Today's Blog of the Day is "The Reader".
Everything about ebooks and readers - all the stuff I like. See at http://wowio.wordpress.com/
Here I discovered that Sony is assumably preparing new version of reader - PRS 505. From the changes that should be included, none is IMHO really so important. The memory capacity of the reader with SD cards (which are reaching 8GB these days) is much bigger than you ever will need. If I should pick some enhancements hat would make a huge difference, it would be:
Few nuggets from recent surfing and reading newsfeeds:
A very nice explanation of differences between Ruby Gem and Rails plugin in Arun Gupta's blog
The community seems to be still fairly divided on the "Is Vista good or bad" ? For the laters, read the story from the corporate IT point of view. I still have not found any good reason to upgrade :-).
Good story of how the experience of joining a project should not look like
One of the many gadgets I have packed for the summer vacation was of course Sony Reader and SD card with nice selection of texts. It was fresh and fully charged, so I assumed that I will be well prepared for the gaps in program during the following three weeks ahead of us and for the long flights over Atlantic.
Obviously, the flight was first moment where Reader was used. During the 7 hours, I spent about 3-4 hours reading. We flew through the night, but the overhead spotlight in airplane was more than sufficient and the letters were very well readable. I also enjoyed the almost non-reflexive surface of the screen.
The combination of software allowing anonymous access to the Net, not too competent police officers and laws not quite 21st century ready can be a very dangerous combination. According this story, the operator of the Tor node was arrested by German police ...
I am quite curious how be would situation like this handled in Canada. First of all, would it happen ? Would the RCMP be more technically up to date than Deutsche Polizei ? What defines the responsibility of an operator of server, that moves encrypted content ? I am not crazy enough to try it out just to find out :-) - so no, I will not setup a TOR node (even if I do admire this cleverly designed piece of software).
Today's BOTD (Blog of the Day) is "Good Math, Bad math".
What it is about is summarized in its subtitle:
Finding the fun in good math. Squashing the bad math and the fools who promote it. There is no need to add anything to this.
Only maybe an URL: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/
Software problems aren't like mathematical problems. They have no clear boundaries or axioms and the problem domain is always shifting and evolving and changing. This fundamental difference ensures that while mathematical knowledge has a long shelf life, technical knowledge seems to last little longer than most popstars. And the changes wrought in programming are not just shallow refinements or surface innovations but fundamental changes wrought by order-of-magnitude shifts in the virtual landscape.
As the September 28th is approaching (the day when the new iPod touch will be available in Canada), I have a real dilemma: do I go with the "iPhone without the phone" or not ? The price $329 for 8 GB iPod is pretty high - compared to $279 for 80GB classic - which would allow me to carry all my music, some movies and all podcasts with me. On the other hand, the Touch has WiFi and can be used as pretty decent Web browser on top of iPod functionality.
For all my fantasy-loving friends who consider reading in Czech or Polish too inconvenient: the first book of the grand master Andrzej Sapkowski in English is out. It is book of short stories about Geralt, the Hexer (or Witcher if you want), who is the main character of the 5-book saga with the same name.
You can get it on Amazon.