The European Commission has put into effect a June 2009 agreement stating that major cellphone manufacturers should standardize their charging/data connection ports to the popular microUSB format.
via blogtechnical.com
Finally. It took over a decade (in Indian market) to get to this point. I wonder why it took so long. But I am so glad that already my Android phone, Kindle and bluetooth headset all use the same charger.
Theodore Ts’o reports that …
Starting with Gingerbread, newer Android phones (starting with the Nexus S) will be using the ext4 file system.
Android Arena mentions one of the main advantages:
YAFFS is single-threaded, which would have been a bottleneck when trying to record those full HD video clips, and save them to the flash memory, whereas Ext4 doesn’t have this limitation. Thus the new file system is more suited for usage with the multicore ARM-based chipsets that will be creeping into handsets and tablets next year.
Just a lighthearted reminder that, even if the lure of the connected digital world gets people to skimp on the Gilligan’s Island reruns, that doesn’t necessarily mean their replacement behaviors will be any more productive. They could instead bring an ever greater capacity for distraction and disengagement and slingshot precision.
Via niemanlab.org
Interesting article on how the Internet giveth and taketh it away. Our productivity, that is. Yeah, we all knew that, but this article gives out some interesting numbers.
Amazing work by all the people involved!
Venkatesh Hariharan reported on the Linux Delhi mailing list today:
The open standards policy has been finalized and it incorporates many of the suggestions made by the FOSS community in India. In the previous draft dated 25/11/2009, our major objection was to section 4.1.2 of the policy which said.
4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard.
I am trying out this post aggregator called Posterous. It allows you to use email for posting to many other sites where you post content, like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It has a neat idea of specific email addresses like facebook@posterous.com for posting to facebook and likewise for others. You can even combine destinations, like [facebook+twitter@posterous.com](mailto:facebook%2Btwitter@posterous.com). For links to images, it inserts the image for you (I think), for videos, it embeds the video player in your posts(they say).
Ok. This is fairly trivial stuff for many of you, but what I found interesting is that the SystemBus lets you shutdown/restart/suspend/hibernate as an ordinary user. Of course, if you think of a desktop, that is a pretty basic expectation of what an ordinary end-user should be able to do.
But when I think about a server, the thought that people can bypass a sudo while doing a shutdown makes me uneasy.
Every time I come back to Python from the land of Perl here at work, I need to re-learn how to use regular expressions in Python, as it is, IMHO, quite a bit different from Perl.
Rather than trawling through the docs again, I made some online notes this time.
Hope it is useful to somebody.
This is something that has bothered me always for the past several years, especially in the period when I was working on my own. Paul Graham has managed to put this so eloquently into words:
… There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule.
The manager’s schedule is for bosses. Its embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.
The latest Ubuntu releases makes it real easy to set up a local DNS cache for your workstation using dnscache from the well-known djbdns software by D. J. Bernstein.
For those who have historically installed djbdns/ucspi-tcp/daemontools from source because of distribution restrictions, things changed really for the better after DJB placed all these software in the public domain in 2007. You can now setup all this in about one minute! (depending on your Internet connection though.
11 years back, I was just yet another guy out of college with a background of Turbo C/C++ and Pascal as most other batchmates of mine. My software career could have gone anywhere. PC Quest Linux was just a toy with which I was playing with but wasn’t too much attached to yet.
A stroke of good luck helped me get an opportunity to work with one of my close school friends - Inder, who introduced me to PHP 3.