GIMP.org Easter Egg

I was looking at the source code of gimp.org when I came across an Easter egg! To see the Easter egg, head over to gimp.org and type "eek".

Flickr Video of the Day: Night Run II, 1st Half

Night Run II, 1st Half (Houston Ship Channel), originally uploaded by OneEighteen

Jetpack: ready for takeoff

Mozilla Labs has released Jetpack, an API (add-on) for allowing the community to write Firefox add-ons using common web technologies.

Currently, Jetpack is still experimental and shares some similarities with Ubiquity, although both projects have different aims.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack - Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Contig: Single-file Defragmenter

Instead of running a disk defragmenter on a single partition, it might be faster (and more optimal) to run a file defragmenter. Contig, from Sysinternals, is a a freeware that uses the native Windows NT defragmentation support to analyse and defrag specific files.

Uses
For instance, if you use a system-managed pagefile, your system performance may be slow if your pagefile is heavily fragmented. Hence, it would be wise to defrag the pagefile (normally hidden at C:\pagefile.sys). Defraging hiberfil.sys may also improve the time required to resume form hibernation. Hence, defraging heavily used files (which have high-tendencies to be the point weakest links), may generally improve system performance.

For those who prefer not to use the command line, PowerDefragmenter (combined with Contig), is the solution.

Pro-Choice vs Pro-Life

Surely, Facebook gives us a choice here:

Facebook: I support the right to choose one element from each set in a collection

Do you believe that an infinite product of nonempty sets should be nonempty? Do you feel that non-measurable subsets of the reals should exist? Or games of perfect information with no winning strategy for either player? Do you believe that every set should have a well-ordering, or that any poset in which every chain has an upper bound is entitled to a maximal element? Do nonzero rings have the right to a maximal ideal? Is every vector space entitled to a basis? Should fields have algebraic closures? Should products of compact topological spaces be compact, and countable unions of countable sets be countable? Do you want to be able to cut a sphere up into a finite number of pieces and reassemble them, with only rigid motions, into a sphere twice as large?

It's all possible if you're pro-axiom-of-choice!

versus

Facebook: The Axiom of Life (aka Negation of Axiom of Choice)

Do you have nightmares of being split apart, reassembled, and finding two of yourself? Do you wonder just how large is a non-measurable set, roughly speaking? Then this is the group for you, advocating the negation of AC (or at least replacement by the axiom of dependent choice if you actually need to prove a theorem for some reason).

Think Different

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Wikipedia: The one-minute commercial featured black and white video footage of significant historical people of the past, including (in order) Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), R. Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso. The commercial ends with an image of a young girl, Shaan Sahota, opening her closed eyes, as if to see the possibilities before her.

Google Reader as Scheduler

Is it possible to use Google Reader as a job scheduler? (albeit an unreliable one)

According to Google, feeds with only one subscriber get updated every 3 hours, while the rest are updated every hour.

More Random

1. 24ways December 2008 archive
2. Shortest way to test for IE: IE=’\v’==’v’
3. 8-minute history of the Internet
4. Free Ubuntu Pocket Guide
5. Star Trek TV Spot #4, #5, #6, #7
6. Mozilla's Bespin is awesome
7. The new Google Chrome 2 beta is even faster.
8. Elements of Style (worth reading and mastering)
9. NYT's 100 days blog (very insightful)
10. Communications of the ACM

Flickr Photo of the Day: Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace, originally uploaded by dikaiteo

Obama on Science

On The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, President Obama said, "We need young people, instead of -- a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide if they want to be an engineer, they want to be a scientist, they want to be a doctor or a teacher. And if we are rewarding those kind of things that actually contribute to making things and making people's lives better -- that's going to put our economy on solid footing. We won't have this kind of bubble and burst with the economy that we have gotten so caught up with in the last several years."