Doom and Gloom

NY Times: Powell Admits No Hard Proof in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda. “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no “smoking gun” proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.” #

BBC: Richer, stouter, and no happier. “The Worldwatch Institute says more than 25% of the world’s people now enjoy the style which used to belong to the rich. But it says rising obesity and debt, and increasing pressures on time, are reducing many people’s quality of life.” #

Guardian: An unnatural disaster. “Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first comprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world. The sheer scale of the disaster facing the planet shocked those involved in the research. They estimate that more than 1 million species will be lost by 2050.”

Pointers

Mark Pilgrim describes whats new in Atom 0.3. #

World Top Secret: Our Earth Is Hollow!  Apparently. #

NEO: A code generation tool and framework providing an object facade over ado.net. (Via Mike Gunderloy). #

“a day on Mars is 39.5 minutes longer than a [terrestrial] day.” Expect to see companies relocating to Mars to squeeze that little bit more working-time out of their exployees. (Via Slashdot) #

Now playing: Big Cat, Afro Celt Sound System.

Pointers: .NET Eval, RSS

CodeProject sample illustrating runtime compilation – “A .NET eval statement”. Neat. #

Intel is making available a free (as in speech) machine-learning library. It says here that its useful for data mining and related tasks. #

pReSS: An RSS 2.0 editor. I’m amazed they’ve gone to the effort of doing this. Does _anyone_ edit RSS feeds by hand? And if you did, why not just use a generic XML editor? #

Actually, if you were to use a vanilla XML editor to edit RSS feeds, then a schema for RSS documents would be helpful. I assumed that the official RSS Specification page would have a link to one, but it doesn’t. Why?  #

Configuration Management Patterns. From 1997 but still fresh. #

The next big thing: Push to talk. Yep, thats all. #

BOFH. Too funny.

Pointers

Rajesh Jain points to the first of a series of articles on Om Malik’s blog about “Lone Coders” – independent developers (of code or content) making a living in the gaps between corporate product offerings. The first part, “Blogging for Dollars”, is about the developer’s of Movable Type, Ben and Mena Trott. Facinating. Subscribed. #

Kevin Kelly has a smart website and, although its not a blog, it has a few feeds. Thats Kevin Kelly that founded Wired, the Long Now Foundation, the Whole Earth Catalogue, and the Global Business Network. Very smart guy. He also wrote one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books. #

Amazing notebooks. The paper kind. Gotta get me some of these. (Via Kevin Kelly). #

Now playing: Sacral Nirvana, Buddah Bar vol 3.