gifts
- economist subscription
- beer fest tickets
- all of tufte's work
- frakkin toasters tshirt
Syndicated 2006-11-30 04:43:02 (Updated 2007-01-01 22:53:14) from gregor
gifts
Syndicated 2006-11-30 04:43:02 (Updated 2007-01-01 22:53:14) from gregor
.net on the desktop is dead
today, my feed reader died. it only showed me an empty window where my feeds should be:
so i tried google reader again. amazingly, it felt more responsive than RSS Bandit. my archive of read posts is in the thousands. i like having access to them, and often use them in searches. this puts a heavy toll on memory usage:
what hope is there for .net if an application written by a microsoft employee is such a memory hog, and gets its clock cleaned by an online application? none.
Syndicated 2006-11-12 04:57:55 (Updated 2006-12-01 16:44:06) from gregor
sophonts
go read this article on elephant violence. it has the qualities of a seminal piece on cross-species relations. consider this statement from a ugandan researcher who grew up in a war zone:
I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants. I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed - no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It's the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost. Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn't sound like I'm inventing something. It's there. People know it's there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.
now we can either discuss the semantics of sentience as we recognize our peer species, hopefully before it is too late, or we can adopt a new term that is not laden with meaning that needs to be repurposed first. sophonts works for me: why look at far away stars when we can find peers right under our nose?
update: another hurdle cleared
Syndicated 2006-10-28 05:55:11 (Updated 2006-12-01 22:32:01) from gregor
in praise of regional airports
Syndicated 2006-10-10 19:57:13 (Updated 2006-12-01 16:44:06) from gregor
nextfest
Syndicated 2006-10-01 04:25:35 (Updated 2006-12-01 22:38:13) from gregor
personalized fashion
Syndicated 2006-09-28 04:05:36 (Updated 2006-12-01 16:44:06) from gregor
spam filtering as a proxy for search market share
why is it that the most basic spams and 419 scams make it past yahoo's spam filters into my yahoo inbox? i was willing to go give them a fair shot with their new ui, but their spam filtering is beyond bad, and makes their new mail beta just as unusable as the old one. almost makes me wonder if they have commercial reasons for letting a lot of spam through to their userbase. not having a capable contextual advertising platform must put them in some tight spots when revenue maximization time inevitably rolls around, and spam thresholds are early victims, i suppose. even more so at MSN, whose hotmail is even worse. it is the rare event, however, maybe once a month, that spam makes it to my gmail inbox.
the less search marketshare your email provider has, the more spam you can expect in your inbox.
update: the new york times reports that gmail spam filtering is getting even better. meanwhile, the obvious spam in my yahoo inbox continues.
looks like yahoo can't even afford a SSL certificate for their mail domain.. oy. plus they insist to show you a spammy 'start page' instead of your inbox. someone getting desperate in the monetization department?
Syndicated 2006-09-05 02:25:49 (Updated 2006-12-01 22:40:09) from gregor
sakku
via etoy and bernhard comes word of a new messenger bag with solar panels. while not powerful enough to charge your laptop, it will do fine with your other gadgets.
what is especially interesting to me is that sakku is a swiss startup. i have outlined before why switzerland is going down the drain. in fact, i sometimes tell smug swiss people that i am an economic refugee. all the more uplifting if a startup is ignoring the naysayers and delivering a cool product.
Syndicated 2006-08-25 16:32:46 (Updated 2006-12-01 16:44:06) from gregor
an inconvenient truth
went to see the most important film of the year today. very well done, with a data-driven approach to hammer the reality of global warming home. the only nit i have is that the call to action comes too late in the movie (in the last five minutes, and in the credits). also, there was not enough coverage of solutions beyond vague calls to save energy. no advice how to short a basket of detroit companies and buy efficient cars with the proceeds, no talk of emissions trading, no call for new nuclear power plants. instead, we got the advice to pray
still, go see it even if you are familiar with all it's points. longer playing times matter.
Syndicated 2006-07-10 02:53:47 (Updated 2006-12-01 22:41:01) from gregor
has last.fm jumped the shark?
Syndicated 2006-07-04 02:08:17 (Updated 2006-12-01 16:44:06) from gregor
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!