My Unix experiences started with Unix V on a DEC Vax system in the early 1980s.Wish I’d done a better job of maintaining and extending those early skills.
Here. An amazing timeline!
Month: June 2004
Another one of the Things the Web Is Great For
Another great thing, of course, is all those clever folks helping you find things worth knowing about. Thank you AKMA for another resource I didn’t know about.
One of the Things the Web Is Great For.
I like online dictionaries, since much of the information I seek in a dictionary appears only in the heaviest, bulkiest, least portable and convenient sources. I d long relied on Dictionary.com, but if you have the bandwidth, Webster s Online tops everything else I ve seen.
Of course, if you just want the correct spelling or a simple definition, there s no need to call up all the overhead from Webster s. Webster s is for browsing and reveling more than elegant simplicity (though there must be a way of making the output from Webster s more elegant, without aggravating its bandwidth load).
Monkeying Around With Text
Looks like a useful addition to the toolkit.
Monkeying Around With Text. Courtesy of my friend Marjolein, the ActiveWords queen, here’s a wonderful little tool that saves more time than you can hope for: TextMonkey, from Boxer Software.TextMonkey strips away all the formatting rubbish that accrues when you move something from an… [LOOSE wire]
The truth about RFPs
I spend way too much time in conversations like these.
Responding to RFPs.
Very very funny :o)
“So, let s say I build houses and someone says.. Hey, wanna come and build me a house?
I say Damn Straight Brother what do you need?
They say Well, I really want blue walls how much will that cost?
I say Hmm.. well, I need to know more about the house you need how many floors, how big, will you need a basement? How many doors?
They say Well, you should know that s not important. What I really need is wood shingles. Now knowing what you know how much will the house cost? And don t try to screw me because I m going to hold you to it and I also have 50 other house builders bidding for the work
I say Um let s go with $250,000
They say Wow, that s a lot. Could you justify that based on my requirements?
I say Well, it s the blue paint that made all the difference… [Joel from Canada via SoulSoup]
The Personal Petabyte, The Exnterprise Exabyte from Jim Gray
This is a big powerpoint file. On the other, and more important, hand it contains some fascinating ruminations about what some key trends in performance improvement in storage technology and network speeds portend for us as knowledge workers and inhabitants of a digital world. Jim Gray is one of the supersmart folks at Microsoft Research who is thinking a few years out about the world we will all be inhabiting soon. Worth the time to look at and think about.
Jim Gray: The Personal Petabyte, The Exnterprise Exabyte (PowerPoint). [Hack the Planet]
Dropping the Register from my subscriptions
I agree, I’ve just unsubscribed from the Register feed as well. Besides finding little worth reading there, I find a headline only feed to be pretty useless anyway
Harvard man loses 3,000 weblogs | The Register. Dave Winer popularized Netscape’s RDF syndication format, which has since splintered into nine incompatible formats.
This is just troll bait.
I’m unsubscribing to the register. The news there has gone tabloid. Obliviously they’re after traffic for ads. Wankers.
[Steve Hooker: cyberSaps business]
Listen to the sound of the Universe on your iPod
I’ve downloaded the mp3s, but they haven’t made it to my iPod quite yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Listen to the sound of the Universe on your iPod.
The New York Times had a great story about Dr. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia who has taken the cosmic background radiation of the universe and made a series of sounds.
For the first 400,000 years, Dr. Whittle said, it sounds like a descending scream falling into a dull roar.
So of course the first thing we did was google him, find the site and turn the .WAV files in to MP3s for our iPods!
Right click / option click this link to download a zip file of the 13 sounds we also combined them all in to one MP3 which is in the zip as well.
If you d like to read more about Dr. Mark Whittle s work visit his site, there are a lot of presentations and information regarding Big Bang Acoustics.
[Engadget]
Google is your friend
Thanks again to Jenny for finding something to brighten my day.
“Google is your friend. All smart people use Google. You appear to not be one of them.” [via MetaFilter]
Installing mod_python
I have a feeling I’m going to need this before too long.
Installing mod_python. If you’ve been wondering (like me) how to run Python programs efficiently under Apache, here’s an article on installing mod_python. [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]
Congratulations Alan!
Congratulations indeed! I used to wish that Alan would publish more, but I finally realized that Alan’s choice was an engineer’s choice to build stuff because it was interesting and not worry about where the credit fell. Nice to know that nice guys practicing old fashioned ways can still win after all.
Congratulations to Alan Kay for winning 2004 Kyoto Prize in addition to the ACM Turing Prize and the NAE Draper Prize earlier. He’s really “cleaning up” this year. This is cool. He deserves it.
Hope this helps the Squeak project too!
By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito’s Web]