi.ca or twitter feed...stuff like that.

So, today you have IdenTickle version 1.1.


The main interface.


and, when you open the setup tab/frame to enter your setup information.
As you'll recall, v 1.0 was already saving your login data (previous version required entry of said data, every time...annoying).

enjoy
./tony

Iden.Tcl v 1.0 released

Moments ago, I released a new version of IdenTickle, the tcl/tk identi.ca and twitter status update tool..



Now it saves your login information, so you don't have to enter it every time.
Additionally, I built installers for Windows and Linux.
(Mac and BSD folks, etc., will still have to install from source...sorry).

screenshots

Paula Toller of Kid Abelha

Convert .html to .pdf in gnu/linux

There are various options for converting .html files to .pdf in a gnu/linux operating system. Your choice of methods will depend on the complexity of the file you wish to convert, and your familiarity with the tools a gnu/linux system provides.

What you'll need:

• Gnu/linux operating system


• Html file


• Web browser

Optional:

• Openoffice.org office suite


• wget


• html2ps


• ps2pdf

Simply "Print to file"
One very simple option for creating a .pdf file from an .html file is to simply open the file in your browser, and choose, print. When the print dialog arises, choose "Print to File", and indicate "PDF". This will write the html file out to pdf format.


Here is a pdf of this article generated in this fashion: converthtml2pdfgnulinux.pdf

OpenOffice.org

"Print to File" works well for basic html files with simple text and some images. If the html file in question has more complex formatting, this option may not always produce the best results. Luckily, other options exist.

Save the html file to your computer (if you haven't already done so), and open it with OpenOffice.org's html editor (ooweb). Then simply go to the "File" menu, and choose "Export". OpenOffice.org will then offer you the usual options for saving a file, such as choosing where to save it, and what title to give the file, and, preso-magico, will produce a .pdf file from your .html file.

Command Line

Of course, no linux how to article would be complete without instructions on how to accomplish your task using only the magical Bash command line interface. For those so inclined, then, the following is a complete process for acquiring an .html file and converting it to a .pdf file. In order to proceed with this method, the following software must be installed on the your computer: wget, html2ps, and ps2pdf. These programs are either already a part of most gnu/linux distributions, by default, or can be easily acquired with your favorite package manager (apt, yum, pacman, portage, etc.)

First, let's save the file to your computer:
wget http://www.somesite.com/yourfile.html

Next, let's convert the .html file to a postscript or .ps file:
html2ps yourfile.html > yourfile.ps

Then, we'll convert the postscript file, finally, to a .pdf file:
ps2pdf yourfile.ps

Voila!
You should now have "yourfile.pdf".

This could, of course, all be scripted.

#!/bin/bash

# convert webpages to pdf files
# get url
echo "Enter the url of the page to be converted:"
read page
#download page
wget $page

file=$(basename $page)
#convert to postscript
html2ps $file > $file.ps
#convert to pdf
ps2pdf $file.ps
#clean up extraneous files
rm -f $file
rm -f $file.ps
#clean up file name
rename "s/.html.pdf/.pdf/g" *.pdf

echo "done"

exit

Here is a pdf of this article, generated via this command line method: convertweb2pdflinux.pdf
Notice, it is different from the above pdf created with "Print to file".
One difference, which, depending on your goals, may be either advantageous or undesired, is that text in this file can be selected and copied, which is not true of the first file.

XHTML2PDF

In many cases, you may wish to create a pdf file from a complex .html or .xhtml file that includes .css (cascading style sheet) or other elements, that will not render in the above methods in such a manner as to produce a file that appears as it does on the Internet.

For those cases, there is a program called xhtml2pdf. This program is not as likely to be a part of most gnu/linux distributions by default, nor available from said distributions' repositories. As such, you may to have to download and install it by hand. Thankfully, the site for this program is easily enough found at http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/, and, of course, the program is free, open source software.

And, of course, here is a pdf of this article generated with xhtml2pdf: xhtml2pdfconversion.pdf

There's more!

Yet other methods exist for generating .pdf file from .html files, of course, and an attempt to compile an exhaustive list, with instructions for each, would be beyond the scope of this article.