So the latest Ubuntu release, Hardy Heron, is rapidly approaching. I dropped the beta on my laptop a few days back, and Holy Shit am I loving life. I’ll be completely whiping my Gutsy partition as soon as I get the chance!
I’m reading a lot of chatter about people being none too pleased that Hardy’s […]
In case you’re wondering how a bribe goes down today, here’s a interesting example…
I want to tell you Slashdot people something about how this kind of thing works. I don’t really know the name for it, but I call it “soft bribery”. You might also call it “economic alignment” or whatever. Here’s what happens.
A large, […]
Mark Pligrim, translating Joel Spolsky’s truthiness…
Those documents are super confusing.
With a little truth of his own…
Hi, I’m Web Developer Barbie. Pull my string and I say, “Standards are tough! Let’s go shopping!”
Can someone explain to me why Mr. Joel on Software gets so much link-love?
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I can’t believe it: Enso is finally Free!
Of course, this had been hinted at for a while, so it’s no great surprise, but it’s still pretty big news for the Python geek and the HCI geek in me. Jono’s humane explanation of the open source development model is a great read for the uninitiated…
But the […]
Larry David on the “Sybillish personalities” Clinton’s broken out on the campaign trail.
I don’t want her talking to Putin, I don’t want her talking to Kim Jong Il, I don’t want her talking to my nephew. She needs a long rest. She needs to put on a sarong and some sun block and get away […]
Those predisposed to dystopian visions of the future, fear not…
Google is not, and never will be, the problem. The problem is going to be the following:
The local city government monitoring your car at every intersection and every stretch of road, and mailing you a ticket every time you exceed the speed limit by […]
From the /. comments, here’s another Wikipedia scandal I’d never heard of…
At some point I picked up in slashdot comments about the whole antisocialmedia.net / Gary Weiss / Judd Bagley / Overstock.com mess and decided I was interested enough to spend the time (several hours) reading everything I could about it and trying to figure […]
Wikipedia founder accused of corruption. And another great comment about community governance:
That’s a bit mean. Wikipedia has obvious problems, but the fact that it is probably the world’s largest book and is more or less accurate is an astonishing achievement. What it loses in accuracy or polish it makes up for in sheer breadth.
The problems […]
I hadn’t yet heard the saga of Shareaza, the yet-another-p2p-app that has been hijacked by a pretty scammy bunch. There are even rumors a’swirlin’ in the echosphere that Discordia Ltd. is really just a shell for the MAFIAA, evidenced by the fact that they’re a US firm and no US firm could survive for long […]
I noticed a nice little humane cue on the humanized site recently. Next to the “POST A COMMENT” label, they’ve included a small, subtle reminder…
Please respect this public space
Now I’m not a fan of wasteful sign pollution, but if you’re in the habit of actually reading the comments (incredibly useful sometimes), this little cue might […]
Having decided to contribute more here, I’m already thinking I need a better application to pump out posts than this TinyMCE hack that sits inside Wordpress. I know there are some desktop apps out there that can handle this via XML-RPC — I’ll have to carve out some time for some research…
In the meantime, I […]
Scientologists, take heed:
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. - L. Ron Hubbard
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I’m sitting in a class about blogs, so I figure it’s about time I put something up here. Turns out the average time between updates on established blogs is two to five days…
Time between my substantive posts usually is usually measured in months. I don’t know how people do it.
The prof also made the assertion […]
Masnick on the rumored Y!AOL marriage to keep MS at bay:
That seems sort of like trying to keep a wild animal from eating you by covering yourself with feces.
If Google was pleased with their competitive prospects before, they must be ecstatic now…
Not only would an AOL/Yahoo merger appear to be less of a competitive worry […]
I stumbled upon a little piece of code from John Resig (of jQuery fame) that fuzzies up dates on the fly. This script hits on some of my favorite patterns: humanity in interface design, unobtrusive javascript, and microformats, with both human and machine-readable dates.
But I’m none too fond of the the design — the default-operator […]
Egads. Microsoft offering $44 bil for Yahoo! eh? Smells an awful lot like desperation. Perhaps it’s not the same as the AOL/TW boondoggle as far as mismatching industries go, but it’s certainly a mismatched culture. As Kevin Dangoor notes:
Years ago, Microsoft bought HotMail. At the time, HotMail’s servers were all running FreeBSD. Somewhere along […]
I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 2 on my XP box at work since its release. Other than a few little user interface bugs (and really, who uses bookmarks anymore?), it’s been rock solid. Stability’s great and all, but I’m looking forward to the final FF3 for one damn reason: it’s fast. Countless lags and […]
Zed Shaw, “expert” programmer and “master” profanitist (see: Rails is a Ghetto), bangs out this hysterical gem in a paper about his XUL experimentation, an interesting take on that awkward, fuzzy space between desktop and web apps…
I see now that XUL has a distinct disadvantage as people don’t know whether to think of it as […]
>>> from __future__ import braces
SyntaxError: not a chance (<console>, line 1)
I love you, Python!
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As often as I rail against intellectual property, it’s stories like this that serve to demonstrate the necessity of copyright in certain circumstances. What a trainwreck — and yet, even in this seemingly Pentopticonian age of IP enforcement, this poor girl has little recourse. These laws aren’t made for people…and that’s the real crime!
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“Linux is not communism, Vendor lock-in is.”
Via /.
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So here I am, on hold with Sprint. I just reupped my contract last night and got myself a new fangled, craptastic phone — yeah, they don’t offer any normal phones anymore. What thanks do I get for signing on for another two years? They cut service off to my current phone…brilliant. No wonder they’re […]
Unmotherfuckinbelievable…
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I just randomly came across this interesting post about rethinking the structure of the filesystem. I’ve been beating around a similar idea in my head — though a little more abstractly. I’ve been enamored with the idea of a pseudo-filesystem for some time, and I think I finally figured out how to do it. Before […]
In case anyone had any doubt that AT&T would find a way to fuck up the Apple Experience™…
For starters, although I signed up for what iTunes told me was a $60 plan (450 minutes, unlimited Internet), the bill says I have a $40 voice plan and a $20 Internet plan, and lists them on separate […]