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The "Put a drop in the Bucket" campaign has hit something of a snag over at Bucketworks. Too many drops, and the wrong kind.

With the weekend's storms, the Bucket's roof gave way and caused massive flooding in what is ironically referred to as "the Flowspace." (You might also know it as "the nice, finished area where Web414 usually meets.") Jenn has a short post up at Bucketworks.org, and Publisher Pete put some nice words down on screen, too.

Here's my take on it.
Bucketworks is a service and space unlike any other I've ever come across. We all laugh and throw around the term "physical wiki" when we talk about it, but really, Bucketworks is as close as you can get to the Utopian sigularlity described in Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld. So, it makes sense then, that I would say that Bucketworks is ahead of its time. There will come a day when collaborative work, art, and playspace is just the standard setting for accomplishment. Until that day, pioneers like the gang at Web414, GLUE, Actor's Craft, Spreenkler, and all the rest will rely and depend on your donations to keep Bucketworks open.

That brings us to "Put a Drop in the Bucket." The gang at Bucketworks has been quietly asking for your financial support for a couple of weeks now. It costs Bucketworks about $350 a day to simply exist. Please support them. Although the details are still coming together as to how the flood damage will hit the Bucket's bottom line, its probably safe to say most of the repairs will be funded via insurance. (Bucketworks may be a hippiedippie physical wiki, but the folks running it aren't monkeys-- a business has disaster insurance. )

However, an organization as small as the bucket can't focus on too many crisis at a time. And recovering from the flood is going to be a priority in the short term. That's where you come in. Bucketworks certainly appreciates your willingness to pitch in and help clean up from the storm. And the best way you can do it: Drop some money in the bucket.

The storm and flooding damage may seem like a big deal-- and it is-- but the bigger deal is Bucketwork's financial future. In order to continue to exist as we know it, Bucketworks needs funding.

Full Disclosure: I proudly serve as a volunteer on the Bucketworks Board of Directors.

What I love about this photo taken by our friend John December is that it shows me using one of the most egregious security flaws in a modern software product to get Bucketworks' Ustream password out of Firefox.
If you let Firefox manage your passwords on a public computer you are exposing your passwords to anyone who comes along and knows to look.
Worse, there have been bugs that expose those passwords to the entire internet.

Use Firefox's master password feature to slap a small bandaid on this problem.

I guess I was too late.
Stark.

Dear Mr. Pete, et. all.
Please consider this post my sincere blessing and approval of any and all remixes of any and all of my posts to Jott, including but not limited to the profane tirade that was posted to Jott on Dec. 15, 2007.

Someone send me the MP3 and I'll host it right here.

And so there's no question about the license, I hereby designate any and all of my Jott recordings, including those I may make in the future, under a Creative Commons Sampling+ license.



My recordings on Jott are licensed under a
Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.
This license only applies to my Jott Recordings and should not be applied to any other content appearing on Writelarge.com without my express consent. It does not supersede or change the license terms offered at Writelarge.com.

Edit:
Item! Thanks to Mr. Raster, we've uploaded the file. Remix away!
It would be polite to mark this with a NSFW tag.

At the December Web414 meeting I gave a presentation on Prism (Don't call it Webrunner.) Thanks to the instructions on this fine post I did a meta-meta thing on my presentation by installing prism into a fresh virtualization of Ubuntu and using GoogleDocs to show my presentation. You can check out that presentation here. What I didn't have in my presentation was any kind of data about the difference between Prism's system footprint versus FireFox's system footprint.

So, here's a non-scientific comparison of Six Tabs in Firefox vs. Six instances of  Prism all doing basically the same thing. First, I launched and logged in to six instances of prism. One each, running Google Docs, Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Last.FM, and Flickr.

And here's the System Resources window.

Then, I launched and opened the same six web sites in tabs in Firefox.

And here's the system resources window in that case:

Summary:

It would appear that reducing your browser's impact on your system is not a significant reason to use Prism. Again, I didn't really study any kind of significant benchmarks beyond these basic screen shots, so if anyone has any scientific data that can prove me wrong, I'd love to see it.  

That doesn't mean, either, than there aren't non-footprint-related reasons to use Prism. Separate processes, easy Desktop integration, reduced UI, and easy deployability are all reasons to put Prism on your machine.

These are all good reasons to encourage Prism's use, but it would appear, unscientifically, that reduced footprint ain't one of them.