'some portions of the experience, such as the sky, may be replaced by personalised advertising.' Uploading your consciousness in the age of copyright maximalism, as Nelson Minar put it (via Nelson)

A great getting-out-of-Flickr life-raft. self-hosted, PHP app, storing photos in Dropbox, S3, or local disk; UI screenshots look great (via Nelson)

Great little summary of useful algorithms

Fluid dynamics

Another approach to caching disks with SSDs in Linux

Linux kernel patch to use an SSD as a cache in front of hard drives

"Map projections are transformations between one shape to another, often a 2d surface like a screen or printout. Below is a mercator projection alongside an orthographic (azimuthal) projection, and a mapping of points - every 10 degrees latitude and longitude, between the two. The orthographic projection is also inaccurate: the world is not a sphere. This is made with d3."

Excellent analysis of a failure of customer service

"Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant of the Ubuntu Server operating system, configured specifically for virtual appliances."

An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'

A little color theory for you

"All that’s left is utter, hopeless zugzwang.

Sadly this, if nothing else, is what unites us. This dreadful unease. This feeling that every option we have is a bad one. And this resentment we feel from being told that it has to be this way, that there are no other options, because these are the rules of the game. But like Poe said, “there’s games and then there’s life. They ain’t the same thing.” It doesn’t have to be this way."

sounds like an impressive young man

Pirate scene has cracked the game one day before release

like Tivo, but sources from Usenet

public laboratory, using balloon mapping.

New approach to terrain shading for maps. Mixes absolute elevation with relative elevation; does not use light coming from the side to shade (so features are visible at any angle). More expensive to compute, but shows more details and allows cheap zooming.