The passionates vs. the non-passionates by
Robert Scoble. Great article on what makes a successful company and how to get new users for your products, whether that be a blog or a piece of software or something else entirely. The descriptions of “non-passionates” rings very true with me.
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Kingston is selling a
bunch of flash drives for pretty cheap with free shipping. This is a great opportunity for new students to grab a flash drive if you haven’t yet. They come in very handy if you’re using public computers at school. I know I never leave home without mine! Just ask Sadie :-p
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22nd Aug 2008
I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look.
In traditional Lifehacker style, I’ll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat and MusicTracker (displays currently playing song in my away message) plugins. I’m using 3 Screenlets: Now Playing (displays currently playing track and album art), Sysmonitor (displays current system information) and Trash. Finally, it shows one of my new favorite productivity applications: Gnome Do. “Do” is a launcher that can be extended by a number of plugins. For example, you type Super(Win)+Space to launch Do and then start typing what you want to do. Start typing an artist’s name, like “beat”, and then pressing “enter” will open all my Beatles songs in Rhythmbox. Typing the first few letters of a friend’s screen name and then “enter” will open a chat with them in Pidgin. Those types of things are useful. Oh, and I got my wallpaper from iunewind.com.
My August 08 Desktop featuring Avant, Pidgin, Now Playing Screenlet, Sysmonitor Screenlet, and Gnome-Do
Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.
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14th Aug 2008
A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson’s easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to come by. This technique was developed for ALS, and it’s been applied to 10 new diseases.
The full list of diseases represented: adenosine deaminase deficiency-related severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome (SBDS), Gaucher disease (GD) type III, Duchenne (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD), Parkinson disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), juvenile-onset, type 1 diabetes mellitus (JDM), Down syndrome (DS)/trisomy 21, and the carrier state of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.
Sound like a list of diseases we studied in class, anyone?
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A comment on
Mark Pilgrim’s
Hello Darkness My Old Friend:
“No one cares about freedoms for the same reason that no one cares about oxygen. As long as they’re there, why bother? Freedom zero is so abstract to most people that no one even thinks about it, let alone care. It’s like the string theory. It’s only when things are taken away that there’s reason to get upset.” -Jesper
For those who are unfamiliar, Freedom 0 is one of four freedoms listed in the
Free Software Definition:
“The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.”
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12th Aug 2008
So I went to check out the replay of last night’s phenomenal 4×100 Men’s relay only to find an annoyingly disturbing message: the NBC Olympics vidoes don’t “support” Linux. First of all, what kind of ludicrous claim is that? They’re freakin’ videos. If I’ve got the correct codecs installed, then I’ll be able to watch them. If I don’t, then I won’t. And what is this? 1998? Who still designs a website for only a select few browsers? I know I reported that the FAFSA website does, but at least theirs turned out to be just a warning, and it lets you continue anyways. Shouldn’t something like coverage of the Olympics be accessible to anyone, especially since broadcast coverage seems so locked down? They currently support 4 browsers: IE (Win), Firefox (Win), Safari (Mac), and Firefox (Mac). Sorry Opera fans, you’re not privileged enough to see the Olympics online.
NBC Olympics only allows 4 browsers
The bigger issue here is that the videos appear to be in Windows Media format. In fact, from the looks of the
NBC Olympics website, the entire show is being run by Microsoft. Now my problem is that I can probably play their WMVs on my linux operating system, but their silly browser detection is preventing me. Things like this should not be happening to such an international public event.
Sorry to say NBC, but there are a lot of web browsers out there that are capable of displaying your videos. No one’s asking you to go out of your way to “support” them all, just don’t preemptively block them. Plus, is anyone else concerned that they’ll start doing this to Hulu and other network’s sites? Well I am, and I’m not one bit happy about it!
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11th Aug 2008
Harvard made a great video called The Inner Life of a Cell a couple of years ago using some great computer graphics [hat tip Sadie]. It tells a brief story of the mechanism of inflammation being activated in a leukocyte. It was put to some great music by Studio Daily. I highly recommend you check it out.
If you’re wondering what all that stuff is, you can check out one of Harvard’s versions, which contain a play-by-play. I must admit that (having no real idea of what I was looking at) I got a little bit lost in the video, so Harvard’s version definitely helped clear up a few things. But Sadie and I agree that it’s pretty cool that we can watch a video like that and actually mostly understand it. After spending years studying something like bio, you forget how much you know about it that the average Joe has never even considered.
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