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Prelude, a Metacity Theme which has minimal window decoration. Great for small screens such as the Dell Mini 9.

Very cool(for me anyway) map of New Zealand from 1843. A couple of noticeable name differences are:

• New Ulster, New Munster, and New Leinster are the North, South and Stewart Islands respectively.
• Tasman Bay is known as Blind Bay(Tasman Bay of D’Urville).

This comes from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection which has plenty of other cool maps to checkout.

Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Software

“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.”

I found it hard to pull just a single quote of this piece out, it’s a quick read that just makes you start thinking. If the calculation of how much effort has gone into Wikipedia is even close, this is an amazing way to look at it.

My consumption to production ratio is so low it’s embarrassing.

Leonard Lin: Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

The hack for the iPlayer from last week was closed by the BBC, but only by more obsfucation. Therefore, there is a patch for last weeks script which fixes the problem.

Reading the comments there are a few people out there working on making this better, and it looks like there is a script to generate an RSS feed for the iplayer website.

Went and saw the Underground: Londons Hidden Architecture at New London Architecture this weekend.

They had a big model of central London which was pretty cool.

From the “it’s almost certainly been done better somewhere else” department, here is my script to fire off a Gnome Notification after a shell command finishes.

a python script:

#!/usr/bin/python
from pynotify import *
import sys

def notify(message=""):
    n = Notification("Command Line Completed", message)
    n.show()

init("cli notify")
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    notify(sys.argv[1])
else:
    notify()

Then just add it to your path and you can append it onto some command:

echo monkey && mynotify.py "some message"

You then get a notification like so:

BBC’s iPlayer is good, but this makes it better.

Found via

Joe Armstrong: Scalable fault-tolerant upgradable systems, part 1.

A system that is fault-tolerant can easily be made scalable and easily made so that we can do in-service upgrade.

Part 1, cool. Looking forward to the rest of this.

19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development