The Betacantrips Travelogue

Don’t be misled — it has nothing to do with hunches. At least from the description, it sounds like a Netflix-esque recommendations engine for researched decisions. The story on  CNN.com:

“For the most part, I was impressed, though it quickly became clear that Hunch isn’t capable of magically making up your mind for you,” wrote Jason Kincaid, a reporter at TechCrunch, a technology blog. He called the site “very clean and unintimidating.”

Nerds: bad at sports and proud of it.

The guy who makes Sexy Losers.. continues to make Sexy Losers. Just in case you wanted to know. His most recent strip.

Hopefully this makes more sense in color, but I have the feeling that it’ll be another one that is funny only to me (sigh). I’m taking a short break this month to dedicate myself to a test that I have at the beginning of July. There’s more to come, however!

You don’t have to read the whole thing, just the first half or so. The post on Language Log:

Martin [Dickie] and James [Watt] were bored of the industrially brewed lagers and stuffy ales that dominate the UK market. We decided the best way to fix this undesirable predicament was to brew our own beers. Consequently in April 2007 BrewDog was born.

Haven’t listened yet but these guys keep getting better! Starscream’s new album:

In the not so distant future awaits the election of the first third party candidate to the White House- they will hail from the Space Party, a political coalition founded by astrophysicists, former democrats and ex-NASA employees. In their 8bitpeoples debut EP, “Future, and It Doesn’t Work”, Starscream tell a tale of victory, science, and potentially catastrophic foreign policy.

Edit: this is one of my favorite albums of the year. You should listen to it.

Need to look at this.. greenlets builds against a standard interpreter? How?? The Second Life Wiki says:

Eventlet is a networking library written in Python. It achieves high scalability by using non-blocking io while at the same time retaining high programmer usability by using coroutines to make the non-blocking io operations appear blocking at the source code level.

Edit: it looks like it copies huge chunks of the stack into/out of the heap as needed. A greenlet is just a few stack frames, starting at a particular stack frame, right? I’m not sure if it gets copied to the same location in the stack or whether C-frame pointers to the stack will get weirded, though.

The real open source smartphone = Palm Pre? Blech. The post on Matthew Garrett’s Livejournal:

I’m impressed. There’s a few rough edges and some obvious short-term hacks, but overall the Pre has the appearance of being a well-engineered distribution. It’s recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn’t. Since it seems to be possible to gain root by entering the developer mode, I suspect that modifying the firmware image isn’t especially difficult. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when GSM ones appear.

This is actually pretty cool — need to play with this. The post on Google Open Source Blog:

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device.

Uh.. WTF? The story from Slashdot:

Barence writes “Novell plans to bring the wealth of open-source software to everyday users through an ‘open-source apps store.’ ‘I would compare what’s happening on netbooks with what’s happening to the smartphone,’ Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development at Novell told PC Pro. ‘There’s a core experience, but then the ability to customise that experience. On the user end, all they’ll see is an open-source applications store with one-click downloads of new software. Unlike the other stores though, they won’t have to pay for any of those applications, which will be very attractive.’”

A post about an Android-powered Walkman over on Android Community:

When I was seven or eight the teenage girl that lived behind us was really hot. She often walked around in a swimsuit sporting her massive Walkman and to this day if you say the Walkman name I think about good ol’ Debbie. The Walkman has changed a lot over the years, Debbie has as well. The Walkman got slimmer and last I saw, the opposite had happened to my adolescent fantasy babe.

Adolescent fantasy babe!