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10 years of commenting on slashdot finally paid off!

Sadly, the site is not what it used to be. It seems to be mostly reposting stuff I already read elsewhere. It used to be the case that they actually had the news when it was still hot. Part of the attraction always was their rapid response time to news events. That seems to have completely gone. I read about steve jobs liver transplant a full day ahead of the slashdot post.

I used to be a pretty regular commenter there. Now I tend to comment less and less.

I’m still getting used to no longer being in nokia research center. One of my disappointments of being in NRC and being a vocal proponent of openid, social networks, etc. was that despite lots of discussion on this topic not much has happened in terms of me getting room to work on these topics or me convincing a lot of people about my opinions on these topics. I have one publication that is due out whenever the magazine involved gets around to approving and printing the article. But that’s it.

A few years ago, a good friend gave me a nice little present: 5 kilos of dead tree in the form of Stephen Wolfram’s “A new kind of science”. I never read it cover to cover and merely scanned a few pages with lots of pretty pictures before deciding that this wasn’t really my cup of tea. I also read a bit some of the criticism on this book from the scientific community. I’m way out of my league there so, no comments from be except a few observations:

Shared by jillesvangurp Only in Finland :-)

Great idea!! Finally someone challenging the state-run monopoly, Alko, with an improved service!!

Finnish health authorities are launching an investigation into a business that delivers Estonian alcoholic beverages in Finland door-to-door. For the past few weeks an Alko taxi, a van painted in a garish yellow, has been delivering Estonian alcoholic beverages to thirsty dwellers in the capital city region.

Customers place and pay for their orders online. To date some 50 orders—mostly in Helsinki—have been placed with this unconventional drink-dispensing service. Vasili Visnapuu, who’s in charge of the cab’s deliveries, says the business is legit as the alcoholic beverages are delivered for free and because the transaction occurs on the internet.

Oops, nevermind, no one better compete against our state monopolies!! Plus, it’s run by evil foreigners, even worse…Estonians!! SHUT’EM DOWN!! (looks like their website has been shutdown already)

ECMA International heeft Microsofts OpenXML Paper Specification tot standaard verheven. Met OpenXPS kan zowel de inhoud als de vormgeving van documenten worden beschreven. Het formaat is een concurrent van Adobes pdf-formaat.

RESTEasy is JBoss's implementation of the JAX-RS specification. It is used to write RESTful web services and clients in Java. A lot of new features in this release including Guice support, caching, and interceptors to name a few.