Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I’m in Berkeley for 2 days. I’m using my host’s SBC internet connection. Out of curiosity I did a quick traceroute to www.gnu.org (in Boston):
$ traceroute www.gnu.org
traceroute to gnu.org (199.232.41.10), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 10.xx.xx.xx (10.xx.xx.xx) 0.943 ms 0.897 ms 0.851 ms
2 obfuscated.snfc21.sbcglobal.net (xx.xx.xx.xx) 8.286 ms [...]

Yep, Sun kept their promise and released the full chip design for their latest Sparc CPU under the GPLv2. You need a SPARC system with (expensive) commercial software to do anything with the design, but I still think this is a pretty significant moment.
I’m very much looking forward to what will come out of this. [...]

So I finally got here on Wednesday. We’ve been doing lots of cool stuff meanwhile. I’ve installed a VDSL link between the two main buildings, giving us network access in the Villa. The Zyxel Prestige 841C/841 I bought are reliable, if a bit pricey (total cost for this setup: about CHF 600). Then I hooked [...]

So I should be in Switzerland now. And I was underway, in fact the plane had just passed Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada when the pilot announced a fuel pump had died, and we had to return to Boston. Too bad we had not reached the point of no return.
So I’m on the (extra) 16.45 flight [...]

MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), i.e. the famous $100 laptop, is now planning to use LinuxBIOS! Check out the proposed hardware specs.
This is major : there are currently no laptops that can run LinuxBIOS. If this happens, there will be millions of them. Of course this will be just one very low-end design [...]

OK, this is way cool: Google Mars. If you’ve ever read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, some of the names of geological formations should be familiar. Check out Olympus Mons – 21 km (!) above… above what actually? How do they determine the ’sea level’ if there is no sea?

Wordpress 2 uses Docking boxes which are pretty nice. I’ve integrated them into one of my projects, and other than the fact that there seems to be a limit of 10 boxes on the number of boxes whose state is stored in the cookie, they work very nicely. They’re pretty simple to integrate too.
My [...]

We went to see the ‘parody 2006′ at Harvard Law yesterday. It was hilarious – even though I only got maybe 25% of the jokes, not actually being in law school. Recommended – the last performance is tonight, and I think there are still tickets.
In other news the people who drop documents (see my previous [...]

I don’t know what it is, but I really often see people drop stuff when I’m walking the streets of Boston. Last sunday coming out of the supermarket, I had to run after someone who had lost a bottle of gatorade from her shopping cart. And today, waiting for the bus in Lechmere, this guy [...]

So AOL has released an AIM SDK allowing third parties to interface directly with the AIM network. Great news, right? Well, not really. The FAQ states:
Developers are not permitted to build Custom Clients that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network.
Not only that; you also need to get a ‘key’ from AOL to [...]