Anyone sickened but not surprised? And just when I thought I’d kicked the habit.
So, has anything come out of Helix yet? I don’t necessarily want anything except a binary of a Helix DNA Client that doesn’t have annoying popups out the ying yang (yeah, I’m looking at you Real ONE)
Lisa’s been covering the burning of Baghdad’s National Library. It’s just… I dunno. I was sorta angry about this whole going to war thing, but I’ve been more sad, than anything else about everything since.
Gilliard wrote about this (chaos) earlier on the Daily Kos. Unfortunately, it seems that it continues… See also, Juxtapositions, and Perspectives:
In 47 B.C., Julius Caesar torched ships in the port of Alexandria, and fire spread to the Great Library (known contemporaneously as “the Museum”). Later on (391 A. D. ), “riots instigated by fanatical Christians damaged the collection heavily” And in 641 A.D. “the Caliph of Baghdad exhibited the same spirit of religious fanaticism” as the restored collection was burned to heat the public baths.
Few of us know the date (or even the century) offhand, fewer still could name the players or detail the political circumstances, much less care who won … but we remember and regret the event whereby civilization lost irreplaceable clues to where we came from and how we came to be.
Linux Media Jukebox on the Cheap – lots of good talk about pitfalls when building your own PVR.
Picked up the Saddle Creek 50 at the BE concert last week. Been listening to it a lot. 22 tracks by 11 artists (1 old, 1 new) on 2 CDs for $10. Good deal:
If you walk away, I’ll walk away
But first tell me which road you will take
I don’t want to risk our paths crossing some day
So you walk that way, I’ll walk this way
(was great live) – oh hey, Bright Eyes did Morning Becomes Eclectic (new songs, starting with One Foot In Front of the Other) last week – at the show Conor explains the whole guitar tuning, apparently he had the chance to take his guitar into the shop before the tour… but didn’t, and is currently regretting it.
OKI braindump
Charles Kern came to speak about Stanford CourseWork last week. Presentation slides are now online [not permalink, may eventually break]. Was a well put together slideshow, and the QA was useful. CourseWork isn’t OKI compliant and is of limited use moving forward, but it’s interesting seeing how they approached solving some of the problems. Future products look interesting.
- D-Lib Magazine: MIT DSpace: An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository
- OKI: Open Knowledge Initiative – latest specs published soon
- cetis: the centre for educational technology interoperability standards (British)
- Peter on eLearning – a good edublog
- Geometry.Net: Science: Knowledge Management
“Technorati” Sifry launches first Sputnik AP. What’s special about them? Oh, autoconfig w/ dynamic firewalling, SSL based user auth, usage tracking, and policy routing via central control, all based on open tech and way cheaper than other enterprise offerings. Good deal.
I think I’ve managed to kick the warblog habit. Am going to try to limit most future links specifically to civil rights issues. Of course, all the regular sources are still still more or less on my reading list:
- Daily Kos
- The Agonist
- Warblogs:cc
- Warblogging.com
- Reuters (Trust Principles)
- Google News: World
- Iraq-O-Meter
- Politech
- AlterNet
- FAIR
- Talking Points Memo
- Stand Down
- rc3.org
- Counterspin Central
- TBOGG
- The Scrum
- Hullabaloo
- IMC
- Cursor.org
- This Modern World
- Common Dreams
Hopefully to finish this week: better blogrolling.
UPX: the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables – good if you’re running on a quota or limited portable drive space