Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Building models

Great Buildings
Free 3d models of buildings from around the world.

LinkDump

Microsoft Fears Firefox, Lawsuits Over Bugs, SEC Filing Shows (TechWeb)
Disposable credit card? That'll do nicely
On blocking Chinese IP addresses
Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle
9 Weeks to Pump Out New Orleans?
Scientist Says Most Scientific Papers Are Wrong
Review of Pocketlinux (31 Aug 2005)
A Good Use for an Aging Linux Machine (31 Aug 2005)
Daily Links for 2005-08-30
Pandora Music Engine comes out of private beta
The Onion redesigns, opens complete archives to all
Lego Factory
NYT on Flying Spaghetti Monster
A judicial answer to the RIAA

Friday, August 26, 2005

BBC - On This Day
1959: US to 'stand by' West Germans
America will stand by West Germans in their efforts to remain strong and free, the US President pledges.
1975: Rhodesia peace talks fail
Talks between the Rhodesian Government and the African National Council collapse acrimoniously.
1985: Budd smashes 5,000m record
Controversial athlete Zola Budd breaks the world 5,000m record.
1994: Man gets 'bionic' heart
A man is given the world's first battery-operated heart in a pioneering operation in Britain.
1962: Abortion mother returns home
An American mother-of-four is on her way home amid a storm of controversy after having an abortion in Sweden.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

LinkDump

Scientists Present Rare Woodpecker Audio (AP)
Beyond CRM: Managing the Customer Experience (NewsFactor)
Public unaware of RSS
Robot Bat With Echolocation
AOL Fined for Making it Hard to Cancel Service
Laser Cannons Coming to an F-16 Near You
Enlightenment DR17 On the Linux Desktop
My Text Problem (24 Aug 2005)
Playing a Platinum Record
Is MySpace deliberately ugly?
Trackback: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Quake 3 source code released

Man 1 Bank 0

LinkDump

World running out of time for oil alternatives (Reuters)
Japanese House-Sitter Robot Hits Stores (AP)
US tops poll of spyware purveyors
Ministers confront reality of climate change
Legal disassembly
Intel ready to begin Phase II of losing propaganda offensive
MS Speaks Out Against New Zealand's Anti Spam Bill
Unix Weblog Hacks (23 Aug 2005)
New user experience with Linux (18 Aug 2005)
KNemo: Network Monitor for KDE (17 Aug 2005)
VB developers embrace linux... say what??? (16 Aug 2005)
So many clueless people...
Finding needles in the growing Blog Haystack?

Friday, August 19, 2005

On This Day

BBC - On This Day
1987: Gunman kills 14 in Hungerford rampage
A man shoots 14 people dead in the Berkshire town of Hungerford.
1991: Hardliners stage coup against Gorbachev
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is overthrown in a coup as Communist hardliners take over.
2003: UN envoy dies in Baghdad bombing
A massive bomb wrecks the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing at least 17 people including the UN's chief envoy to Iraq.
1942: Allies launch daring raid on Dieppe
Allied troops, mainly Canadian, pull back after nine hours of heavy fighting on the French coast at Dieppe, northwest of Paris.
1960: Moscow jails American U-2 spy pilot
The United States pilot, Francis Gary Powers, is sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Soviet military court.
1975: Davis campaigners stop Test match
Campaigners calling for the release of robber George Davis from prison vandalise the pitch at Headingley cricket ground in Leeds.

Friday, August 12, 2005

LinkDump

Spacecraft Blasts Off to Gather Mars Data (AP)
Sun to shed around 1,000 jobs
Wide open Vistas beckon for Microsoft in Germany
Scientists blame balloons for climate change debate
Gov.UK preps ID card contracts
Scottish Police Revert to Microsoft Office
Siberian Permafrost Melting
Talking about KDE 4
Advanced PHP V5 objects
Object Oriented PHP Programming

BBC - On This Day
1985: Hundreds dead in Boeing crash
A Japan Airlines jumbo jet crashes on a remote mountainside 70 miles from Tokyo in Japan.
1969: Police use tear gas in Bogside
The Royal Ulster Constabulary uses tear gas for the first time in its history afternine hours of rioting in the Bogside area of Londonderry.
1964: Great Train Robber escapes from jail
A massive manhunt is underway across Britain after one of the gang involved in the Great Train Robbery breaks out of a high-security prison in Birmingham.
2003: Gilligan: language 'wasn't perfect'
BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan answers questions from the Hutton Inquiry over his report that the government "sexed up"a weapons dossier on Iraq.
2000: Murdered schoolgirl's life celebrated
The family of murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne is joined by friends and hundreds of members of the public for a memorial service.
1990: Briton shot by Iraqis
A British man attempting to escape in a convoy from Iraqi-occupied Kuwait is shot by Iraqi soldiers.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Desktop BSD
A BSD flavour aimed at the desktop.

