Excerpt from a mail to the SL4 mailing list from Micheal Vassar that I found particularly good:

“Popular conceptions of the “singularity”, grounded on trend extrapolation for either poorly designed metrics like “change” or narrow metrics like “transistors per dollar” are squarely SL3 because they inspire a belief in discontinuous change without any real understanding of […]

e17 is nice, and elegant - oh so elegant. But it’s been in development for along time now and although they say it’ll be very unique when it arrives I think they will have missed their chance to make a spash in the linux desktop market.
You see, compiz and xgl were released earlier in the […]

Get E
Either…
a) Get the latest packages from:
http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org/
extract with
for i in `ls *.tar.gz`; do tar xfvz $i; done
or
b) get the latest cvs sources:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e login
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17

Build packages
install some packages:
sudo apt-get install fakeroot cdbs debhelper libpng3-dev libpng3 libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev html2text libgtk2.0-dev libxine-dev libtagc0-dev libtagc0 libcurl3-dev libcurl3 devscripts giflib3g-dev giflib3g libid3-3.8.3-dev libtiff4-dev […]

one red eye
Originally uploaded by New York Observer.
Braaaaains…

I enter the next phase of my evolution (and madness).
Polyphasic sleeping is an alternative to the traditional monophasic sleeping of our culture. In this particular regime I’m planning to attempt, it means you take 6 x 20 minute naps instead of the normal 6-8 hours that most people get. Why? Well if you do the […]

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For my record before they escape me:
Alcohol calculator that takes in bodily alcohol processing and timing of drinks to give charts of blood alcohol level.
Convert windows sleep monitoring program to linux.

X-face lets you add a 48×48 black and white image to email and usenet posts.
I tried to find some other interesting extensions but was unsuccessful. The only other thing I can think of is OpenPGP.
Any suggestions (or requests for my public PGP key)?

I need to let off steam because I’ve dug myself into a hole using Matlab. If I could start again I would be using R, or Octave or any number of opensource mathematics tools. Matlab is ugly - this wouldn’t usually be a problem, I respect functionality over whizzy interfaces - but it feels clunky […]

An obscure one hit wonder band you ask? Why yes. If you were alive around 1994 you no doubt remember the track “Spaceman” which I shall now perform:
“Spaaaace man, I always wanted you to go into Spaaaace man. Intergalatic chri-ist”
…ahem. Anyway, I bought the CD years later on the basis of liking the single, and […]