randomwalks/dj

its all there

Originally posted by fruminator from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 10:57 PM

Researchers said that they had created pigs that make their own omega-3 fatty acids, but for now the benefits are theoretical.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 26, 2006 10:56 PM

In a typically idiosyncratic talk that could be subtitled "State of the Onion 9.3", Larry Wall offers yet another way of examining the state of the Perl language and its community of users and coders. This time he addresses the concepts underlining Perl - and his own view of the world - alphabetically, treating his audience to insights that manage to be simultaneously humorous and thought-provoking.

Originally from ITC: All Programs, on March 26, 2006 09:17 PM

bbum’s weblog-o-mat: “Of all the programming languages I have learned, there are two that have consistently made me feel stupid. Prolog and AppleScript.”

Originally from ranchero.com, on March 26, 2006 09:16 PM

Erica Sadun, MacDevCenter.com: “Take Quartz Composer, for example. It’s a free utility that can bring new life and interest to your iMovie projects. In this article, you’ll learn how to use your own pictures to create a simple but flashy animation.”

Originally from ranchero.com, on March 26, 2006 09:16 PM

I was having a conversation with Matt the other day about how people are saying it's a great time to start a company. We both did the skeptical cocked eyebrow thing: it's a terrible time to start a company, especially here in the middle of it all, in the Bay Area. Why?

1. Everybody else is starting a company. It's crazy. Every single person who leaves a tech company isn't going to Microsoft or Google or Apple or whatever, they're going to a startup. Trying to operate in this environment is crazy. I'm getting late-onset ADD from trying to keep track of them all, and it's impossible to get attention for your product amidst all the buzz (er, noise).
2. Your competition just got funded too. You've got $5 million in the bank, and they do too. Their VCs want them to succeed every bit as much as your VCs want you to succeed. This gets you into a horse race, which no one wants: it's exhausting and expensive.
3. Talent is scarce again. Hell, I want to find someone to write a little bit of PHP for Wench.com and I can't find anyone (Hey if you are a PHP webapp builder and have some spare cycles, email me at caterina-at-gmail). Everyone's gainfully employed, and fielding several offers.
4. You can't operate in obscurity anymore. We started our company in 2002 when nothing was getting funded anywhere and everyone was still licking their wounds from the big bubble bang. Nobody cared about us except us. We were in Vancouver fer crissakes. But we were able to focus on finding and connecting with the people who mattered most: the customers, the users, the community. You get more done when no one's looking over your shoulder.
5. Web 2.0 isn't all that. Hello?. I don't think there's a rising tide lifting all boats here. I don't think Web 2.0 is the magic bullet some people seem to think it is either. It ain't the features, it's that AND the business. Tagging was a great feature, no doubt. But Flickr was at break even -- about to tip into the black -- when we were acquired.
6. There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer.

some great products & businesses out there, and I am advising few of them (Bunchball, Now Public-- in Vancouver!) which is great. And here's some great advice from Mike Tatum of CNet. But I had this same stay-out-of-the-water-there's-sharks feeling circa 1998. Maybe my hype antibodies are just kicking in.

UPDATE: I've turned comments off. I was talking here about consumer-facing Web 2.0 companies based in San Francisco and the Valley, which bears repeating. Given that 9 out of 10 companies fail, I just think the odds are getting worse.

Originally from Caterina.net, on March 26, 2006 09:15 PM

At big companies like Yahoo!, our ever-loving parent, there are all kinds of crazy processes to enable decision making and prioritization, planning and budgeting, resource allocation and what gets focus now and in the coming years.

This manifests itself in powerpoint 'decks', and spreadsheets, long meetings, dashboards ... all kinds of things; some valuable and some not so much. Among them is coming up with the vision and mission statements.

Coming up with a plainly understandable articulation of Flickr's vision was initially something I saw as annoying. The best place to store, sort, search and share your photos? Sunsets, Babies, Kittens, Flowers? Argh. This was time we could be spending fixing stuff, or added needed features.
 