LinkDump

Microsoft Trying to Fix Security Hole (AP)
AOL raffles spammer's gold bars
Six patches - three critical - in MS August patch batch
Linux-head runs Doom on iPod
Moody Non-Photo-Realistic Driving
Linux Kernel Code May Have Been in SCO UnixWare
Backups using hardlinks and rsync

Monday, August 08, 2005

Rocket to nowhere
a critique of the shuttle program

Lots of samples
100,000 bouncy balls

LinkDump

Weather Forces Discovery to Delay Landing (AP)
NASA Readies Next Mars Mission (AP)
Internet Scammers Keep Working in Nigeria (AP)
Public sector e-biz push threatens small firms
UK firm offers legal video downloads
March of the Penguins Tops Box Offices
When Microbes Ate the Ocean
Google Urged to Drop Images
Remote Backups With Rsync
Server Setup with Mandrake/Mandriva
In Pursuit of Good Desktop Linux
Making Firefox Handle Multiline Pasted (
Silicon Valley Real Estate is Crazy

Netcraft survey is 10 years old this month
There are now 70 million hostnames

Friday, August 05, 2005

BBC - On This Day
1973: Athens attack leaves three dead
Three people are killed and 55 wounded when two Arab gunmen open fire on a crowded passenger lounge at Athens airport.
1962: Marilyn Monroe found dead
Film actress Marilyn Monroe is found dead in her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets by her side.
1983: IRA members jailed for 4,000 years
Twenty two members of the IRA are jailed for a total of more than 4,000 years following one of Northern Ireland's biggest mass trials.
1991: Toddler 'poorly' after dog attack
A two-year-old girl is recovering in hospital after being savaged by a Rottweiler dog.
1975: Deadly tree disease spreads
Dutch elm disease, which has so far attacked more than three million trees in Britain, is spreading, according to Forestry Commission officials.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Symphony OS
A Linux distro with a new desktop GUI called Mezzo

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Getting the monkey off Darwin's Back
Sceptical Enquirer looks at the common myths about evolution.

James Randi Encyclopedia

James Randi has put the entire debunking Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural online.

Remembering punch cards

How many punch cards would it take to read a 3 minute MP3? The answer is 40,960 punch cards , requiring a 228 cards per second throughput.

Flickr Explore

Flickr has just gotten a heck of lot more interesting with Flickr Explore and interesting photos in the last 24 hours and clustering of tags.

Monday, August 01, 2005

My grandfather - the Nazi

BBC article about Dan Tetsell, a British citizen, who discovered that his grandfather was in Hitler's SS in the second world war. But his grandfather wasnt your common bureaucratic Nazi type sitting behind a desk - he was in the elite of elite SS regiments - the Liebstandarte

Dan Tetsell's show Sins of the Grandfathers will be running at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 4-28 August.

The most compelling quote for me in the article is this one, where Dan Tetsell says:

"If it shows that my grandfather can not only stand aside while bad things happen but actively take part, then it could happen to any of us. It's a lesson that's been taught again and again, but in this anniversary year it's worth hearing again."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Google - embrace the bleeding edge

The lead engineer for Google maps has urged fellow Web developers to abandon the lowest-common denominator approach to Web application design.

Daniel Burka on the digg.com redesign
Wired: Hacking a Hotel room TV

LinkDump

Discovery May Need Unprecedented Repair (AP)
Study: Warming Making Hurricanes Stronger (AP)
Yahoo to Partner With CNN, ABC for Video (AP)
Al Gore Debuting TV for Web Generation (AP)
Microsoft blogger: 'My toolbar vanished too!'
British Intel Shuts Down al-Qaeda Sites
Stealing Data? A Sniffer Shows it's Easy
Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents