Topics on my particular interests.
I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my main system over the weekend (I’m preparing a blog entry about it now). I’d hoped to try it out on the Eee system first, but that hadn’t been possible yet. The Ubuntu-Eee project finally posted a Release Candidate for the 8.04 upgrade a week ago yesterday, on the second. …
This New York Times article suggests that longevity drugs might be not only possible, but developed fairly soon. As I’ve heard that there are already more humans alive right now than have died in all of history combined, that suggests some interesting and disturbing things… I want to live a good long time as much …
Continue reading ‘“New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging”’ »
We humans think that we’re the be-all and end-all of evolution… that our bodies are mere support systems for our brains. Maybe we’re right, but some fascinating recent experiments suggest that we’ve survived despite our intelligence, not necessarily because of it.
More information on NASA’s temperature data, and why it points to a major global warming trend despite the Earth actually being in a twenty-year-long “cooling period.”
This article clarifies a few things that I’ve subconsciously noticed myself — for instance, when you have a function in your program that does more than it should, it becomes hard to succinctly and concisely name it. It also introduces the “three numbers in software” (zero, one, and infinity), and the phrase “inheriting from the …
Continue reading ‘“When code goes bad: What to watch for”’ »
And again, life imitates art — in this case, the horse-racing game in the men’s bathroom in one of the Austin Powers movies, which was controlled by the “flow” of those standing at the urinals below it. Gotta love technology… and admire the business sense of the two guys who created it.
The people at Mozilla have come up with a neat idea for Firefox 3: they’re trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most-downloaded program in a twenty-four hour period, on an as-yet-undecided day next month. To see a breakdown (by country) of how many people have pledged to do, or to pledge to …
Continue reading ‘Firefox’s Download Day 2008: Help Set a Guinness World Record!’ »
(For the unenlightened out there, IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a program that usually includes a text editor specifically geared toward program source code, an integrated project manager to keep track of what files are part of your program, some kind of parser for error messages from your compiler, easy ways to call up …
(I’ve been too busy over the past couple weeks to keep up with low-priority things, so now that I’ve finished part of a project, I’m playing catch-up.) One of the things that I like about Paul Graham’s essays is that they’re always thought-provoking. This one is no exception, and I recommend that anyone who has …
An interesting view of why Microsoft now says it’s going to add Open Document Format support to Office. I’m not sure I believe it though… Microsoft has a very long history of being less than truthful about why it’s doing things.