An interesting read: “A life in the day: David de Rothschild“. Yes, he’s one of those famous Rothschilds.

He’s planning to sail a catamaran created from recycled plastic junk to an area in the Pacific Ocean, where all kinds of plastic junk is circulating and destroying the wildlife.

We’ll sail through some of the world’s most ecologically threatened regions, including the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, where currents converge and marine debris — 90% plastic — gathers. As this debris consists of microscopic fragments, it’s getting straight into the food chain.

The Google Chromium OS is open sourced.

In the world of Chromium OS, applications will be web apps. Access to the applications will be through the web browser. The web apps live in the cloud, i.e. in a bunch of servers somewhere in the Internet.

In light of this, let’s talk about cloud computing. More specifically, let’s talk about the security and privacy trade-offs of non-cloud and cloud computing.

Do you trust the cloud?
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A battle took place, at a narrow sea-shore lined track at Thermopylae, about 2500 years ago. The defenders fought valiantly against the Persians but were ultimately killed to the last man.

Simonides of Ceos wrote about it with these words:

Go tell the Spartans, you who read:
we took their orders, and lie here dead.

There comes a time in each man’s life that he can’t even believe his own eyes.

A new programming language has emerged from Google. It’s called Go.

And one thing is certain, someone’s responsible!

These people are Rob Pike, Ken Thompson (of the Plan 9 fame), and Robert Griesemer.

I’ll bet my badge right now we haven’t seen the last of those weirdies.

(You might want to read this also.)

Thanks to Christophe-Marie, who sent me a link of a very interesting video of a UI concept where the mouse is no longer relevant. Instead, multi-finger touch is used, with quite natural gestures.

Here’s the 10/GUI video by C. Miller.

Why do I like it?
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To help keep the Andromeda strain swine flu away, you should take a swine flu shot.

Ingredients:

• 4 cl of Red Opal (Icelandic salmiac-menthol vodka)
• a squeeze of lemon juice
• freshly ground black pepper

Enjoy!

Zenburn v2.13 is released!

Thanks to Zac Thompson and Christophe-Marie Duquesne, there is now:

• Fix for invisible NonText-group
• Various fixes and fine-tunings for Terminal and UI modes for Ignore-, NonText- and Error-groups.
• Vimball installable version, see vim.sf.net.

Grab it from vim.sf.net or from the official Zenburn page.

Enjoy!

Another Sunday to play with big numbers.

Anyone who has been to London must have noticed the numerous cameras observing you, like some strange proto-Orwellian social experiment.

Why have they built such a system? The theory goes: to reduce crime, and create safety, etc. But practice tends to disagree.
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BBC reports on the self-taught hardware hacker William Kamkwamba, who recycles junk to build electricity-generating windmills in Malawi.

Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.

When he ran into bugs, he had to debug and refactor the original design a little:

He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.

It’s ingenious stuff, check it out.

The Christian conservatives of USA recently had one of their echo chambers of retarded thinking taking place in Washington.

BBC reports of a great fear – the direction where Mr. Obama is leading the country:

From the podium, Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor stoked the audience’s fears with a joke about a man who goes to sleep in America and wakes up, after a year of Obama, to find himself living in Sweden.

To many foreign ears, the thought of waking up in Sweden might seem rather appealing, but to this fiercely patriotic crowd it would not have made much difference if Mr Cantor had substituted Sweden for North Korea.