Wu Tang vs. The Beatles

First of all, I really really don’t like mash-up music. In fact this is not the typ­i­cal mash-up shit, it’s absolutely high-quality:

Wu Tang acapel­las over beats made with sam­ples of Bea­t­les songs, all mixed together with spo­ken word from both groups. Pro­duced by Tom Caruana.

I couldn’t think of any­thing more inap­propi­ate than com­bin­ing the Wu-Tang Clan with The Bea­t­les, but what can I say, it def­i­nitely works! Smooth beats, the dis­tinct wu flow, and every now and then some fancy Bea­t­les sam­ples. I’m lis­ten­ing to it for the first time while writ­ing this, and I enjoy it so much!

So go ahead and get Enter The Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Cham­bers from Tea Sea Records for free!

John Lennon met the walrus

In 1969, a 14-year-old Bea­tle fanatic named Jerry Lev­i­tan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and con­vinced him to do an inter­view. 38 years later, Lev­i­tan, direc­tor Josh Raskin and illus­tra­tor James Braith­waite have col­lab­o­rated to cre­ate an ani­mated short film using the orig­i­nal inter­view record­ing as the sound­track. A spell­bind­ing ves­sel for Lennon’s bound­less wit and time­less mes­sage, I Met the Wal­rus was nom­i­nated for the 2008 Acad­emy Award for Ani­mated Short.

The King of Iron Fist Tournament

Damn right, there’s gonna be a Tekken movie! I’ve played all of the games, start­ing with Tekken 2 on my PS1 ’till the lat­est Tekken 6 on the PS3. And though my exces­sive career of spend­ing days in front of the screen beat­ing the shit out of my com­rads is over, I’m still able to per­form a 10 hit combo with my favorite player Mar­shall Law and kick anyone’s ass! And in my dreams I can still here the voice pre­sent­ing: The King of Iron Fist Tournament…

So I heard France was trying to buy the Atlanta Braves — but they found out the name wouldn’t work!

Bikini Climbing

Ever seen an more asthetic climb­ing video? Ever seen a girl in bikini climb­ing a deep water solo tour? Well, me nei­ther. Natal­ija Gros swims and solos Le Tango Vertical.

RJD2 — Let there be horns

This video doc­u­ments a day in the life of a mino­taur today.

Artist: RJD2

Track: Let there be horns

Direc­tor: Thom Glunt

(via)

This is appar­ently the new sin­gle of RJD2’s highly antic­i­pated 4^th solo album “The Colos­sus”, to be released on Jan­u­ary 19^th 2010.  In my opin­ion RJ’s music was bet­ter on his first two records, and as he was still DJ & pro­ducer for DefJux. His recent devel­op­ments in music have not been very lucky  — but let’s wait for the release date…

Guru’s Jazzmatazz Vol. 4 for free download

Founder and MC Guru of the leg­endary Gang Starr crew just released the 4^th vol­ume of his Jazz-HipHop project Guru’s Jazzmatazz. He started back in ’93 com­bin­ing smooth jazz beats with his dis­tinc­tive flow and still today, noth­ing can stand up to this unique and out­stand­ing mix. In his gen­eros­ity, Guru offers the album for free to download!

So, what are you wait­ing for, give it a shot!

Facebook’s Master Password: Chuck Norris

I’m not sure when exactly it was dep­re­cated, but we did have a mas­ter pass­word at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the pass­word. I’m not going to give you the exact pass­word, but with upper and lower case, sym­bols, num­bers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Nor­ris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Hell yeah, that’s good news! But don’t worry, you could only use it inside Facebook’s local net­work and it was lim­ited to engi­neers. Any­way, pretty awseome?

This is not the only inter­est­ing story of what’s hap­pen­ing inside of Face­book. The Rum­pus inter­viewed a Face­book employee, who — what else — wants to stay anony­mous. Here are some key facts men­tioned in the con­ver­sa­tion, which I con­sider to be good to be aware of, when talk­ing about THE social network:

• EVERYTHING is stored, pro­to­colled and monitored.
• They run four data cen­ters. In Santa Clara, San Fran­cisco, New York and Lon­don. Each of them holds about five to eight thou­sand servers. They have essen­tially the same data on it.
• Cur­rent num­ber of active users: 200 to 220 mil­lions. All together (inac­tive, fake, etc.): over 300 million.
• There are 300 engi­neers work­ing the site. One engi­neer for about 1 mil­lion users. Accord­ing to founder Mark Zucker­berg this is the com­mon ratio they want to keep.
• Face­book is the largest photo dis­trib­u­tor in the world with stor­ing more than a tril­lion images, each of them saved in six dif­fer­ent versions.
• With the above men­tioned Mas­ter Pass­word, every­one who knew the pass­word was able to admin­is­trate every sin­gle pro­file. But that’s not even nec­es­sary. As every social net­work or web­site, the data is also stored in a database.
• They cre­ated a Chief Pri­vacy Offi­cer posi­tion, which is cur­rently held by Chris Kelly, run­ning for Attor­ney Gen­eral of California.
• To deve­l­ope new fea­tures, they started run­ning psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis, such as eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while brows­ing Facebook.
• Dur­ing the Iran­ian elec­tions, Face­book coded a trans­lated ver­sion in Farsi, their sec­ond right to left lan­guage ever, within 36 hours.
• One of the engi­neers is rewrit­ing the com­plete soft­ware from PHP to HPPHP. Hyper-PHP is a com­piled lan­guage (PHP is scripted) which will improve speed (about five times faster) and reduce the CPU load by 80%. This guy is cur­rently invent­ing this language.
• 70% of Face­book engi­neers (you should bet­ter call them ultra-geeks) are from Har­vard and Stanford.
• They don’t care what, where, how, when, you work, as long as you get your shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done.

It’s just amaz­ing to get an inside view on how the largest social net­work world­wide oper­ates. Here is the com­plete story at The Rum­pus. By the way, don’t worry about your pri­vacy. It doesn’t mat­ter if it’s Google, Face­book, or your local ISP, the more you use the web, the more data you cre­ate. And the web never forgets.