Win a Zune with John Chow

John Chow dot Com, a blog that helps you make money on the internet, is giving away a Microsoft Zune. To enter, all you have to do is write about it. This is my entry. Now give me my Zune!

09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

Here's the t-shirt

Via Digg

Wired article on the hexcode.

Friday linkdump

Sumotori Dreams
Hilarious drunken fighting simulator, in only 96k!
TopPop
Dutch 70s Tv program opens its archive.
ACME novelty toy gallery
Giant fossil rain forest discovered in Illinois
Four square miles discovered in coal seam.
DoMyStuff.com
Outsource your life.

How To - iPod with Ubuntu Linux

Comprehensive thread here on how to get your ipod working with Ubuntu.

I recently purchased an iPod Nano, and i can confirm that the Feisty Fawn live CD does indeed recognise it - it pops up on the desktop when you plug it in. However, i'm having problems with it being seen by my Dapper Drake laptop. "dmesg" shows that its being recognised at a low level, but Amarok and gtkPod can't see it. I'll probably just upgrade to Feisty anyway.

"Aldrin" - a Buzztracker clone for Linux

Aldrin is an open source clone of Buzztracker that is currently in development. Packages are available for Ubuntu Feisty and Edgy, as well as Debian. Screenshot and examples are over here.

Friday linkdump

The Most Hated things on the web
The Mile High Collection
The story behind the greatest comic book collection ever found.
Christopher Walken wants to destroy Silicon Valley
Interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne
He's had problems with scaling Ruby on Rails:
"All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both."
Fast food adverts versus reality
Beyond the Red Line
Free space game based on Battlestar Galactica
World Geography Quiz
Google Maps mash up

Goodbye Fedora

Feb 21 message from Eric Raymond - after 13 years of loyalty to RedHat/Fedora he ditches it for Ubuntu.

Feisty Fawn due out tommorow

The next release of Ubuntu , "Feisty Fawn", is due out tommorow.
Press release here
Start downloading now and get it faster on release day

sorry state?

Sorry State of Open Source
A 26 page critique of open source today.

xeyes in real life

Hardware hacker Hunz has built a real life version of xeyes. You can download the video from here (2 meg avi)- its insanely cool.

Linux Action Show

Episode 43 of the Linux Action Show is out.
A leaked Microsoft Memo gets Chris worked up, a version of Debian is out, the new release of Cedega is covered, Microsoft trying to kill ODF in California is mentioned plus they review some of the best open source first person shooters, answer listener questions and so much more.

Google Earth imagery update

Via Google Earth community



New high resolution:
Canada: Downtown Vancouver, BC
England: Northamptonshire, Nottingshire, Berkeshire, Peakdistrict,
Birmingham, Greater Manchester, Avon Gloucestershire, Linconshire
France: Rennes, Poitiers
US: Omaha, NE; Missoula, MT; Amherst, MA; Keowee, SC;
Catawba Wateree, NC/SC; Rolla, MO; Nashville ("Burbia"), TN; US Gaston
County, NC; Anne Arundel County, Metro Water District of Southern
California; State of Arkansas

Updated Imagery:
Spain: Gran Canaria, Fuertaventura, El Hierro, La Gomera, Tenerife, and Las
Palmas (Canary Islands) Spain
US: Austin, TX; San Bernardino, CA; State of Connecticut

Fixes:
Danish plane replicants removed
Andes, Maccu Picchu terrain repaired

Found on Google Books

A Journey through Ireland in 1834
Handbook for travellers in Ireland, 1854
History of Cork , 1861
Annals of the Famine in Ireland - first hand account of the Irish famine, published in 1850.
Letters on the condition of the people of Ireland

Linkdump

Austria's 5 star prisons
Why are burglary rates so high in Austria?
Find an old Unix command = $$$ Profit
an interesting observation. Yahoo Pipes = bash. Gmail = pine. Twitter = wall. Google = grep.
Waxy on the explosion of Twitter
nice graphs.

Toy Robot heads

These toy robot head pics make for some nice avatars.
Via Flickr

Invisible Octopus

Most programming candidates can't actually program?

Over at CodingHorror Jeff Atwood is astonished at the sheer number of programming candidates who cannot do the simplest , basic , programming tasks - like a for loop or fizzbuzz.

"I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs."
Why can't programmers ... program?
Using fizzbuzz to find developers who grok coding
Don't overthink Fizzbuzz

post altered because of dmca

this post has been edited because of a DMCA take down notice.

For further reference here is the take down notice posted on ChillingEffects.

Snap Preview Hatred

Is Snap Preview the most hated Web 2.0 function ever?
Wordpress.com - please stop using Snap preview
Say no to Snap preview

Google building an AI system?

Via Google blogoscoped

Larry Page talked about AI (video) at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he said

My prediction is that when AI happens, it’s going to be a lot of computation, and not so much clever blackboard/ whiteboard kind of stuff, clever algorithms. But just a lot of computation.

My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 Megabytes compressed... so it’s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. That’s my guess.

We have some people at Google who really try to build artificial intelligence, and to do it in a large scale. (...) You know, to do a perfect job of search, you can ask any query, and we’d give you the perfect answer, and that would be artificial intelligence, right. Based on everything being on the web, which is a pretty close approximation. (...)