Gadget Wishlist

How about a small GPS-mouse sized device which bridges from bluetooth to wireless. Think about it. Almost every cell phone or PDA has built-in bluetooth, and a web-browser. But very few come with support for wireless.

Please, somebody build this baby and sell it for around 50€!

Tool of the Week: baobab

I'm amazed at what useful things you can find within gnome. I accidentally discovered this one, when I installed ubuntu on my old laptop the other week. baobab is a tool which summarizes and visualized filesystem usage. So when you're wondering where all those gigabytes have gone, try this tool. It seems that baobab has migrated into gnome-utils, although I find the current gnome-utils homepage less informative than the (obsolete) original one.

Miscellaneous Things - Part I

Hi there, finally after visiting some project partners in Finland and attending this years NIPS conference, I'm finally back.

I'd like to finish of this year (or at least the pre-Christmas period) with pointers to two interesting pages which are not all that new (but interesting...):

Clay Shirky has some nice articles on semantic web and the futility of building an ontologoy which fits all applications. As I said these articles are not new but contain many nice examples to illustrate why such a top-down approach might not be a good idea.

Then, being a scientist myself and therefore depending on getting my work published, the existing peer review process is always a topic worth discussion. It seems that the nature magazine has recently picked up on that topic.

Merry Christmas!