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Pentadactyle Firefox add-on for Vim and Links addicts

Pentadactyle Firefox add-on for Vim and Links addicts

Pentadactyl is a free browser add-on for Firefox, designed to make browsing more efficient and especially more keyboard accessible. Largely inspired by the Vim text editor, the appearance and finger feel of Pentadactyl should be familiar to Vim users. Additional web-specific features, such as our ‘Hint’ mode, command interface, and key bindings to automatically follow back and forward links, make it easy to navigate without touching the mouse and give Pentadactyl a habit forming nature of its own.

Pentadactyl is a fork of the Vimperator project by most of its primary developers. Major differences include a 7-fold startup speed improvement and other speed improvements elsewhere, the command-line is hidden by default, better private mode and :sanitize support, better forward and reverse incremental find support, and the ability to separate multiple Ex commands with a |.

OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice?

OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice?

CyberNet News has a nice coverage of StarOffice / OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice history.

  • August 1999 – Sun Microsystems buys a company (StarDivision) and gets StarOffice.
  • October 2000 – An open source version of StarOffice, called OpenOffice.org, was released.
  • … almost 10 years goes by with several major and successful OpenOffice.org releases.
  • January 2010 – Oracle buys Sun Microsystems.
  • September 2010 – Some members that worked on OpenOffice.org started “The Document Foundation” due to concern over the future of OpenOffice.org now that Oracle owns it. The concerns were understood since Oracle took the OpenSolaris project, which had been around for nearly 20-years, and discontinued open development of it.
  • January 2011 – OpenOffice.org 3.3 released.
  • January 2011 – LibreOffice 3.3 was released (based on OpenOffice.org 3.3). This is the first stable version of the product.
  • April 2011 – Oracle announces that it will no longer be supporting development of OpenOffice.org.
  • June 2011 – Oracle announces that they will contribute OpenOffice.org (the trademark and the code) to the Apache Software Foundation.
  • June 2011 – LibreOffice 3.4 released.
  • February 2012 – LibreOffice 3.5 released.
  • May 2012 – Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released. Note that it’s not called “OpenOffice.org” anymore, and is instead called “Apache OpenOffice”.

Fukushima butterflies mutations

Fukushima butterflies mutations

Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of butterflies living near Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. The gruesome discovery has led scientists to fear that the leaking radiation could affect other species.

The study was published by Scientific Reports. Researches said that around 12 per cent of pale grass blue butterflies that had been exposed as larvae to nuclear fallout developed abnormalities, including broken or wrinkled wings, changes in wing size, color pattern changes, and wider-than-normal variations in numbers of spots on the butterflies.

Though the insects were mated in a lab well outside the fallout zone, about 18 per cent of their offspring displayed similar problems, said Joji Otaki, an associate professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, in southwestern Japan.

That figure rose to 34 per cent in the third generation of butterflies – even though one parent from each coupling was from a group unaffected by radiation.

Researchers also collected another 240 butterflies in Fukushima last September, six months after the disaster. Abnormalities were recorded in 52 per cent of that group’s offspring – “a dominantly high ratio,” Otaki told AFP.

Octopress – a blogging framework for hackers

Octopress – a blogging framework for hackers

Being a very happy WordPress user doesn’t stop me from looking around for alternatives.  I recently came across Octopress, which is, in some sort, GitHub pages on steroids.  This is a really neat and geeky approach to tech-savvy bloggers. Recently, version 2.0 has been released.

Octopress comes with:

  • A semantic HTML5 template
  • A Mobile first responsive layout (rotate, or resize your browser and see)
  • Built in 3rd party support for Twitter, Google Plus One, Disqus Comments, Pinboard, Delicious, and Google Analytics
  • An easy deployment strategy using Github pages or Rsync
  • Built in support for POW and Rack servers
  • Easy theming with Compass and Sass
  • A Beautiful Solarized syntax highlighting