10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World.
The Tree of Tnr or L’Abre du Tnr was the world’s most isolated tree - the solitary acacia, which grew in the Sahara desert in Niger, Africa, was the only tree within more than 250 miles (400 km) around. … [isolation] wasn’t enough to stop a drunk Libyan truck driver from driving his truck into it, knocking it down and killing it! Now, a metal sculpture was placed in its spot to commemorate the Lonely Tree of Tnr:
Neatorama — Maybe not the best, or most representative quote, but…
Oniguruma for Ruby: Project Info
Ruby bindings to the great Oniguruma regular expression library featuring: increased performance; same interface than standard Regexp class; support for named groups, look-ahead, look-behind; and other cool features!
RubyForge — Gotta look into this.
Rosborough Mac OS X Development
lipServiceX is a Cocoa service that generates “greeked text” or “Lorem ipsum” text that is can be used as placeholder text in page or web layout applications. “Lorem ipsum” text is often used to “fill in” spaces that will eventually have written content, before the content is written.
Handy
Care to see what the critics are saying about a new movie? With it’s streamlined and intuitive interface, Tomatometer keeps the Rotten Tomatoes movie database only a key press away
OS X
The Corporate Ipsum Dashboard widget is a Lorem Ipsum generator Peter Gibbons might use in a TPS Report…if he were a graphic designer and had a need for a Lorem Ipsum generator.
10x biger than the one above, but maybe worth it.
New study finds food supply already imperiled by climate change
The study by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California found fields of wheat, corn and barley throughout the world have produced a combined 40 million metric tons less each year from 1981 to 2002. Annual global temperatures increased by about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit between 1980 and 2002, with even larger changes observed in several regions.
DeSmogBlog — Oh, good.
Very Quiet DayI read lots of stuff today, but nothing much seemed suitable for logging. It was mostly follow up to other things.
JeffreyPfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices
I am pleased to be able to offer my thoughts and evidence as the Federal Government thinks about how to manage its substantial civilian workforce to ensure even higher levels of performance and service. There is no doubt that people and how they are managed matter tremendously for organizational success – as literally scores of studies show.1 However, much of the conventional wisdom about and current practices in managing people are inconsistent with both theory and evidence about how to attain the best from a workforce.2
by Jeffrey Pfeffer at Evidence-based Management — This looks interesting, but, because of time constraints, I’m posting this before reading it.
On the 150th anniversary of the birth of brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla, Mark Pilkington explores the enigma of the man who lit up the world.
Tesla is, for reasons you’ll discover when reading about him, relatively unknown in North America, maybe the world. This guy is fascinating. I’m posting this before reading due to time constraints.
OpenMCLThere is a pre-release of OpenMCL 1,1 available since 14 Feb for OS X 10.4 (or better) using Intel CPUs. This is a nice implementation of Common Lisp for several platforms (and there are pre-releases for them all). I wasn’t paying attention… sigh.
CL-S3 is a Common Lisp library that implements a client interface to the Amazon S3 Web Service
And it looks like a pretty complete interface too.
Half an HourStephen Downes — There are a lot of good articles on this blog by Stephen Downes. Have a look and subscribe. He is currently in a bit of a debate about the viability of the semantic web, but, as I say, look back through the postings there are some really good ones there. Now, how is it that I just found this blog when I read all of his others?
Feed normalizer wraps various RSS and Atom parsers, and returns a single unified object graph, regardless of the underlying feed format.
Looks useful. It also has an html cleaner.
Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial - Part 2
This article is the second part of my series about Ruby on Rails Caching. … This tutorial is going to address Action Caching, Fragment Caching, and even ActiveRecord Caching (only available in Edge Rails) which will complete our tutorial of caching in Rails.
Rails Envy — Nicely done.
Creating a CSS layout from scratch
This guide will attempt to take you step by step, through the process of creating a fully functioning CSS layout.
Subcide — Nice!
Alcohol worse than ecstasy on shock new drug list
Some of Britain’s leading drug experts demand today that the government’s classification regime be scrapped and replaced by one that more honestly reflects the harm caused by alcohol and tobacco. They say the current ABC system is “arbitrary” and not based on evidence. … By their analysis, alcohol and tobacco are rated as more dangerous than cannabis, LSD and ecstasy.
Guardian — These are the experts who apparently advise the UK government on their ‘fact based’ drug policy.
Breaches of personal data: blaming the myth and punishing the victim
In a recent dissection of the connection between gaming and violence, the term “folk devil” was used to describe something that can be labeled dangerous in order to assign blame in a case where the causes are complex and unclear. The new paper suggests that hackers have become the folk devils of computer security, stating that “even though the campaign against hackers has successfully cast them as the primary culprits to blame for insecurity in cyberspace, it is not clear that constructing this target for blame has improved the security of personal digital records.”
ArsTechnica
Fat scan shows up 'true' obesity
Currently, doctors gauge fatness with a calculation of body mass index (BMI). But BMI is flawed - people with lots of muscle are considered overweight.
BBC NEWS — Funny how doctors ignore this fact. When I was younger I did a lot of swimming, my BMI was near obese (high 20’s) but my percentage of body fat was around 3-5% (that is not obese). These days there is no real question what’s what, unfortunately.
Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application. We have Joyent Connector and a select group of third party applications working under Joyent Slingshot. Joyent plans to have Slingshot available for general release on both Windows and Macintosh OS X in late April, 2007.
Joyeur — This looks really interesting.
Joyent SlingshotMagnetk — More about Slingshot by someone developing an application using it.
Why use Atom Publishing Protocol for REST?
But as we did the work, it seemed like a lot of overhead to put all this APP framework around a very specific application. Why not just use HTTP and JSON and have done with it? … so we thought we’d ask the experts here at Sun [Tim Bray and Dave Johnson] … stick with Atom, even with the overhead. Why? Here are some of my reasons:
David Van Couvering — Worth thinking about
If you watch Heroes, that says that you believe in good, evil, doing the right thing, following your inner geek, building alliances, and searching for purpose in a world of seemingly infinite possibility and coincidence. And you’re probably working on a new community-driven Web 2.0 application, building a brand new conversational marketing model for your business, or pushing the frontier of digital convergence.
David Seah
SaaS infrastructure, as a service
Anyone still laboring under the misconception that SaaS is just a different delivery model for conventional software should spend a few minutes talking to Treb Ryan, CEO of SaaS infrastructure hosting provider OpSource. … Ryan listed some of the distinctive differences between the on-demand model and traditional software. “The best SaaS companies tend to think as web companies who have business customers,”
ZDNet.com — Hmm. His ‘three points’ described are something to think about, especially the third.
Lost in the hype around Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is the fact that the idea is really really simple. It’s all based on the idea that most applications (and that includes websites) are built either to be used by people , or used by computers.
O'Reilly ONJava Blog — Sure, and a five years ago or so we could actually talk that way. ‘SOA’ has been corrupted to the point where we no longer can.
Micro-turbines output micro-electricity for Hong Kong's micro-apartments
Gambarota’s new micro-turbines, which can generate electricity with as little as 2 mph of wind, and keep turning at all times from the slightest of breezes. The little windmills are actually gearwheels, mounted in a array. They can be arranged in different shapes and sizes, from two to thousands of square meters. The energy is put into a battery …
Engadget
So. What happened to Mar 22?Arrgh! I published yesterday’s (Mar 22) entry just after midnight. It sort of, kind of, got the day right but actually stored the thing as Mar 23. Today is Mar 23 and so all of today’s entries got appended to yesterdays and published as Mar 23. Sigh.
