Ubuntu Touch Preview on Galaxy Nexus

Great start.

How to Flash / Install Ubuntu Touch on Galaxy Nexus from Mac OS X

G+ / Twitter.

And this isn’t even about Red Hat.

Tools and technologies that Instagram uses:

Ubuntu 11.04
nginx
Amazon’s Route53 for DNS.
25+ Django app servers on high CPU Xtra-Large EC2 instances.
Gunicorn as their WSGI server.
Fabric to deploy in parallel to all machines.
3 12 PostgreSQL-server clusters on Xtra-Large memory instances.
EBS as a software RAID configuration.
Apache Solr for geo-search API.
6 memcached instances for caching.
Gearman task queue.

source

But by far the biggest break with tradition for Pottermore is that all the books will be sold without DRM restrictions…the Potter books will be personalized or watermarked.”

Am I the only who thinks a custom watermark with a buyer name or graphic would be pretty cool? Upsell opportunity. Essentially, buyers pay to “DRM” their own copy.

[gigaom]

[image]

Sooo…say you are trying out a new online newsletter app.

You assume that you can prune the list of email addresses once they are uploaded.

You upload a boat load of contacts.

App decides to automatically email everyone immediately with a confirmation message.

Faaaaiiiil.

My apologies to anyone or any mailing list that got an email about subscribing to a newsletter from me. None of you are subscribed to anything.

image credit

From the JSON license:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Seriously?

The Bacon Book

The Better Bacon Book

20 HD videos, 150 high-resolution photos, and 31 original recipes from some of USA and Canada’s top chefs

All about bacon.

How perfect is that?

From getyourcensoron.com.

I understand why the entertainment industry thinks SOPA a good idea. They are retarded.

From the Washington Post, this might be my favorite quote about the discussions in Congress:

If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing markup used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”

And we give these asshats control over money and bombs.

Lovely.

Pictures from our safari in Kenya.

Q: What else influences people?

A: Names. A while back, someone who operated a healthy cafeteria called to say, “No one is eating in our cafeteria. What should we do?” So we simply changed the names of the foods they served.

Instead of Italian Pasta, we called it Succulent Tuscany Pasta. Or instead of Chocolate Cake, we called it Belgian Black Forest Cake, even though the Black Forest isn’t in Belgium. Once we added a descriptive name, sales jumped by 27 percent. And it’s not just that food. People rated the restaurant better and the chef more competent.

If you believe that something’s going to taste good, you look for the qualities that confirm that. If you believe the milk is spoiled, you drink the milk looking for confirmation of that, too.

Proof that GIMP needs to change its name already, even if it is an acronym.

From How external cues make us overeat

Update: Some folks have questioned why I used a food-related article as my argument for Gimp needing a new name. The research is not food specific. People don’t make decisions solely on quality. The brain starts making decisions whether or not to like something before we are even consciously aware of it. The value of a product and service is determined by more than whether or not it serves its purpose well. So before you or I can introduce how awesome GIMP is to someone who has never used it, we are already fighting an uphill battle. And this is supposed to be good? Nothing like a project to handicap itself from the start.

If you would rather read it, there is a transcript.