Hughservers.com

Well, it is a day late.  Whoops.  So again, another bit of a short one really.  Just a few links that have caught my eye over the past week or so.

Firstly, OpenID has been gaining a lot more ground recently.  Quite a fair few start-ups are using it.  If you do like the idea of a open ‘passport’ kind of system, it is well worth a look.
Here are a couple of nice linuxy blogs, that are pretty interesting.  The first one is a post about how to upgrade Ubuntu to include a lot of the things that most take for granted these days.  The second is an announcement of the first motherboard to be able to use the linuxBIOS.

And finally, is a rather interesting piece of research.  It is a image of the relationship map at a American High School.  Odd, but interesting.  Wierd job as well.

Well I’ve managed to get myself addicted to World of Warcraft.  Whoops.  This shouldn’t affect SSL too much tho.  I hope.

Personally there hasn’t been much that has grabbed me over the past week or so.  This means this post will be a bit light on info this week.  Sorry.

I think the main one was Yahoo Pipes.  I first found out about it via the O’Reilly blog.  Quite a lot of people are hyping it up as the ‘next big thing’.  It does look rather cool, but I have to wonder how many people will get into it as it is relatively technical.  Basically you can use any one of a number of RSS style feeds and formats to create your own unique feeds.  There is a lot more you can do with it, but basically it is a mashup for RSS/Atom etc.

In a nice twist on the tidy your life style sites, there is a chap who has hidden a lot of his computer under his desk.  Various things, routers, external HDDs, external DVD burners etc etc, all hidden under his desk.  Pretty nifty really.

I’m not going to be doing anything about Steve Yegge, as I haven’t had a chance to read his posts this week.  They are that massive and WoW and a community site that I run have taken up all my time.

So with no further ado, back to those two things!

Hello and welcome to a slightly more regular edition of Some Sunday Links.

The latest version of Wordpress is now out and actually, to be honest, has been out for sometime. But I’m going to briefly mention that and then try and upgrade before next weekend. Erk. Lets hope I’m still here.

For quite a while now, I’ve been meaning to throw some webcomic reviews into the mix on these sunday posts. So, for the last few days I’ve been going through the Player Versus Player archives. In the interested of research you understand? Right! Riiiiiight. Player Versus Player, or PvP as it is more commonly known has been around since 1998. It has undergone quite a few visual changes since it started back then. Black and white has been replaced by colour. The way the characters are drawn has been overhauled once and gradual tweaks are generally always happening. However, the general quality of the storylines hasn’t diminished. The comic is always good to read.

Like many webcomics, PvP started off as a mainly gaming comic, detailing the adventures of a group of journalists at a gaming magazine. Doesn’t sound like the greatest story in the world, but as I said, PvP is well written and complemented by good solid artwork. the main characters are the editor, Cole, the art editor, Brent, a senior columnist, Jade and Francis, a teenager working at the magazine, who runs the techical side of things. And there is the troll, Skull. Skull is a mythical creature from Ultima Online, he is technically an intern at the office, but is generally a mascot.

There is a rather large supporting cast, but instead of boring you with endless details, I’ll just advise you to start at the beginning and work your way forwards.

Vista? Vistaschmista! It is all about Vienna now. Yup, that’s right, Microsoft have given their next version of the Windows operating system a codename. It had previously been blackcomb, which was announced in 2000, but due to the monumental cock-up with Vista, they’ve renamed it and re-jigged it. According to Ben Fathi, the corporate vice-president of development, it is scheduled for late 2009. Thats about 2 and a half years from now. I can’t quite believe that they’re going to try and foist another OS on us that soon. They are currently having quite a battle to convince most people that switching to Vista is a worthwhile idea.
I’ve not been checking some of my favourite blogs recently so I’ve managed too miss several of Steve Yegge’s most recent posts. I’ll go through them and provide some hit and miss commentary on them next week.

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over Wikipedia this week. If you believe the hype, Wikipedia and by extension the whole Wikimedia foundation has the cash to run it’s servers for a few more months and then poof! It vanishes in a puff of smoke. However saner heads have prevailed and a slightly more accurate quote has emerged from the darkness courtesy of Laurence Haug. A few people have commented on the usual effect of the blogosphere distorting the original quote. Noting that it is often better to quote those who were actually there and not those who weren’t. Oh well, I’m sure someone somewhere has learnt a lesson from it…

How to make your own Gauss pistol. An utterly awesome but scary thought. However to allay fears, the built gun is equivalent to a air pistol in power. It is a pretty neat project and he plans on providing kits and plans to make the gun. Currently the site doesn’t have much information about how you actually build the gun. It has a fair few pictures and a decent amount of explanation. Probably enough that you could build it if you had a pretty good handle on physics and the like. It isn’t a rail gun however, it is a coil gun.

And I quote:From HVWiki: “Coil Gun: A device that accelerates a ferromagnetic projectile using a coil of wire and a pulsed power source, usually capacitors. A large current is put through the coil, making it magnetic and attracting the ferromagnetic projectile. When the projectile passes through the coil, the current switches off and the coil loses its magnetism, allowing the projectile to keep going“.

One other rather nice website that has caught my eye recently, is the art of science website. It is from Princeton university in America and it is a exhibition of images, videos and sounds all gathered from the pursuit and research of science. The range of media is wide and quite stunning. I’ve always been a fan of electron microscope images, this one is particulary nice.

Quite a while has passed since I last updated this. I’m hoping to get back in the saddle, so hopefully you’ll hear something from me this weekend.