http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net Pseudo-random experience capitalization by Jean-Marc Liotier, just in case... Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:05:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In a comment to a nostalgic utterance by Louis Gray, I found that Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie) expressed best what happens when participants in online communities move on : "That's the problem of online communities - they cannot move. It doesn't matter how good the community is now, people just wont agree ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2010/03/11/what-happens-when-participants-in-online-communities-move-on Solid state drives provide incredible IOPS compared to hard disks. But the consideration of cost rules them out as primary mass storage. But for most applications you would not consider storing everything in RAM either - yet RAM cache is part of any storage system. Why wouldn't we take advantage ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2010/03/09/understanding-how-to-use-ssd-as-hybrid-storage-pools-for-zfs Yesterday, while Google Buzz was still only a rumor, I felt that there was a slight likelyhood that Google’s entry into the microblogging field would support decentralized interoperability using the OpenMicroBlogging protocol pioneered by the Status.net open source micro messaging platform. I was wrong about that, but it was quite ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2010/02/10/no-openmicroblogging-in-google-buzz-and-no-twitter-api-but-plenty-of-other-protocols-including-salmon According to a report from the Wall Street Journal mentioned by ReadWriteWeb, Google might be offering a microblogging service as soon as this week. When Google opened Google Talk, they opened the service to XMPP/Jabber federation. As a new entrant in a saturated market, opening up is the logical move. The collaborative ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2010/02/09/will-google-support-openmicroblogging Nothing new, but as Paul Currion remarks, the Haïti post-earthquake crisis shows once again that media and governments alike are still operating under the rule of sensationalism : "Nobody can deny that Haiti needs assistance right now to save lives, but it also needed assistance yesterday when the infant mortality rate ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2010/01/15/if-it-bleeds-it-leads-drama-sells-but-no-one-really-cares-about-haiti After days of being pestered by Corseman, here is the list of the Android applications I use after a few months of optimizing my selection. All of them are free, but many are free as in "free beer" rather than free as in "freedom". Communications : K-9 - Excellent IMAP client. A ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2010/01/12/my-favorite-free-android-applications The quality of OpenStreetMap's work speaks for itself, but it seems that we need to speak about it too - especially now that Google is attempting to to appear as holding the moral high ground by using terms such as "citizen cartographer" that they rob of its meaning by conveniently ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2009/12/17/countering-googles-map-maker-propaganda Today I mentioned that 15 years late, I had finally put a name on a past adolescent problem : patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS). As far as I understood, it is a growth related muscle unbalance that solves itself when the body reaches maturity. As usual with most of my microblogging, I ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2009/12/15/medical-marketers-find-customers-by-watching-microblogs-for-symptomatic-keywords The October 2008 article "American troops in Afghanistan through the eyes of a French OMLT infantryman" gathered more than two hundred comments and will be past a hundred thousand visits by most reasonable accounts before the year ends (see 2008 traffic and 2009 traffic). I though that translating this piece ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2009/12/10/impressions-of-american-troops-by-a-french-soldier-still-sparking-interest-a-year-later As Ars Technica announced three days ago,  Intel's 2009 launch of its ambitious Larrabee GPU's has been canceled : "The project has suffered a final delay that proved fatal to its graphics ambitions, so Intel will put the hardware out as a development platform for graphics and high-performance computing. But ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2009/12/07/what-intels-larrabee-gpu-is-about On 13th May 2008, Facebook announced ”Right now we’re building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat“. The news has been greeted positively in various places everywhere. A year later, strictly nothing had happened, and ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2009/11/05/xmpp-support-for-facebook-chat-is-imminent Valued Lessons wrote : A lot has been written lately about Google Maps Navigation. Google is basically giving away an incredible mapping application with good mapping data for free. Why would they do such a thing? Most of the guesses I've seen basically say "they like to give stuff away for ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2009/11/02/the-overlooked-reasons-for-google-navigation-and-for-google-latitude