Tech
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The Civil War in time lapse format
Coming Anarchy has an awesome time lapse animation of the Civil War, it’s one of the best animations like this I’ve seen.
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Wind Power in Popular Mechanics
Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on Wind Power on their site. Sadly, it makes it seem unworkable on any kind of large scale. It would be quite handy on a small to medium scale though.
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Local cooling
I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it’s 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.
I wonder if there’s a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project…
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How does the West expect to win…
When we have judges like this
“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.
Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”
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A cool idea
ThinkCycle.org – an open source community for machines.
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Quote of the moment
Via CodePoet, and from this page
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)
and
There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
and
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)
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Monday link roundup
- It’s Wiretap the Internet Day – what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
- Entrepreneurial Adages – All quite true. in particular
Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible — small budgets give big focus
- Battlefield spy-bot – really cool
- Tribal Minds
- The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.
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Blogger is back!
It’s been hanging on posts for the past few days. Now it’s working again for some reason.
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xSQL is a cool Sql Server tool
I’ve been using xSQL for a good while now and I think it’s about time to give it the Moody Loner endorsement. While it does a lot of things, I mostly use it for copying databases between servers where I have different permissions (doing that using the built-in tools is quite problematic) and it’s saved me countless hours of tweaks and cutting and pasting.
It’s run by cool people too. Check it out here http://www.xsqlsoftware.com/
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Friday Rapid Fire
- European Solar Power – with an array of mirrors instead of photo voltaic panels
- CogMap – an online organization chart maker, pretty cool, very Ajax-ey
- SilverLight – Microsoft’s Next Big Thing has it’s first (that I’ve seen) user generated application. And I just learned Ajax…