Things that caught my eye over the last few days include:
- Big “attaboy!” to Damien Stolarz, author of Car PC Hacks, for this fantastic USA Today piece.
- This first year student computer boot camp is brilliant! I’ve already disassembled an old VCR with my son, so I think his next project should be assembling the hardware that will become our household Asterisk box.
- An article about Skype partnering with a Chinese wireless firm caught my eye. It’s one of several articles on the topic, all lauding Skype’s entry into a huge (300M and growing) market. Nobody stops to point out that the Chinese government does not want foreigners owning critical parts of the Chinese infrastructure. This is why Linux is so big there–to use Windows would be to cede the platform part of the computing infrastructure to the very American Microsoft. How long unless VoIP becomes a critical part of the infrastructure and China decides it doesn’t want a European company owning it?
- Anonymous Usability Designer: Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age: amusing candy coating of bitter truths.
- Reduce the risk, hire from open source is an interesting piece by David Heinemeier Hansson, who will be keynoting at EuroOSCON. This is related to Rishab Ghosh’s research into FLOSS as skill-building (FLOSS==Free (Libre) Open Source Software for those of you not up with the acronyms).
- Revealicious: not necessarily useful, yet pretty, visualizations of your delicious tags.
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Christian Lindholm, father of the Nokia Series 60 (and thus my 3650), is moving to Yahoo!. What does this presage for Yahoo!? In Lindholm’s words: ” I believe Yahoo! really want to crack mobile internet nut.
In the next 5 years the Internet will be accessed as naturally on a pocketable device as on a bag sized laptop. In my opinion no one has cracked how to put Internet in the pocket. I do not have the answer, but I have the passion and dedication to try to crack it and I see no better place to have a go at it than at Yahoo!” - Mystery bulge in Oregon. Linus can’t keep sweeping the dead SCO executives under the mantle.