P. W. Singer gave an interesting TED talk about the use of robots in war [1]. He briefly covered some of the ethical and social issues related to robot soldiers as well as showing many pictures of existing robots.
Since November 2007 there has been a request for Google Gears to support “Iceweasel” (the Debian name for Firefox due to trademark issues)[2]. Apparently supporting this different name is not easy for the Google people. If you visit the Google Gears Terms and Conditions page [3] then it will work with Iceweasel on the i386 platform – but not for AMD64 (or at least not my Debian/Lenny AMD64 system).
Charles Moore gave a disturbing TED talk about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” [4]. Pollution in the oceans from waste plastic is worse than I realised.
Ressuka documented how to solve the Time went backwards problem on Xen DomUs [5]. Run “echo “jiffies”> /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource” or use “clocksource=jiffies” in your DomU kernel boot parameter list.
Nassim Taleb [6] has written Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world [7], this is in regard to the current US financial crisis. It’s worth noting that he made a significant amount of money due to successfully predicting some aspects of the crisis.
James Duncan Davidson has some good advice for speakers based on his experience in filming presentations [8]. Some of the ones that were not obvious to me were:
Take off your name-tag – it doesn’t look good
Stay in the part of the stage with the best light
- [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html
- [2] http://code.google.com/p/gears/issues/detail?id=313
- [3] http://gears.google.com/terms.html?platform=linux
- [4] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html
- [5] http://ressukka.net/blog/posts/20090305_XenServer_and_non_citrix_kernels/
- [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Taleb
- [7] http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/tenprinciples.pdf
- [8] http://duncandavidson.com/2009/03/dear-speakers.html
Google Gears doesn’t support 64-bit Linux at all, Debian or otherwise. There’s an issue on Google Code tracking the problem, including links to unofficial 64-bit builds.