Sean’s Mental Walkabout

• EKB: Aspect ratio comparison. Why the black bars?
  probably the best explanation of all the aspect ratios / tv if you need to explain it to someone.
  (tags: tv hdtv)

Popularity: 5% [?]

• Stevey’s Blog Rants: Code’s Worst Enemy
  Stevey’s posts are always some of my favorite, and this one does not disappoint!
  (tags: development programming)
• ASCII Banner Generator
  This is great, and supports a whole series of different “fonts”
  (tags: email text ascii)

Popularity: 4% [?]

• Penny Arcade! - The Guitar Hero Thing
  boo Activision, boo Sony.
  (tags: games sony)

Popularity: 4% [?]

or sometime over the last 12 months, in no particular order

• I’m one of those folks that has lucid dreams while taking malaria meds.  The dreams are cool, though I could leave behind all the waking up in the middle of the night.
• My TV has audio optical out, but won’t pass Dolby 5.1 through from the HDMI cable.  Never trust the satelite installers.
• Football is really awesome in actual Dolby 5.1 (or 4.1 in my case), though it takes some getting used to random people’s voices popping up from time to time behind you.
• irb (the interactive ruby intepretter) does tab complete, but only if you enable it manually.  You get tab complete in the rails console, so I was always just using that.
• irb does coloring of code!  That definitely one ups the python interactive shell.
• Wood stove inserts for fireplaces are really painless installs and manage to throw an incredible amount of heat.
• Amazon S3 really is that easy, and quite cheap to be used for offsite backup.
• An automated backup solution for all your home systems is a single apt-get away.
• xkcd really is that awesome.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Porkchop sent me this youtube video on Saturday.  ++ for an hour of really good entertainment.  My love for xkcd is even greater after this.

Direct link for RSS readers that don’t support embeds.

Popularity: 9% [?]

• ongoing · Message From the Web
  Lessons learned from the web. Very solid.
  (tags: collaboration community open-source internet web)
• Amazon.com: SimpleDB Web Service
  The pricing model on SimpleDB is interesting as it is basically S3 + $0.14 / hr of processing time used on a machine. This is actually more like what everyone read into EC2 for machine hours used (vs. machine hours on).
  (tags: amazon database programming s3)
• inside looking out » What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB
  More details on SimpleDB. It’s apparently backended by Erlang, and you’ll have to do indexes for your searches on the client side.
  (tags: amazon simpledb database erlang programming web internet)
• YouTube - Authors@Google: Randall Munroe
  This is definitely worth the hour
  (tags: cool media xkcd video google)

Popularity: 4% [?]

• Complexity syndrome and Rumplestilskin 2.0 « Vendorprisey
  “Complexity, not Oracle, is SAP’s biggest competitor”
  (tags: enterprise software)

Popularity: 5% [?]

• Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5: an outrageous disaster
  Boo Apple, and Boo Nokia. Apple’s been massively anti open standards for ever, but it looked like Nokia was starting to see the light with their Linux based web tabblets. Apparently not.
  (tags: copyright opensource openstandards)
• James Governor’s Monkchips » Open, Social, Only People: Putting the Ad-hoc into ERP. On SAP, Breakthrough Productivity and Bring Sexy Back
  This post is very dense, don’t let that scare you off. It’s all about how Enterprise software becomes personally relevant, and gets sexy, and has many great observations.
  (tags: software enterprise socialsoftware)
• tecosystems » Software Science vs Software Evolution, or Software Science and Software Evolution?
  Not sure there is anything much I can add here, just read it.
  (tags: software opensource)

Popularity: 8% [?]

• » Before buying an HD display, read this lowdown on 720p vs. 1080i vs 1080p | Berlind’s Testbed | ZDNet.com
  (tags: shopping hdtv)

Popularity: 5% [?]

• Tectonic: Tectonic
  8W pc running linux. Can run off a solar panel.
  (tags: linux africa solar)
• Environment: Newspaper Brick Maker Transforms Funnies into Yule Logs
  an interesting christmas gift idea
  (tags: fireplace gift recycling)

Popularity: 4% [?]