Quote of the day

"If Bush loses, do you think he'll leave?"

- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Ubuntu I still can't decide whether the name for Mark Shuttleworth's new Linux distro, Ubuntu, is brilliant or absolute crap. Regardless, the first stable release is out there now and the torrents are available. I'm going to give it a try because lots of people are saying good things about it, and frankly, I don't really want to bother again with something as massive as Fedora Core.

By the way, I hope there's a Jabber server on there by default ;)
(via Tuttle SVC).

QOTD From :

The optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Firefox Extension Idea I'd like to get an extension for Firefox that automatically takes me to the Printer Friendly version of an article if it's available. The reasons are pretty obvious. First, I don't have to go through a website's paging mechanism -- I prefer my scroll wheel any day to their choice of layout. Second, there are less ads on a printer friendly version, and they typically don't put the ads in the middle of the text either. Here are two examples, one from Anandtech (Regular and Printer Friendly), and the second from the NYTimes (Regular and Printer Friendly). See for yourself.

Outsourcing This is a perfect example of outsourcing gone wrong.

Country music kills whitey As Kramer says, "story like that has got to be true!"

"The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is thought to reinforce the link between country music and suicide."

Read on...

CSS: Color Whore! Are you as terrible at picking out a good color scheme as I am? Well you're in luck! Color Whore has a wonderful collection of colors. They do allow you to contribute your own colors, unfortunately this has already resulted in some color pollution. The Browns and Muted tones are especially nice. Mezzoblue also posted some tips a while back, and I found the picking colors from nature approach to be quite interesting.

Sun loses patent fight with Kodak Ouch. Kodak wants 1 billion dollars in damages. Well, I can't say that I feel too sorry for Sun. In fact, the same goes for Microsoft and Eolas. I'm sure there are lots of people that feel that Sun got a raw deal because they believe, like myself, that patents are government granted extortion monopolies. But wasn't it Sun that recently got a a billion dollars in a settlement with Microsoft over on going lawsuits about various infringements? And let's not forget Sun's latest patent on a painfully obvious business method.

What I think needs to happen is that the damages from patent lawsuits need to get much, much larger. Companies need to quake in their boots when patent lawsuits show up at their door. It seems that companies like IBM, Microsoft, HP, and Sun are more than happy at the moment to play along with this arms race for patenting ideas, and willing to tolerate the occasional loss. I'm sure that if these companies are faced with extinction from a single patent lawsuit, they'll borrow the RIAA's hotline to Congress to change this absurd system of doling out ideas.

(via Slashdot.org)

Gush interface making the rounds
Update: The kind folks at motion4graphics contacted us and have decided to include us in their credits. They have also modified their interface, and it looks even better.

Just recently I came across flashblog.org and immediately got the sense that I had seen their interface before. Oh that's right, I designed it for Gush 1.0. Interestingly enough their slogan is "Las mejores ideas son propidedad de todos" which roughly translates, "the best ideas belong to everyone." That's easy to say when they aren't your ideas :) Don't get me wrong, we are flattered more than anything that people like our interface enough to copy it, but some credit would be nice.

Here's a comparison: (Gush interface on the left)

A great new reason to use Firefox I was just made aware of a feature available into today's bleeding edge build. You can now force links opened by other applications to open in the active or new tab, instead of opening a new window! I can now open links from Gush to my hearts content without getting a pile of new windows. You can also force links in Firefox to open new tabs instead of a new window, eliminating the need for Ctrl+Click or the buggy middle mouse button click. Total control at last.

Fox fabricates story and then pretends it's The Onion Here's the breaking post at Talking Points Memo. Now that's what I call fair and balanced reporting by Fox.

(via Aces Full of Links: Fox Making S**T Up)