Technology

Lars Wirzenius’ Linux Anecdotes:

In January, Linus bought a PC. He’d been using a Sinclair QL before that, which, like much British computer stuff, was ingenious and almost unusably different from everything else.

Holy smokes. As Dell’s sales slump and stock remains flat, the famously unimaginative company is trying to tap into the Mob for ideas about what new shade of grey to deliver its hardware in next. And what did the Dell IdeaStorm mob say?

“Give us Linux!”

“Give Us OpenOffice.”

And how did Dell respond?

“No. No. And, No.”

John Naughton reports on the story for The Guardian, explaining:

more than 85,000 people took the trouble to register with IdeaStorm in order to tell Mr Dell that they wanted him to ship his computers with Linux pre-installed. Moreover, 55,000 revealed that they would like the free open-source office software suite, OpenOffice, pre-installed on their shiny new Dell machines.

And all Michael Dell could say was that there are too many variants of Linux. Of course that doesn’t explain why the company, who’s biggest contribution to the technology world was an online store that allowed customers to chose computer configurations from a dizzying array of options, doesn’t simply allow customers to buy their PCs with no software at all.

Middlebury College is proud to have taken a stand against Wikipedia this year:

Members of the Vermont institution’s history department voted unanimously in January to adopt the statement, which bans students from citing the open-source encyclopedia in essays and examinations.

Without entirely dismissing Wikipedia — “whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful…” — the decision paints it with a broad brush — “as educators, we are in the business of reducing the dissemination of misinformation.” (Though a site search reveals it’s frequently cited there.)

Chandler Koglmeier’s op-ed response in the student newspaper, however, was rather pointed:

[Professor Waters’ states that] “the articles can improve over time, but there’s always an [emphasis on] change rather than something finalized.” I wasn’t aware that knowledge was a static thing. […] I think you should talk to our nation’s medical schools. They seem to have advanced beyond the world of Hippocrates and the Greek doctors in the past few years and might be teaching something that is dangerous.

Intrigue, indeed. My question is how will Middlebury students be taught to evaluate their information sources after they leave college? Who will tell them what to trust then?

Apple’s WWAN Support Update 1.0 brings support for the following new cell carrier-based based networking cards (WWAN = wireless wide-area networking):

• Available on the Cingular network
  • Novatel Merlin XU870 ExpressCard (HSDPA)
• Available on the Sprint network
  • Novatel Wireless Merlin EX720 Express Card (EVDO Rev. A)
  • Novatel Wireless Ovation U720 USB Modem (USB Adapter, EVDO Rev. A)
• Available on the Verizon network
  • Novatel XV620 ExpressCard (EVDO Rev. 0)
  • Novatel V740 ExpressCard (EVDO Rev. A)
  • Novatel Wireless Ovation U720 (USB Adapter, EVDO Rev. A)

I’m only about six months in to a 2 year contract for Verizon V640 EVDO Card, so I’ll have to wait to take advantage of the Rev A speeds. I could buy a shiny new card for a few hundred bucks, but I’m saving it for an iPhone, of course. Besides, My little old V640 still rocks on the train and is often faster than a hotel’s service in some cities (though the capped upload speeds are frustrating).

Back in August Educated Nation offered the following top ten list of web tools for college students:

• Writely
• Soundslides
• Bluedot.Us
• eFax
• PDF Online
• Google Calendar
• Google Spreadsheets
• Bloglines
• Technorati
• mynoteIT

Not to be outdone, an anonymous-but-first-person story at Nextstudent identifies their top ten:

• Book Finder
• MynoteIT
• Ottobib
• Google Docs
• Tada List
• Meebo
• Wikipedia
• Zoho Show
• Google Reader
• Del.icio.us

Kansas State University‘s Digital Ethnography group — “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography” — posted this visual explanation of Web 2.0. It’s by Michael Wesh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and it rocks.

Text is unilinear…when written on paper.

Digital text is different.

Hypertext can link.

With form seperated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web.

Who will organize all of this data? We will. You will.

Digital text is not longer just linking information…Web 2.0 is linking people…people sharing, trading, and collaborating.

