Link: Feather Linux - About.

Feather Linux is a Linux distribution which runs completely off a CD or a USB pendrive and takes up under 115Mb of space. It is a Knoppix remaster (based on Debian), and tries to include software which most people would use every day on their desktop.

I guess the question for me is: “Would my iPod Shuffle be running Linux if I installed Feather on it?”

Sounds like an interesting project to pursue…. But it might be too geeky even for me.

When I graduated from college a couple of years ago, there was this buzzing in academic circles of a semantic web. The world wide web had been about information exchange between people. The semantic web was going to take a step further and allow information exchange between machines.
From the wikipedia entry:

Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web.

The interesting thing is for the last month or so, I’ve been using the semantic web. Flickr, del.icio.us and 43Things support the use of tags. Tags are really a loosely defined format for describing a piece of data (i.e. semantics!). RSS/Atom and Aggregators are another good example.

None of this really clicked in my head until I read this presentation eTech/2004/realworldsemantics. It’s from last year’s Emerging Tech Conference (Darn! Have I become that outdated? It only takes me a year to learn about these things). The 2005 Emerging Tech Conference (going on right now) seems to be continuing this thread. Maybe I’ll go for the 2006 conference so I won’t feel so out of date in 2007.

At the very least, I can say I’ve heard Rael’s talk. It was a interesting presentation describing people “remixing” products to use in new and interesting ways. His weblog makes for pretty interesting reading too.

Link: MSNBC - Photos for the Masses .

An article featured on slashdot a couple of days ago talking about online photo-sharing sites. Photo sharing sites have been around for a couple of years. In the past, I’ve tried to use dotmac and
typepad to fulfill my need for publishing photos online. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with either of those two solutions. The limited amount of space that they give you (~200MB) made you think about what you had to delete. Not good especially if you link to your photos off a weblog. That’s what appealed to me about flickr.

1) They don’t cap my storage space. Only your upload bandwidth is capped. With the pro account I purchased, my cap is at a gig. For me that’s an infinite amount of space for a month. I might hit that limit when I’m on vacation and have lots of photos taken but most of the time “no way!”

2) They don’t delete photos if I choose not to continue as a pro subscriber (with a slight catch). From their FAQ:

Imagine you have uploaded 350 photos in a free trial Pro Account frenzy! Your Pro Account expires…now you (and other viewers of your photostream) will only see the most recent 100 photos you published, even though all 350 of those photos will remain on our servers.

If you save the URLs of your previously-uploaded (before 100) photos and your extra photosets, you will be able to have access to these by plugging in the URL into your browser. The catch is that you need to login every 45 days.

Oh well free is free.

3) The photo viewing app is one of the best flash applications out there. It justifies the existence of flash. If you don’t have flash enabled on your browser, you get a normal photo. But enabling flash on the browser is worth it for flickr.

The MSNBC article mentions some of the alternatives to flickr and try them if you’re interested. I think flickr is the best one out there but don’t take my word for it.

My flickr page is here.

Link: 博客中国：科技·新知·生活 Blog in China.

I wish my mandarin was better. Pithy…. I’ll struggle with a dictionary in my hand and read mandarin blogs. This should become a 43thing: “Improve mandarin by reading blogs”.

Link: ongoing · It’s Not Dangerous.

One of the better articles highlighting the benefits of blogging. I thought while I’m at it I’ll include a ole goody 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.

There have been articles in the mainstream media lately talking about how blogging can get you fired from your job. Reading those articles, I thought the issue had been overblown. The people interviewed had done really stupid things. It’s the reasonable person principle applied to blogging: Don’t reveal more than is appropriate (literally and figuratively). Especially in the public forum of the world wide web where figuring out who you are is a google search away.

Looks like the Knoppix 3.8 ISO is available now.

I downloaded my torrent file from here: BNBT Tracker Info

Enjoy!

Update: Looks like the ISO is the German language version. Not that useful for me since I don’t know German although that is one of my 43things.

Update 2: From Rick and some googling, at the boot prompt, type “knoppix lang=us” i.e. “boot: knoppix lang=us”. To get the = sign, you need to use “shift-0”.

Link: The Seattle Times: Dot-Con job.

A tragedy of the dot-com crash.

Link: Shirky: In Praise of Evolvable Systems.

Another essay in the spirit of Worse is Better.

Link: Pi Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Darn! Almost forgot about it.

Update: Apparently today is also this.