Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Amazon.com: Sports Night: The Complete Series 10th Anniversary Edition: Peter Krause, Felicity Huffman, Thomas Schlamme: Movies & TV
If you haven’t seen this show, you are missing out big time. Buy this and correct it.

freshmeat.net: Project details for ProcessMaker OSS
ProcessMaker is workflow and business process management software that allows small to medium-sized organizations to automate document intensive, approval-based processes across various systems including finance, HR, and operations. An entirely Web-based, AJAX-enabled application built on the popular open source WAMP/LAMP stacks, it includes tools to design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, and send alerts. A full service-orientated architecture (SOA) and Web Services interface allows the software to directly connect with popular business intelligence, content management, and enterprise resource planning systems.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Web 2.Rockstar: The robotic tale of Jonathon Coulton: Page 1
Susan and I went to Coulton’s show in NYC a few months ago, and it was hands down the best show I’d ever been to. Goes to show that there is a way to make a living under creative commons.

Overturning Copernicus, eliminating dark energy
A new model that eliminates dark energy from the universe equations. Plus, I like how the article ends…

“In addition to the concepts put forth, this paper illustrates nicely how science works. Pseudoscience often argues that controversial or contrarian papers and ideas never get published, suggesting that the “establishment” won’t listen to new ideas. But this paper puts forth a completely novel idea, and in the process overturns a long held philosophical pillar of astronomy, and yet it is set to be published in one of the top-tier physics journals.

The main idea put forth here is vastly different from the generally-held consensus of how the universe works; however, as in all of science, every idea is tentative. Future surveys of supernovae may tell us whether or not we are special in relation to the rest of the universe.”

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Today’s comic is available as a poster.

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The Associated Press: Paul Newman, Hollywood’s anti-hero, dies at 83
RIP Paul.

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Extension:GoogleCalendar - MediaWiki
I love how ubiquitous google calendar stuff has become. It’s really a great way to advertise public events.

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Android has finally arrived.  The comparisons to the iPhone are everywhere, and rightly so, as this is going to be a very interesting show down between Google + Open and Apple + one of the best design teams in the world.  I tend to place my best on Open, but if anyone can compete against it, it’s the people that convinced the world that devices with non replaceable batteries are good investments.

It’s also interesting that the dramatic challenge in getting everyone excited by mobile wasn’t really a bump up in technology.  90% of what the iPhone can do today would be doable on your random flip phone from verizon, except the carriers block you from doing it.  Carriers:

• block your access to the gps on the phone.  Every phone has had a gps for the last few years due to e911 requirements.
• make it difficult to deploy apps to the phone, as they want a cut of every one.
• make it impossible to really provide free apps on phones (by the previous point)

A good instance of this is the fact that I’ve got google maps on my Sprint flip phone.  Google wrote the app, and it does all the close searching for things like the iPhone does.  It can’t tell me where I am, because sprint blocked the gps.  But, when it comes to finding a restraunt in a strange city, it works quite well.

What Apple and Google have really been working on is getting the carriers out of the way so that mobile devices can really become a more primary platform for consumers.  They basically forced AT&T, T-Mobile, and hopefully soon Sprint, to break down their walls against letting consumers really do things on the mobile networks.  This is exciting.  I’m eagerly hoping that Sprint (who is part of the Android alliance) puts an Android phone out by the end of the year, because I’m going to snap it up immediately.  I’ve already got the Android SDK installed, and am going to start puttering around with applications that I’d love to be on my phone.

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stacker on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Someone whote Tetris inside of Little Big Planet, and it’s really impressive. It’s amazing what you get when you let your users do things like this.

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tecosystems » Define “Contributions”
“If Novell and Red Hat are then the better plumber, to beat the housing analogy to death, Canonical, to me, is the better designer/architect. And much like I don’t want a house without running water, I’d prefer one that’s designed to be livable. It takes all kinds, as they say. “

openmeetings - Google Code
This looks seriously interesting. I’m going to have to see what it takes to get something like this set up.

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And you should read it every day, as it’s been this awesome for weeks.

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