Day in brief – 2011-10-31

  • @lufandever Проснуться,умыться,кофе,почта,завтрак,обед,диван,ужин,душ,заснуть. Выполнимо 10 из 10. :-) #
  • My last Amazon order arrived today split in five packages. Oh boy, so much fun to be had, I don't know where to start. :) #
  • Shared: Samsung Takes the Lead In the Smartphone Market http://t.co/d4B4gUi4 #
  • Shared: How Can I Justify Using Red Hat When CentOS Exists? http://t.co/jEoIYNwW #
  • Shared: Dennis Ritchie Day http://t.co/dbLh1Omt #
  • I'm comparing web-based genealogy software. Nothing that I really like. Thinking of doing my own. http://t.co/YvCBpelC #
  • Shared: Climate Change Skeptic Results Released Today http://t.co/e7aBmtx8 #
  • So many people love #Ubuntu So much is going on with it. But I've always been a #RedHat #Fedora person. Haven't regretted it even once yet. #
  • Now that's a good place to hang out – WordPress Ideas http://t.co/yCDHzzfd #
  • One wee left until #Fedora 16 release http://t.co/v01ONBwp #

Jeff Atwood on parenthood

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame is expecting two more kids – twin baby girls.  When something like this – a baby or two on the way – happens, it doesn’t go by unnoticed.  It consumes your whole mind and forces you to think and rethink everything.  Jeff is an excellent writer with a trained technical brain.  So it makes reading his thoughts on parenthood especially interesting – it’s a crazy mix of logic and emotions.

It’s also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What’s your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There’s no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

Congratulations, Jeff, and good luck with the pregnancy!

Zed Shaw : Why I GPL

Zed Shaw, the guy behind a lot of code and several books, shares his thoughts on why he is now switching from simpler, more permissive licenses like BSD and MIT, to GPL.  Most of the Linux  people and GPL fans would easily guess the reasons, since they’ve popped up in pretty much every license related flame war.  But it’s nice to hear from someone who did actually experience the theory, and who really knows what he is talking about.

I’ll always be an open source developer, but quite frankly, we’re dying off because the companies who use our software do not give back. The irony of the situation is that, in order to improve my motivation to do open source, I have to charge for it.

I obviously won’t ever charge an open source project, since they are honoring the unwritten contract: If I give, you give.

But the days of quick-flip corporations and ingrate programmers making money on my software are over. My new motto is:

Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.

Welcome to the GPL camp, Zed.

7 billion

Sometime soon (or already?) the world population will hit 7 billion.  CNN prepared some aids to help us visualize how large of a number that is.  They have some great examples, but I still don’t think people can actually visualize that.

— Seven billion ants, at an average size of 3 milligrams each, would weigh at least 23 tons (46,297 pounds).

I don’t think one can transfer the ants or rice visuals onto humans.  I think humans are the best examples here.  Just take a moment and think of all the people you ever knew – family, friends, classmates, colleagues, cashiers at the nearest grocery shop, politicians you saw on TV, important people you’ve read about in history books, fiction characters, your Facebook friends (most of who are fiction characters), and on and on and on.  If you sum up all those people, you’d probably be well over a thousand people.  Maybe two or three  thousand. Let’s say it’s five thousand.  That is still 1,400,000 times fewer than the current world population.  Hence, I say, it is impossible to imagine.  We are just not built for that.  After all when we were built, the world population wasn’t even a single million.

Michael Winslow : Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin

If you are not a teenager or a pensioner, you should remember a rather successful comedy “Police Academy“. It was so good they made 6 sequels. It was about a bunch of cadets going through the training in the police academy. One of the cadets, played by Michael Winslow – cadet Larwell Jones – had an interesting talent. He could make all sorts of sounds – police car sirens, gun shots, TV noises, and so on and so forth.

Back then only a few people knew that Michael Winslow does indeed have such a talent. He is now known as a man of 10,000 sound effects. And I must say that with years, his skill only grew and improved. There are quite a few videos of him on YouTube, but this one in particular will amaze you, I promise. He is doing a cover on the Led Zeppelin’s song Whole Lotta Love.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcCC2g1Ke0]