We’ll need to rethink a few things…

Thanks to the Google Operating System blog for bringing this to my attention.

Ecto is finally available in Intel optimized form, but WP 2.1‘s XMLRPC breaks it. Cliffy, of all people, tells us how to fix it.

Now, when is Ecto 3 coming out?

Aside: this blog post explains how to hack up the XMLRPC to extract the tags Ecto is sending. This was interesting to me a long time ago, but bsuite handles tags entirely in the post content.

Does open source free your budget up for the best talent?

I asked her if the choice to go with open source is helping her to keep costs in check, here’s what [Dabble CEO Mary Hodder] said:

What happens with open source is you actually spend the same amount of money, but you don’t have lock-in and you pay for really good people to run it. And so you still end up paying. But you just pay in a different place. And I think it’s a much more sustainable model for that kind of server/software development.

Found in south by southwest festivals + conferences

I’m lazy, that’s all I can say to explain why I hadn’t put any serious thought into upgrading from the 1.3.x version of Apache that ships with Mac OS X to the much more feature rich 2.0.x or 2.2.x. But today I found reason enough to switch my development to 2.2.3, and I went looking to the community for information about the switch.

A post in Marc Liyanage’s forums made it clear how easy config/compile was. Minutes later I was up and running and fiddling with the new features.

Ryan Boren wrote about using memcached with WordPress almost a year ago:

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. WordPress 2.0 can make use of memcached by dropping in a special backend for the WP object cache. The memcached backend replaces the default backend and directs all cache requests to one or more memcached daemons. You must have a memcached daemon running somewhere for this to work. Unless you’re managing the server on which your blog is running, you probably can’t run a memcached daemon, making this backend useless to you. The memcached backend is targeted at ISPs and those running WPMU. If you are using WPMU and distributing DB requests across multiple servers, memcached will come in very handy. Using memcached for a single blog isn’t really worth it. In my tests, it was sometimes slower than using the default object cache backend.

The plugin is here, a bug-fix note is here.

I’ve been following WP2.1 development, but Aaron Brazell’s post in the development blog wrapped up a lot of questions all at once.

The short story is that 2.1 is going to bring some really good changes that will allow more flexibility and better optimization of WPopac. Of the four changes Brazell names, the last two, the addition of the post_type column and a change in usage of the post_status column, are where the money is.

I’m awaiting the final release of 2.1 before building the necessary changes into WPopac, but the benefits will be worth it.

Perhaps it’s just because I’m in the air again today, but I’m fascinated by Aaron Koblin‘s animation of aircraft activity, illustrating the pulsing, throbbing movements of aircraft over North America. Nah, this is hot. You’ll love it too.

Also worth checking out: Koblin’s other works.

It’s old news (Boing Boing and Slashdot covered it a month ago), but Flickr’s patent application is a bit troublesome. It’s not that they’re trying to patent tagging (they’re not), it’s that they’re trying to patent the things library folks have been wanting to do (and in some cases actually doing) for some time.

Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as ”interestingness.“ These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

See, interestingness is what you get when you link two or more metrics — think $interestingness = ($circulation * $comments * $rating); — together to get a number you can rank items by. I’d been playing with that sort of thing with bsuite, does that mean I might be subject to a lawsuit?

Via a friend who coordinated a program I presented at not long ago I received this message about difficulty accessing my blog post with notes from the presentation:

Do you have the notes electronically that you could send? Believe it or not our federal government internet filter is blocking access to the blog site below…..big brother is truly at work these days…..

Jessamyn has been dealing with this for a while now, but this is the first I’d learned that I’d been blocked.

It’s good to know that my site has joined the ranks of those like Jessamyn’s and MySpace and probably thousands (millions?) of others that are blocked but shouldn’t be. Thinking of that, I wanted to find a list of those websites, but Google came up short. Any suggestions?

What I did find, however, amused me: <a href=“http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_connect_to_myspace_at_school.html” title=““How can I connect to MySpace at school?” from the Ask Dave Taylor! Tech Support Blog”>How can I connect to MySpace at school?, What are YOU looking at?, and Elementary Student Threatened With Psychiatric Evaluation After Visiting 9/11 Websites.