Google Earth beta released

Slashdot mention that Google Earth has been released to Keyhole subscribers.

Linkdump

A Gamers Manifesto
20 suggestions on how to improve games.
Public web services
List of services available by xml interfaces.
Google Earth
Keyhole + Google
Jumbo jet landing in the Netherlands Antilles
Astonishing photo
Airdisaster.com

Airplane with 4 engines

Here's how to build a model airplane with four engines and some glue.

Microsoft Double Plus UnGood

Microsoft is running this curious Thought Thieves film competition for 14 to 17 year olds where the theme of submitted film shorts should be about "intellectual property theft". Of course, any films submitted have to be licensed to Microsoft on Microsofts own terms...

BBC - On This Day
1955: Communist states sign Warsaw Pact
The Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies sign a defence pact in the Polish capital, Warsaw, places all member countries under one military command.
1991: Mandela's wife jailed for kidnaps
Winnie Mandela, the wife of anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela, is given a six-year jail term for her part in the kidnap of four youths.
1964: Nasser and Khrushchev divert the Nile
The Egyptian and Russian leaders end phase one of the construction of the Aswan High Dam by blowing up a huge sand barrage to divert the course of the Nile.
1957: Cheers as petrol rationing ended
Relief across the country as the paymaster general announces restrictions on fuel consumption imposed during the Suez crisis are to be lifted.
2001: Scientists warn of more CJD cases
Variant CJD - the human form of BSE or "mad cow disease"- has been found in 99 people so far - but scientists warn a "second wave"in several years could be much larger.

Alternatives to Movable Type
Ann Arbor points links to alternative blogging software.

FunnyFox

FunnyFox has three humourous Firefox propaganda videos

BBC Backstage

BBC Backstage
Play with feeds - APIs coming soon.Slashdot mention it too.

My tag soup

Here's my variant on the tag soup idea , as initially developed by John Herren.

I hacked these together using my own coding along with some Magpie RSS , a Zend POST function and Yahoo content analysis services. Some jiggery pokery with my back-end mysql tables and an hourly cronjob and voila - a nice soup of news tags. It took about 4 or 5 hours of hacking about, but I have to say , its a nice idea. I sometimes find very strange keywords popping up , and just clicking through to see what the stories are. Its certainly a different way to browse the news headlines.


Tech News Soup
Business News Soup
TagSoup - my main blog posting about it.

Yahoo News soup
Yahoo services, php, rss combined

Microsoft meets Red Hat
Balmer has lunch with RedHat chief.
Low cost shuttle proposed
only $20 million per launch.
Kooldock
KDE panel replacement
kxDocker
Another panel replacement
basKet
KDE app for notes, urls, and lots more

Learning German

On my main blog I've posted an my first article on German syntax entitled word order in German. I'll be posting more articles over the coming months as I try to grapple with learning the German language. I'm not too bad at speaking German, but this is more a of self-teaching exercise, so that all the notes and books i have on German are committed to my blog. In a way , it's self-learning-while-i-blog.

The funniest thing i've seen in ages...

Somebody at Symantec thinks its a great idea to educate people about how fast worms and viruses spread by encouraging the download of an executable file of undetermined origin from a web page.

Oh, and the worm spreading simulator only works on Windows. How appropriate.

Huffington Post

The Huffington Post was launched today. Its a celebrity blog featuring posts from Walter Cronkite, Warren Beatty , John Cusack and many more.

Lego version of Han Solo in carbonite
Brick by brick
The Economist on the Long Tail
The Economist catches the "dozens of customers in millions of markets" meme

LinkDump

Scientists Boycott Kan. Evolution Hearings (AP)
How to avoid VAT on email
419ers seek project manager
UK Schools Told to Dump Microsoft
Desktop Linux Usage Statistics

Orb's Torrent Site Status
Big listing of torrent sites and whether they are online or not.

Worth 1000 Vintage products
Modern gadgets photoshopped to look old.

