Tholos
From the pages of Star Trek: Tholos, planned to debut next year, is a real-time, high-definition public portal between cities:
A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk could make its debut in Britain next year.
…
The London Tholos would be linked to an identical one in [...]
Migrating to Mail.app
As part of moving to my new laptop I’ve also decided to give Mail.app a try and so far it’s going well except for two things I’ve been unable to figure out how to do:
1. Mark all the unread messages in a folder (err mailbox) as Read.
2. Create rules to filter outgoing messages.
[...]
Electricity from water
The big news item of the day appears to be the discovery that forcing ordinary water through a very small mesh (very, very small) causes the water to generate electricity (Edmonton researchers discover new way of generating electricity).
As far as science goes, this is really quite cool. Who new? As far as the hype surrounding [...]
Kill ‘em all
In a move that defies all possible logic, the Bush government is proposing open season on endangered species around the globe under the guise of helping to preserve them:
“This Bush policy is truly Orwellian, encouraging killing endangered animals in order to save them,” said [...]
A thought about traffic flow
Roadwork needs to be done, that’s a given, however… When the work that needs to be done is the repaving of all the off-ramps from the freeway heading in one direction wouldn’t it perhaps be better to do stagger the work, say paving every second one at the same time rather than all of them [...]
Everest summiteers
The history of Everest summits is an interesting one. In recent years though the frequency of summits has increased dramatically with the advent of guided tour parties lead by professional climbers and the use of supplemental oxygen. Standing out among the crowd are the few who manage to do it under their own power, [...]
Installing Perl modules under OS X
I rarely have to install Perl modules, so rarely in fact that every time I do have to, I forget how and have to Google for the answer. Fortunately Apple has described this process quite nicely in Installing Perl 5.8 on Jaguar, two thirds of the way down the page.
Apple logo to change in Panther
Seed releases of Panther evidently show the venerable Apple logo chromed to the gills and this seems to have gotten a few people up in arms. I gotta agree with Crazy Apple Rumours:
New Apple Logo Exactly The Same As Old Apple Logo.
Apple has shocked long-time Macintosh users by altering the appearance of the trusted [...]
Unicode explained
The members of the RbNUG are on a roll today. Just posted: a pointer to the absolutely excellent “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” by Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky explaining Unicode, text encoding,why there is no “high ASCII”, and why you should care:
I’ve [...]
Biology vs. software
“In biology, you can gain information from observation. But in software development the only thing you can gain from observation is a bunch of wrong and dangerous assumptions. RTFM instead.”
- Frank Bitterlich, RbNUG