Posts filed under 'Notes'
Serendipity User Survey
We have reached the first milestone of the Season of Usability project I’m participating in: the Serendipity user survey is now online. If you’re a Serendipity user, please participate! It’ll no doubt help us improve your blogging experience.
Net neutrality survives
Companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Comcast spent more than $150 million to push Congress to gut Net Neutrality. But in the end, they couldn’t overcome widespread public opposition. Net neutrality survives, for now.
The World Challenge 2006 Winner
The Word Challenge 2006 winner has been chosen, and it’s none other than Maximus, the Sri Lankan papermaking firm that makes high-quality products from a variety of wastes, including paper from offices and bark from banana trees, and most interestingly, elephant dung.
Nidahas is back
I’ve had a nightmarish experience with my earlier web host, Page-Zone.com. They seem to be going through a Dreamhost period, but three weeks without any response to the numerous support tickets was a bit too frustrating at the end. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix things soon for their existing customers. As for me, I’ve moved elsewhere.
Thank you Google
Google SoC has come to an end. This is not my official thank you note - that’ll come in a later, longer post. This is a pointer to the Thank you Google image created by Manu Cornet.
I was overjoyed to see the blue-green padma of this site, used as my avatar, all over the place - apparently it was a good source for creating the blue letters.
A pale blue dot
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
OpenDarwin not open anymore
The project to build a free (as in freedom) Mac-like OS is dead. The team says it has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on
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The reasons?
Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this.
I don’t know what commitment was there from Apple when the project was initiated, but they don’t look like a company who want to share information, let alone source code. As far as I know, Apple representatives speak in legalese, not the ideal way to communicate with hackers. No wonder the community was not interested.
But above all, OpenDarwin was destined to fail because it was trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist. The Cult of Mac is not searching for a way out of Apple’s tight grip. They just want more ways to play with the system. John Gruber speaks for many of them when he says:
I don’t want the source code to their software; I just want to be able to script the hell out of it.
“Come September” - Arundhati Roy
Not many of our generation know the history of the Palestinian/Israel conflict. Not many of us understand the hidden agendas. Of those who know and understand, not many have the eloquence of Arundhati Roy.
September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles.)
How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.
ApacheCon Asia in Colombo
ApacheCon Asia is the first ever Asian offering of the popular ApacheCon Conference of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). ApacheCon Asia provides an excellent opportunity to experience first-hand what ASF technologies and development communities can do for you and your enterprise. Priced at a very affordable level, the conference will be held in Colombo, Sri Lanka from August 14th to 17th at the Trans Asia Hotel. See ApacheCon Asia website for further details.
General Killed
Major General Parami Kulatunga, the third-highest ranking officer in the Sri Lankan army and a veteran of the civil war, was killed in a bomb blast by the LTTE.
Indi has a brilliant post that sums up the situation in this country (and elsewhere) really well.