BBC - On This Day
1945: Germany signs unconditional surrender
Germany signs an unconditional surrender ending six years of war in Europe.
1976: Quake devastates northern Italy
Italy's worst ever earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale kills more than 550 people and leaves 80,000 homeless.
1965: Huge Rhodesia election win for Smith
White voters in the African colony of Rhodesia back Prime Minister Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front which is demanding independence from the UK.
2001: Thousands greet Pope in Syrian visit
Pope John Paul II prays for peace on a visit to the Syrian capital Damascus, where he is greeted by thousands of people.
1956: Minister rejects anti-smoking lobby
The Health Minister, RH Turton, rejects calls for a government campaign against smoking, saying no ill-effects have been proven.
2001: Healthy cattle to die to save Exmoor
More than 1,000 cattle on two farms near Exmoor will be slaughtered - even though they show no sign of foot-and-mouth disease - in order to protect Exmoor from infection.

Windows - change prompt and reboot your PC

I subscribe to a Windows oriented newsletter , just to see whats up in the Windows world. The following section talks about customising the command prompt in Windows. It may well bring a wry smirk amongst you more seasoned Linux users.

In the bash command prompt all you need to type is
PS1="mylaptop>"

or something more complicated.

Plus you dont need to restart your machine to see the changes.


***************************************************************************************
Customising the Command Prompt

The Windows Command Prompt usually just consists of: C:\>
However, there are lots of special codes that you can use to customise
the prompt in Windows Me/2000/XP by following these steps:

1. Click Start > Run.
2. Type: regedit and press [Enter].
3. Go to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
\SessionManager\Environment.
4. In the right pane, edit the value Prompt (or if it isn't there, add a
new value of the type String and call it Prompt). The default value
is $P$G, which produces the C:\> Any of the following can be used in
combination:

$T - Current time
$V - Windows XP version number
%COMPUTERNAME% - Local computer name
$H - Backspace (erases previous character)
$L - < (less-than sign)
$N - Current drive
$P - Current drive and path
$Q - = (equal sign)
$S - (space)
$_ - Carriage return and linefeed
$A - & (Ampersand)
$B - | (pipe)
$C - ( (Left parenthesis)
$D - Current date
$E - Escape code (ASCII code 27)
$F - ) (Right parenthesis)
$G - > (greater-than sign)
$$ - $ (dollar sign)

5. Restart Windows to see the change.

Cheat sheets

Here's a collection of various handy cheat sheets for the command line and web development.

PHP Cheatsheet
CSS Cheat sheet
Another CSS cheat sheet
Command Line tips
Humble Linux cheat sheet
Evelyn's Linux cheat sheet

Settop box with Knoppmyth
Fun with knoppix
Mars polar lander found

The Oh-My-God particle
A proton with the same energy as a 50 miles per hour baseball.

Xbox cluster
3 Xboxes turned into a mini-cluster

Mini-mizer

The Mini Mizer allows you to build a replica of yourself in lego person plastic.

Firefox 50 million

Firefox hits 50 million downloads

Linkdump

Newfound Dinosaur a Transitional Creature (AP)
REVIEW: Cheaper Laptops Full of Features (AP)
Microsoft competitive chief pragmatic on Linux
The Unemployed Working on OSS Projects
Searching by Image Instead of Keywords
Lockheed Martin unveils Space Shuttle replacement
Gmail on Linux Box using Postfix and Fetchmail
Interview: Mandriva Linux Founder Gael Duval
Ken Norton Starts a Blog
The most unusual question I've been asked at work recently
Firefox Market Share on O'Reilly

Orion Multisystems
Makers of a 96 node desktop Linux workstation.

Online shoppers aren't impulsive

This fascinating posting on Slashdot points out that research on online shopping habits, has found out that online shoppers are more frugal than offline shoppers and "that almost half of all online purchases are from shoppers who leave a site after the first visit, and return -- even days later -- to buy".

If you've ever wondered why the majority of your shopping baskets are abandoned on your site without a final purchase, then maybe that posting might give you some clues. In other words - dont worry - it's normal.

History of kernel.org

Kerneltrap has a very interesting history of kernel.org detailing its progress from a single box in 1997 to its multiple quad Opteron incarnation (each with 24 gigs of RAM and 10 terabytes of disk space).

MadPenguin review Mandriva LE 2005

Mod Rewrite

What mod rewrite can and cannot do