But after thinking about it for a while, the vision was obvious:

Eyes of the World

That can manifest itself as art, or using photos as a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, "personal publishing" or intimate, small group sharing. It includes "memory preservation" (the de facto understanding of what drives the photo industry), but it also includes the ephemera that keeps people related to each other: do you like my new haircut? should I buy these shoes? holy smokes - look what I saw on the way to work! It let's you know who's gone where with whom, what the vacation was like, how much the baby grew today, all as it's happening.

And most dramatically, Flickr gives you a window into things that you might otherwise never see, from the perspective of people that you might otherwise never encounter. This photo taken during the riots in Paris, titled March 23, 2006 - 18:08, from Hugo* is a fantastic illustration of that:

I came across it after browsing the CPE tag, after following a link from a blog post entitled "France: Youth ignore newspaper requests for protest photos; turn to Internet. The message of the article was that even the biggest French newspapers haven't been able to get readers to send in their photos, but a real time, street-level view of the protests in Paris was flowing into and out of Flickr. These four from Gonzale are another look:

The same day I read the blog post above, the BBC ran a story titled Belarus protesters turn to internet. Anti-Lukashenko protest went largely unseen inside the country since the state controls most of the media, but people on the streets of Minsk were able to show their fellow citizens what was happening:

photos by by2006 (left) and yesfuture on (right)

* * * * *

And, of course, there are a near-infinite number of other things going on all over the planet at any given moment (the page which shows the latest uploads is great to watch and reload every few seconds). There's just so much. The world has a lot of eyes — here are an assorted dozen photos uploaded today:

It's funny that a corporate strategy exercise can bring things so sharply into focus. And it's overwhelming to think of the sheer magnitude of photos captured, people contributing, viewpoints shared, stories told, connections made, places represented. It really is the eyes of the world.

For more:

• Hugo*'s outstanding Demonstrations set.
• The la france brule-t-elle ? / is france burning ? group
• The Global Photojournalism and Photojournalism group pools.
• The Manifestations contre le CPE group
• by2006's photos tagged with Беларусь (Belarus)
• yesfuture's photos from March
• The sunset, babies, kittens, flowers photos above from snowriderguy, Bridget x3, JMZawodny and vsz, respectively
• The dozen at the bottom were found while exploring
   

Originally from FlickrBlog, on March 26, 2006 09:15 PM

"It's a bad time to start a company". Amen. It's kinda what I was getting at in this post..."if you're buying low and selling high, the time to buy optimism was two to four years ago, not now".

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 26, 2006 09:15 PM

The LoremoGreen technology is piping hot right now. The buzz filled the ballroom at the Cleantech Venture Network conference yesterday in San Francisco Some 500 people attendees (double the number at the previous conference, or so some people told us) crammed into the room when John Doerr and John Denniston, partners at the respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, gave their talk about the pressing need for new technologies and policies to save the planet from pollution and global warming....

Originally posted by Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat, on March 26, 2006 09:13 PM

"Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heatbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair."

(i'm revising.)

Originally from serenalarogers, on March 26, 2006 09:13 PM

Contrary to the predictions of many a moron, Apple’s lead in the digital music player market is stronger than ever.

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on March 26, 2006 09:13 PM

Mark Dalrymple: “The Seattle Xcoders showed some home movies of me giving a talk to my Local Linux User’s Group, made a couple of years ago, about debugging with gdb. I figured I’d list them here for anyone that is totally bored out of their skull.”

Originally from ranchero.com, on March 26, 2006 09:13 PM

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads this blog, I'm not the sort of person likely to write an article bemoaning how kids today are tuning out of normal social interaction by listening to their iPods all day. But for those of you who are working on just such an article, I've got a tip -- one of you should borrow the phrase that iTunes uses to announce that it's finished loading up your iPod with music: "OK To Disconnect." What kind of message is that sending the youth of America?

E. M. Forster is no doubt rolling in his grave...

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on March 26, 2006 09:13 PM

Wired has an excellent new special issue on video games edited by Will Wright that's worth checking out in full. I have a little essay that just went online a few hours ago, though I've been getting a lot of mail about it already. It's called "When Virtual Worlds Collide":

But virtual reality has failed to conform to forward-looking visions in one crucial respect. We don't live in the Matrix, but in the matrices. Your World of Warcraft persona can't visit a Stonehenge replica in Second Life. You can't impress an EverQuest elfin hottie with Jedi skills honed in Star Wars Galaxies. If you want to buy an Ultima scepter with Therebucks, you'll have to exit both worlds and consummate the transaction on eBay.
Because the current metaverse evolved largely out of videogames, it makes sense that it should be composed of fiefdoms - after all, you wouldn't expect a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims. But there is reason to believe that the divided metaverse is merely a transitional phase, and that its component worlds will coalesce.
All virtual worlds require a communication protocol that lets you talk with other people, a software platform that lets you build things on top of it, and a currency that enables trade. These three elements share one thing: a gravitational pull toward a common standard. Think of the diversity of the PC marketplace in the early 1980s: the Apple II, Radio Shack's TRS-80, IBM's PCjr, the Commodore-64, the Atari 400/800 series - they all ran different operating systems or flavors of Basic. Ten years later, however, Windows held 90 percent of the market. Email followed the same pattern. Diverse and incompatible standards - CompuServe members could only email other CompuServe members - gave way to a common platform that allowed everyone to connect.
The logic of convergence may be even stronger in the metaverse...

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on March 26, 2006 09:13 PM

Originally from The Mobile Andrew, on March 26, 2006 09:12 PM

I just watched the Kid Rock Behind The Music. I am not ashamed. It was good. And I don't even like his music.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on March 26, 2006 09:12 PM

"It's a bad time to start a company" (Caterina Fake)

I've just arrived in Vancouver for the IA Summit, where I will be on a Sunday panel with Gene Smith, Dan Brown, and Michal Arrington (I will be the one running back and forth along the net, picking up wayward tennis balls). The topic of our conversation is Web 2.0, and what it means for information architects. This comes somewhat hot-on-the-heels of Peter Merholz calling out Web 2.0 poster-company 37Signals for their "shallow views and rhetoric", in response to a swipe at information architecture from the Getting Real PDF file, and I have been informed that a lot of information architects are worried about what Web 2.0 means for their employability. What skills will transfer, does user-created content mean no one needs to be told how to choose section titles, etc.

Caterina Fake's post detailing the reasons why it's a shitty time to start a new venture (everyone else is doing it, talent pool is finite) is a ray of hope for me, because one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 for me personally has been "Low Hanging Fruit". There are a million companies with similar-sounding names and logos all running a mile-a-minute trying to solve easy problems: calendars, word processing, drag and drop, time-and-milestone trackers. Web frameworks Rails, Django, and TurboGears are optimized for these tasks, and process dogma Getting Real assumes that anything which takes more than a week to dream up, prototype, and release may very well not be worth doing.

If all the coders and designers are exhausting themselves implementing known solutions to solved problems, who's paying attention to the big questions? This feels like the natural home for the IA Summit crowd: people comfortable imposing order on chaos and tackling big tasks. I say this more from a position of reverence than experience, because I'm definitely missing the experience of long-term, many-faceted projects at the moment. There's so much fast-turnaround, race-to-market work in the world right now it's making my head spin, and not in a good way.

It's an auspicious time to Go Big.

Originally from tecznotes , on March 26, 2006 09:12 PM

During a rhetorical argument with a blank piece of paper, Karinthy Frigyes resigned himself to what is called 'literature': telling everyone what, on an individual basis, nobody is interested in. Elsewhere:

Nem mondhatom el senkinek,
elmondom hát mindenkinek.
I cannot tell anyone, so I tell everyone.

I wonder why the opportunity for anonymity in blogging is not seized upon by all and sundry. Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog. Maybe Karinthy should get one too.

As a child, I could never quite decide how to colour this in:

Canterbury Tales woodcut, 1484

From now on, Lady Upgrade aspires to something approximating this:


Blank pieces of paper are truly terrifying. I'll go and buy a pen, then.

Originally from the lady upgrade project, on March 26, 2006 09:11 PM

Bill Gates gave the opening keynote at last week's Microsoft Mix06 conference, featuring Aber Whitcom from MySpace (which uses SQL Server) and Ashley Highfield from the BBC. The speech ended with a dicussion between Gates and Tim O'Reilly, followed by...

Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog, on March 26, 2006 09:11 PM

You've heard about YouTube's issues with NBC. It seems the words copyright violation have scared them into a stupor, as now several bloggers are complaining, and even calling for a little civil disobedience.

Originally posted by Brittanie from MetaFilter posts tagged with copyright, on March 26, 2006 09:11 PM

part of the deal here is to knock out quick projects from conception to fruition and share them. that white bean-shaped footstool? the one i was gonna buy and recover? pssshhh. are we comfy with "the c word" here? becuz antique shop lady wuz TOTALLY out. the condition of our white footstool was poor. i personally witness her rotting in the rain and snow, when nobody bothers to bring her inside. this morning i came for her with cash, to bring her to you, to share. but while a fool and her $ are easily parted, larogers spends seven hours in a honda showroom negotiating in one-dollar increments with a sexy former basketball player used-car salesman named mike.

ok, ambiguous motivation.

anyway i pointedly left and shot cross the street in plain sight and negotiated for gorgeous, ass-polished piano stool, above left. i will make a seat cover for it though because, it's actually been badly repaired, on the seat, but i don't want to refinish the ass glow; i want it to live, beneath a vibrant cover. project: begin.

speaking of vibrant, meet XXX public access channel 21 personality, fighting for equality in the science laboratory facilities of local schools. note, behind right shoulder, darts, on face of anonymous education administrator. every show, there are more darts.

whoops -- XXX -- photo removed. will post why some other day.

and thus my friends, is today's post on the subject of sewing and murder.

Originally from serenalarogers, on March 26, 2006 09:10 PM

Caterina Fake has a peculiar list of reasons why starting a company today is a bad idea. I say it's never been a better time to start a business. You know, the kind that develops a product or service and asks money for it.

Yes, it's a bad time to start a company on VC diesel, using me-too technology, flaunting your non-existing goods, doing tagging because it's cool, and spending all your time partying. Guess what? That was never a good idea.

I know we've been beating many of these drums to death, but here goes a recap of six reasons why you should start a business today:

1. You don't need VC diesel to get your motor running. Working nights or putting money aside to run full-time for three months is enough to get off the ground if you have a great idea and enough passion to make it matter.
2. You can actually charge money for valuable services. People have never been more willing to part with their credit cards to pay for services that improve their business or their life. You don't need to spend aeons and cumbaja meetings pondering HOW TO MONITIZE?! when all you need is a service worth paying for.
3. You don't need mainstream tech to make a dent. No wonder you have a hard time finding people if you're only looking at the mainstream tech circles. You're competing for talent with all the risk-averse insurance companies of the world. We picked Ruby early and used Rails to get access to the cream of the crop. People bustling with passion to develop using tools they love.
4. You don't need to live in San Francisco to make it big. Or rather, if you want to make it big, don't live in San Francisco. You'll get sucked in to the myths (you need VC!) and drowned by the parties. Most of the worlds talent does not live in that tiny spot of land. I developed the Basecamp, Backpack, Tada List, and Writeboard from Copenhagen, Denmark. And we have one of the greatest developers I've ever met in Provo, Utah. While the rest of the company is in Chicago and New York. The Rails core team includes people from Germany, Canada, Austria, and all over the US.
5. You don't need a swarm of worker bees to take off. Of course its hard to find 10 or 20 great people by tomorrow, but you don't have to. We're entering a golden age of small teams capable of doing big things. Just get a band of three together and you're good to go for v1. Using modern tools and simply doing less software means that having more people is likely to slow you down rather than speed you up.

Thus, I believe it has never been easier to build a great business for the web, if your intentions are to simply be profitable and please a constituency of passionate users.

But yes, I agree with Fake that its getting harder to create a company with the intents to play the Web 2.0 Lottery. There can only be so many winners and if you're relying on Google or Yahoo to buy you out, you might want to pick a coupon for the powerball while you're at it.

Originally from Signal vs. Noise, on March 26, 2006 09:10 PM

david posted a photo:

Originally from david's Photos, on March 26, 2006 09:10 PM

Today a fellow blogger asked me to pimp his post. Since it's only two lines, I figure I can take a break from my busy schedule of, uh, drinking and stuff, and help a brother out.

So I did the Challenge problem in Chapter 4 of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Second Edition . I've come up with two different "solutions".

Solution 1: "Screw retain counts"

- (IBAction) reportCharacterCount: (id)sender { NSString *inputString = [inputField stringValue]; [outputField setStringValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ has %d letters.", inputString,[inputString length]]]; }

Solution 2: "I'm a good boy"

- (IBAction) reportCharacterCount: (id)sender { NSString *inputString = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:[inputField stringValue]]; [outputField setStringValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ has %d letters.", inputString,[inputString length]]]; [inputString release]; }

For pedagogical reasons, could someone tell me what the difference is between the two? And if possible, which one is better?

(As you can probably guess, my very first solution consisted of version 1 with a release, which brought me to the debugger in a hurry.)

The short answer is the difference between the two is that the second one wastes time and memory to no good effect. There are several problems with the second one: for example, if you really wanted a immutable copy of a string, you should just use [[inputField stringValue] copy] and not -initWithString:, because the latter always allocates a new string, whereas the former will just return the same object with an increased retain count if the original string was already immutable. Now that's fast!

But, in fact, there's no point in doing this copy of the inputField's string, for two reasons. First off, when you call -setStringValue: on outputField it's really the field's job to make sure it holds on to a immutable copy of the string you've passed in, so it's going to call -copy or do something similar itself. (It's true there were bugs in early versions of NeXTstep where sometimes mutable strings would be retained or returned instead of immutable ones, but those are mostly ironed out now.)

Secondly, and more importantly, you're not actually passing this string directly to your output NSTextField, you are generating a new, autoreleased string in your +stringWithFormat: call, which has the inputField's stringValue as a sub-string. Now, leaving aside the actual implementation details of +stringWithFormat:, it's a given that it will somehow keep an immutable copy of any strings you pass into it. Otherwise, honestly, nothing in this damn system would work.

Less code is better if it's functionally the same, and the second implementation is absolutely no safer in any way. Even if you were, say, messing with multiple threads at some point, so the value of inputField could change during your action method, both implementations would be failures, so there's really no conceivable situation in which the second implementation is better.

Also, what's up with that blank line at the beginning of your methods? Seriously, that isn't helping anyone.

Finally, I should point out both implementations are really non-optimal in the post-10.3 world: what you should really do is bind the 'value' inputField to a new instance variable in your controller in Interface Builder (say, NSString *inputString;), and then bind outputField's 'value' to your controller with the path of, say, 'outputString', then write the following:

Solution 3: Bindings

+ (void)initialize; { [self setKeys:[NSArray arrayWithObject:@"inputString"] triggerChangeNotificationsForDependentKey:@"outputString"]; } - (NSString *)outputString; { return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ has %d letters.", inputString, [inputString length]]]; }

Admittedly, this isn't really less code, and in fact it change the semantics of your app: eg, it doesn't require you to send the action to populate the outputField. But bindings are generally the way you should code these days; if you find yourself using target/action, or otherwise manually pushing or pulling values to or from controls, think hard about using bindings instead.

Originally from Call Me Fishmeal., on March 26, 2006 09:09 PM

yatta posted a photo:

Photogs wait for their victims during a space rental @ Eyebeam 3/23/2006.

Originally from eyebeam - Everyone's Tagged Photos, on March 26, 2006 09:09 PM

Doesn't this say it all?
Photo Credit: SCHA-LA on LA Indymedia

Reports are 500,000 in today's Gran Marcha in Los Angeles to protest the Immigration bill! (LA Times headline is here.

Yes, it's spring. And the youth are getting restless.

Thank you to Sister Rosa for the Indymedia link.

Originally from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on March 26, 2006 09:09 PM

On our way to other things the Google Reader team decided to open up sharing of labels. Basically you can have a page in Reader that will splice together feeds you choose. Or it can splice just single posts or entries that you tag, er, label. That page also has a feed. There are a number of really interesting ways to use it, I think.

