Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, September 29, 2003

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Nokia Snapshot of the Future: "In a move analysts say is an indicator of what's to come in the camera-phone business, Nokia releases a series of imaging products, including a necklace, digital picture frame and kaleidoscope." [Wired News]

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Two new Lisa Rein songs online: "Lisa Rein has posted two more of her original songs to her site: Hiding and It's Alright. Both very good, both under a Creative Commons license." [Boing Boing Blog]

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Java for Bioinformatics: "Bioinformaticians and biological scientists have to sift through a lot of data. Visualization helps. While Perl has been a mainstay of bioinformatics, several projects and APIs in the Java world are making Java a viable development language. Stephen Montgomery surveys the scene. [O'Reilly Network ONJava.com, via A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

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Linux for Poets: "Once upon a time Unix used to be for geeks only -- the platform of choice for godlike SysAdmins and obsessed hackers who muttered strange phrases and giggled over inside jokes, as they swigged gallon after gallon of Mountain Dew. [...] Then a strange thing happened: Unix started to get friendlier. [...] Finally, that bastion of the Hide the Moving Parts Club, Apple, broke all tradition and built a lovely and sophisticated operating system, Mac OS X, on top of a Unix platform. [...] Today's Unix: slicker, safer, smaller, better...but push aside the fancy graphics and built-in functionality and simple installation, and you're still going to be faced, at one time or another, with a simple command line and dire warnings about what not to do." [Burningbird]

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Your photos are beautiful...: "The problem with film photography is that the costs can be prohibitive, especially if you use professional film and development. With the digital camera, there were no costs involved and I felt free to experiment, try new things, explore new territory. By doing this, I was able to find not only the type of photography I enjoy -- journalistic photography, not what is known as 'art' photography -- but also to post examples online and get excellent, brilliant, and spot on feedback from readers." [Burningbird]

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Pentax Optio33LF: "Pentax UK has today announced the Optio33LF. It has a 3.2 megapixel CCD, 3X optical zoom lens and advanced PENTAX image processing technologies. It also offers the advantage of a handy swivelling LCD monitor [...]" [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

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Proposal for a collaborative learning system: "As a self taught programmer I have always been interested in finding better and faster ways of educating myself on any subject. In my experience I have found the biggest blockade to learning is the quality of information. The problems I most commonly encounter are: Assumes you already have studied a certain technique/skill/area but fails to mention this. [...] Wastes time explaining a different subject to the one it is meant to be explaining. [...] There is no structure across different documents which often leaves gapping holes in a students knowledge." [kuro5hin.org]