Gulfstream

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-10sysadtips/
Pretty good set of 10 Linux sysadmin tips, if you’re into that sort of thing. 07:50

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7493076.stm Profile of a Cambodian marathon runner who lives on $50 a month, from a nice series of profiles of athletes “heading to the Olympics despite huge obstacles.” As the BBC is wont to do, though, the voice-over translation sounds like it was done by an earnest child striving mightily vary his pitch (see the passage beginning at 1:30), which endas up being quite belittling. (For better of for worse they do this pretty consistently to anyone that isn’t a statesman or famous—it’s not a developing country bias.) [text, video] 07:48

http://www.vimeo.com/1213401 Surprisingly compelling mini documentary about Martin the Tailor, a guy who came to the states after being in a concentration camp in World War 2, now owner a garment factory (and suit-maker for Bill Clinton). Very well put together, and looks nice on Vimeo as well. 07:22

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-
a8a0-945d1deb420b Negative, rather political review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: “But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. … Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was—guess what?—part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly.” 22:59

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html “Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.” 22:54

http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2008/07/21/firefox-surpasses-
50-market-share-in-indonesia/ According to one measure, Firefox has just hit 50% market share in Indonesia, with Finland, Slovenia and Poland close behind. (I couldn’t find the data on the linked site.) 22:34

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fciD_II7NI Feist on Sesame Street! “I love counting ... counting to the number four.” 10:13

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html Y Combinator’s “Ideas We’d Like to Fund.” Some great stuff here. “25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it’s a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.” 20:59

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/us/19exclude.html Is suppressing evidence the best remedy for police (or procedural) misconduct? The US is pretty much unique in this regard. 20:03

http://madeinqueensfilm.com/ A documentary about the Trinidians from Queens who mod their bikes with thousand-dollar stereos. (NY Times story from last year.) 19:50

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7513571.stm Brother Cesare is a 62-year-old Capuchin monk who is the lead singer of an Italian heavy metal band (with video). 12:28

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly “In architecture, a folly is a building constructed strictly as a decoration…” 18:23

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16dowd.html “May We Mock, Barack?” Maureen Down thinks Obama is too earnest. Also, once upon a time comedians did have jokes about Obama. Dowd: “It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys.” Stewart: “Are you kidding me?” Stewart, Colbert together: “His dad was a goat-herder!” 09:04

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7510423.stm The Betancourt rescuers not only posed as aid workers, but at least one wore a Red Cross logo. I don’t know why aid organisations weren’t more critical of this, since it directly jeopardises their work. (As well as being a pretty shifty thing to do.) 22:34

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-
google-ranking.html Some of the ways in which Google disambiguates queries, so that it can return what it thinks you want, instead of what you said you wanted. I actually wish Google would do less of this, or would at least tell you when the results are very sensitive to location or term order, etc. (The did you mean... system is fine.) A few years ago Google decided that the order of search terms was meaningful, and so now I sometimes enter various permutations of the same terms if it seems like Google is getting confused. I’d rather not have to run the same search across different versions of Google. Coincidentally, I discovered today that Google Maps reckons the Natural History Museum is on Park Avenue (about a mile away from where it should be). 22:13

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24022623-
601,00.html The Pope substitutes u for you in a text message (his first?) to World Youth Day pilgrims. (It’s otherwise proper English.) 16:50

http://furbo.org/2008/07/14/bugging/ The only way iPhone-owning non-developers can get applications onto their iPhone is via Apple’s App Store, which makes it difficult for developers to distribute beta versions, or get users to run special debug builds of their software. 09:49

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_
id=11670357 How true is this? (On oil price speculators:) “since no oil is ever held back from the market, these bets do not affect the price of oil any more than bets on a football match affect the result.” 16:41

http://www.snopes.com/sports/soccer/barbados.asp The consequences of a rule that victory in overtime would be counted as a 2–0 result, and Barbados needing to win by two goals to advance to the final of the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup: Barbados, winning 2–1, score an own goal to force overtime, leaving Grenada a frenzied few minutes to score at either end. They fail, and Barbados duly win via a golden goal in extra time. 12:12

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/07/table-of-contents-
creative-and-beautiful-examples/ Smashing Magazine puts together some quite extraordinary spreads on design. (Mostly web design—this on, on tables of contents, is a bit of an exception.) Example after example, and not much text. I don’t know how they come up with so many good examples several times a week. 21:38

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/07/2008070201c.htm “I never would have made it this far in graduate school without the aid of marijuana.” 21:34

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/07/07/iphone-
3g-prices-and-plans-for-21-countries Prices for the iPhone 3G across different markets. Customers in some countries seem to be ripped off, but you can’t really tell without knowing how much the networks paid for 3G spectrum in the first place. I don’t know what percentage of operating costs goes toward paying for spectrum, but in some countries this must be significant: in 2000 in the UK, for example, five bidders bought 3G spectrum for a combined £22.5bn. 16:43

http://marriedtothesea.com/051508/survival-of-the-spitefullest.gif Mammoth vs. human vs. wikipedia. A strange cartoon thing. [pic] Update Someone has edited Wikipedia. Awesome. 15:55

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-comes-next-in-
this-series-13-33-53.html Until today, Google’s homepage hasn’t had a link to their privacy policy. (I can’t remember where I read this but I think their argument was that more links hurt the user experience, and that if you want it you can Google for it.) Privacy groups have been complaining about this however, and according to this Marissa Mayer blog post, Sergey and Larry finally agreed that the homepage could link to the privacy policy—but only if the total word count didn’t change. So they took away the word “Google” from the footer and replaced it with a link to the privacy policy. (Includes the story about the angry user who sent mysterious emails consisting of a single number (the number of words on the homepage) to Google every time it changed.) 22:46

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/man_on_the_moon_
future_and_pas.html Thirty-year old pictures from the moon, and pictures of vehicles being tested for future missions. (Is driving on the Moon really that different that you need funny looking/complicated 6-wheeled vehicles where every wheel can turn independently? Make it small and light and lift it (1/6th gravity) if it gets stuck.) 08:57

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7469398.stm WWE Wrestler Kofi Kingston is ostensibly Jamaican but actually comes from a family of Ghanaian intellectuals. A family friend: “Why would a person who is very capable of going to graduate school decide to jettison all that for concussion in the face?” 11:24

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-
crawl-flash.html Google reckons they can now index (some) Flash. Any examples of this? 07:25