Clips

With sharing in Reader you can put a clip of items anywhere you control HTML. They can use a theme or have styles applied via CSS. The clip feature is popular. Some examples:

• Quantlogic
  
• Matt Deegan
• Philip's Photos
• Flower armor (Chinese?)
• Jeremie Berrebi
• daze fuze
• Presna-online
• the drowned man
  
• applied luck
  (the randomness of city living - it turns out we were at the same Frank Black show recently)

Starred items

You can also have a "starred items" page to show stuff you want to share with someone (or with everyone). Here's my starred items.

All about "you"

Another use I've been thinking of for shared Reader information is as additional profile data. I've styled a couple of Reader clips to show my recent recommendation and reading data on the about page for this blog.

Then there's my Me Roll. Feed services like ours owe a lot from others' pioneering of these uses (e.g. Feedburner's) and I've found using splicing for this kind of avatar-as-feed has been immediately gratifying. I am considering pointing my auto-discovery link to the feed for my "me" label instead of this blog's feed. There's a steadily increasing amount of feed-serving out there so features like this help push the barrier to splicing nice and low. I'm not entirely sure what belongs in a "me" feed, however. Flickr photos, sure. My moblog, yup. My normal blog, of course. But what about the comments feed on my Flickr photos? My del.icio.us feed? My upcoming.org feed? Hmm.

Oh, and "me roll"? Laurence coined that term and he's immensely proud of it since it's his favorite phrase ever and he claimed that people would build cities around it and has monogrammed it onto all of his v-neck cardigan sweaters which is his favorite type of clothing. (Entire sentence after "that term" is a lie.)

What should we call a "me" feed?

Some technical notes

For the Javascript-adept it might be interesting to note that we're delivering clips in Douglas Crockford's JSON format and using callback wrapping to work around the same-origin policy which hampers similar efforts via the XmlHttpRequest object. (It should just be named HttpRequest, shouldn't it true believers?) Want more information about it? Check out the writeup by Simon Willison about the excellent Yahoo! APIs which have JSON as an alternative output format.

For further reading: check out Mihai's post where he points out that we were very close to being syndication bozos by missing the highly appropriate source element in Atom. Can't remember if it was Ben or someone else standing over my shoulder pointing to the spec on my monitor as I muttered, "crap, we're idiots..."

What in the world is being referenced by the post title?

Originally from massless, on March 26, 2006 09:09 PM

The brain is incredible.  The human capacity for perception, reason, logic -- the sheer processing power inside our skulls -- is, well, mind-boggling.  But as incredible an organ as is the human brain, it is fallible.  Even the "geniuses" we'll hear from at TED2007 have imperfect brains.  Take, for example, human memory -- we all forget things.  Even Ken Jennings ultimately lost on Jeopardy (but, sadly, not until he had already dispensed with my brother Josh).

The certain fallibility of human memory has been the life's work of James McGaugh, a brain researcher at the University of California at Irvine.  Which is precisely why, according to a recent story on ABCNews.com, Dr. McGaugh is so intrigued by a woman called AJ who came to him seeking an explanation for her monumental recall.  For any given date over her lifetime, AJ can remember the day of the week, the weather, personal and historical events, you name it.  Her memory so exceeds that of any individual's memory documented to date, that AJ has left researchers stumped.  They have found no explanation for her incredible recall.  In hopes of better understanding AJ's database like brain, the UC Irvine researchers begin a comprehensive set of brain scans on AJ in the coming months.  I certainly look forward to reporting what the researchers discover.  That is, of course, if I can remember to check back on the story.

Originally posted by David Hornik from TED Blog, on March 26, 2006 09:08 PM

Visualization of Internet Ownership

From CIO: What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S. If you click on the map it will take you to much bigger version complete with labels that tell you the address of many of the routers.

Read the post at Blogs.CIO and download the Internet backbone map (PDF).

