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  • 1 min read

Fascinating history of Wikipedia

If you are interested and fascinated with the Wikipedia, how it came to be, why it is the way it is, there's an absolutely gripping account of the history and origins on Slashdot:

"An impassioned debate has been raging, particularly since about the summer of 2004, about the merits of Wikipedia and the future of free online encyclopedias. This discussion has not benefitted by much detailed, accurate consideration of the origins of Wikipedia and of its parent project, Nupedia. But it seems to me that those origins are very important -- crucial, even -- to forming a proper judgment of the current state and best future direction of free encyclopedias." (from "The early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir", part 1 and part 2.)

Technorati Tags: recommended, wiki, wikipedia

  • 1 min read

Identity theft scam?

What would you do if you received two letters from a collection agency saying that you owed $5,000 to a firm with whom you've never had an account with? I ignored it and the following letter, immediately smelling a rat. What would you do further, if you got a call from that agency, and you told them that you had never heard of them, and that you had never had an account with the firm? I told them to go to hell. And then they asked if I was willing to just verify some information. Like the last 4 digits of my social security number. I told them, even more forcefully, to go to hell. And then they asked whether I would be willing to confirm the last 4 digits if they read them to me? I told them again to go away telling them I definitely smelled a rat and thought this was some kind of identity theft scam. He pointed out that he wasn't asking me for any information, simply that I confirm information that he was giving me. Four simple digits. What would you do? Technorati Tags: interesting

  • 1 min read

Creepy article!

Get this:

"A man's severed leg - with a white Adidas sneaker still attached - plummeted from the sky onto a garage roof and bounced into the backyard of a Long Island home yesterday morning."

Want to know more? Technorati Tags: interesting, gross

  • 1 min read

Good stuff from Paul Graham

If you work with software developers you'll appreciate these two pieces by Paul Graham , author of Hackers and Painters, a book that I also recommend heartily. He always has interesting things to say:

"I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I'm now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued." (From "Hiring is obsolete")

I also came across this really excellent IT Conversations Podcast of a speech he gave at the Open Source Convention (OSCON), which I also highly recommend (and it would be a good introduction to IT Conversations and Podcasting if you were looking for an excuse 🙂 Technorati Tags: programming, hackers, recommended

  • 1 min read

[BLOGBRIDGE] Bloeb: A new kind of web site for BlogBridge

We've been experimenting with a switcharoo of the BlogBridge web site - a major overhaul conceived and prototyped by Francois. (Thanks!) The new site will be going to production tomorrow, but you get to take a look while we are putting the finishing touches on it. What kind of a switcharoo? Well, instead of a conventional site that happened to contain a blog, we jokingly call this a 'bloeb ' (blog+web) site. You've seen web sites with blogs in them, and you've seen blogs with non blog content attached to them, right? Well here we have a full hybrid , with a traditional navigation tree on the left and a bloggish navigation tree on the right. Our FAQs are blog postings. Our announcements are blog postings. In fact it's hard to tell where the blog starts and the site begins. What do you think? ** Update: **The new site is up. So far so great! Technorati Tags: blogbridge

  • 1 min read

Dan Bricklin doing some interesting podcasting

I just came off listening to Dan Bricklin's first podcast, an interview with Linda Hamel of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts about patents , intellectual property and open source. Quite interesting info. I am looking forward to listening to the other ones. One link, right off the bat is to Linda Hamel's own web site with lots of interesting resources about Open Source licensing in the public arena. Particularly cool is this huge Excel chart doing a comparison of all the multitude of open source licenses. Technorati Tags: opensource, legal

  • 1 min read

Good article about software design

Just add this one to your reading list:

"(XP) challenges many of the common assumptions about software development. Of these one of the most controversial is its rejection of significant effort in up-front design, in favor of a more evolutionary approach. To its detractors this is a return to "code and fix" development - usually derided as hacking. To its fans it is often seen as a rejection of design techniques (such as the UML), principles and patterns. Don't worry about design, if you listen to your code a good design will appear." (From "Is Design Dead?")"

Thought-provoking. Technorati Tags: software, recommended, technical