It has been predicted that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost more than the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was the effort to rebuild the whole of Western Europe at the end of WWII. Something is definitely wrong there…
archive for the News category
Buy some toys for sick children at xmas.
So, the big Y! makes yet another social-software purchase and buys del.icio.us. I started using delicious last year and while I didn’t find the whole book marking thing that useful I do try to trawl delicious popular once a day to catch up on all the latest trends. It seem that Yahoo! is taking taking a different approach to the big G. Google tend to hire the super-academics and take the “look how smart we are” approach. Whilst Yahoo! are hiring (and buying) the entrepreneurs to broaden their portfolio of online services to provide to Yahoo! users, “look how friendly we are”.
It’s quite a turn around as Google used to be the friendly new kid on the block, with Yahoo the bumbling, messy old guy trying to keep up. Now everyone is realising that Google is not infallible, is making billions of dollars a year, has endless beta cycles and generally wants to index every bit of data, ever. Yahoo are trying to get close to the people who use their products, they’ve finally got into blogging, launched a nicer API than Google and started buying up the social apps that people actually use (upcoming, flickr, delicious etc). I still like Google’s products, Maps is just awesome, but somehow I feel they’ve become more corporatey than Yahoo!
So I’m adding to the general blogosphere buzz by blogging about a blogging tool. A while ago I put my email address into some box on wordpress.com and a few days ago I got an invite to start a blog. WordPress.com offers a free pre-installed wordpress hosting solution much like blogger. So I setup a completely pointless blog just to try it out.
It’s a very neat setup, you can do almost everything you can on a normal wordpress setup except edit the actual page templates. It comes with a choice of eight different themes which is more than adequate for this type of service. I think I’ll stick to my own hosted wordpress install though. The geek in me requires much more customisation than wordpress.com allows.
So, hurricane Katrina turned out to be a lot worse than anyone expected. I know everyone is saying the same thing, (with a lot of passion in some cases) but it is quite amazing that the Bush administration can fund the invasion and occupancy of a country half-way around the world. Yet cannot give sufficient help to people in its own country. Lack of communication and excess red tape seems to be to blame for a lot of the delays. The post 9/11 knee-jerk reactionary Department For Homeland Security just seems to have added another level of bureacracy into the whole governmental apparatus.
A whole bunch of geeks stayed behind and and holed up on the 27th floor of a New Orleans ISP keeping a journal, which is fascinating yet scary reading. I can’t help feeling that the worlds greatest super-power has enough money, but if want to you can donate through the Red Cross.
$ cd Afghanistan
$ ls
bin Taliban
$ rm Taliban
rm: Taliban is a directory
$ cd Taliban
$ ls
soldiers
$ rm soldiers
$ cd ..
$ rmdir Taliban
rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty
$ cd Taliban
$ ls -a
. .. .insurgents
$ chown -R USA .*
chown: .insurgents: Not owner
$ cd ..
$ su
Password: *******
# mv Taliban /tmp
# exit
It’s all pretty horrendous although compared to Madrid we got off lightly. Also, when put in the context of what happen every day in Iraq, this is nothing. Also, I’m glad to see that Alex is alright.