Originally posted by jesse from networked_performance, on March 26, 2006 09:05 PM

I have always been a great fan of Vim editor. The very same versatile editor created and maintained by Bram Moolenaar. Over a period of time, I have been so comfortable with using vim including its various enhancements over the original vi editor that I have made it the default editor for all the editing purposes - be it writing a letter, a document or for coding. But on hindsight, my attraction

Originally from All about Linux, on March 26, 2006 09:02 PM

Earlier this month I lamented that we didn’t have much of a process for donating computers to projects that are doing good things. We seem to be making some progress on that, for example the T2000-tryout program seems to be running a lot smoother. But that’s not all; for example, an X2100 showed up Friday on the doorstep of Nexenta, as in GNU/Solaris. I think that this kind of thing is a complete no-brainer and hope that we manage to do more of it.

Originally from ongoing, on March 26, 2006 08:59 PM

David says it's a great time to start a business, as long as you're not playing the Web 2.0 Lottery  

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on March 26, 2006 08:53 PM

I’m late to the party on this, but as one of its co-founders notes in passing, the photo sharing site Flickr is fast becoming an easy way to find photos of major protest events in wired urban areas. See for instance, protests this week against the CPE in Paris or the election in Belarus. See also this December 2005 story on MoveOn’s use of Flickr or the 1,430 photos tagged “RNC.”

If Web 2.0 is made of people, an easy use is a kind of grassroots media. Though the corporate-owners of such Web frameworks are certainly willing to take down images that “may offend” or hand over the goods on users. (via)

Originally from Social Design Notes, on March 26, 2006 08:53 PM

Cool new Matthew Barney trailer...

Originally from KALIBER10000, on March 26, 2006 08:52 PM

"No Cool Hunting. There is a terrible inclination only to report the things that are really, like, cool. But lots and lots of trends are not cool at all. They just happen to be a new building material. In my opinion, cool hunters are quilty of a fatal confusion between what they know about the world and what they wish to be true about themselves. They study novelty in order to make themselves more cool."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 26, 2006 08:50 PM

"FeedSpool, simplified syndication feed poller and spooler. The basic idea of FeedSpool is to handle many of the up-front details of syndication feed aggregation, while being as ignorant as possible about the feeds themselves."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 26, 2006 08:49 PM

"The feed filter that doesn't know much about feeds ... the main idea behind this feed filtering kit is that I'm not parsing and reconstituting feeds at the format level. Instead, I'm diving down to the XML level with SAX filters. Having finally realized the meaning of Must Ignore, this was a particularly interesting realization to me..."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 26, 2006 08:49 PM

A group of university researchers said that they had created cloned pigs that make their own omega-3 fatty acids.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 26, 2006 08:48 PM

The president and chief executive of Craigslist.org, Jim Buckmaster, ended up at the company after posting his résumé - where else? - on Craigslist.org.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 26, 2006 11:38 AM

It could be the single most incomprehensibly wrongheaded decision of the century: allowing cellphone use while in flight.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 26, 2006 11:38 AM

Twenty years after "She's Gotta Have It," Spike Lee, the onetime outsider, is a go-to director. It's time to give those early films a second look.

Originally from NYT > Arts, on March 26, 2006 11:36 AM

Al Jazeera, the most ambitious television network start-up in recent years, will launch an English-language offspring in late May.

Originally from NYT > Arts, on March 26, 2006 11:35 AM

In Austin, Tex., the five firefighters of Team C at Firehouse 2 now eat vegan.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 26, 2006 11:35 AM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 11:34 AM

EasyUbuntu is an easy to use script that gives the Ubuntu user the most commonly requested apps, codecs, and tweaks that are not found in the base distribution - all with a few clicks of your mouse.

Originally posted by finn from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 11:34 AM

quicktime 10.4........QTkit. Yep, i am back to the thing of trying to make a movie by scratch. I did this years ago blabla, but it was a crappy hack. now i am trying to do it again. YUCK!

Originally posted by cory_arcangel from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 11:34 AM

Originally posted by cshirky from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 03:04 AM

Originally posted by cshirky from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 03:04 AM

Originally posted by anselm from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 03:04 AM

"...being popular is a good thing" - jp

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 26, 2006 03:03 AM