UFies.org

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1

After a slew of Alphas, the latest release of Ubuntu has hit Beta. You can see more information at the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Technical Overview page. Looking forward to seeing how this works on my home machine!

College Humor Internet Troll Skit

Awesome sketch from College Humor on Internet Trolls. Best 2 comments are the "usenet flame war of '99" and the Steve Jobs one. Great stuff as always.

Stellar Work From Stuck In Customs

I don't normally pimp random photos, or Trey Ratcliff's work in general, as I assume that everyone already reads his blog. However the latest shot is frikkin' amazing, and best viewed large and on black (click the image to view it). Amazing detail and beautiful HDR work.

The 20 Greatest Shows Canceled By Fox Before Their Time

Great list of The 20 Greatest Shows Canceled By Fox Before Their Time. Some real classics in there, but some that I've never heard of (though the 'counting with Bruce Springsteen' sketch on the Ben Stiller show clip is great).

Sadly it looks like most of the video clips have been pulled by.... Fox. *sigh*. Tell me again how video clips of cancelled shows is going to threaten them?

2010 Winter Paralympics @ The Big Picture

Another great set of images of the 2010 Winter Paralympics at The Big Picture. Pro tip (thanks MacBreak Weekly) you can use the j and k keys to move up and down the pictures.

Chat Roulette Video

This chat roulette video from Casey is good and goes in and defines what this new phenomenon is all about.

Alpaca on a Surfboard

Snuzzy has a video of an Alpaca on a surfboard.

Sometimes the world really just doesn't make sense.

Get a Real Human On The Phone

GetHuman.com is a directory of numbers and tips to get a real person on the phone when calling those big companies.

"No Dashes Or Spaces" Hall of Shame

John Gruber points to the "No Dashes Or Spaces" Hall of Shame, showing off stupid sites that can't figure out how to parse CC numbers with spaces or dashes in them.

Happy Meal One Year Old

Boingboing has a horrifying story about a Happy Meal that shows no decay in a year on a shelf. Either it's terrifying that that stuff is eaten (cause it's so damn good) or good to know it'll survive the apocalypse and sustain the survivors....

Ruby Best Practices - Full Book Now Available For Free!

That about says it all! Kudos to the author for doing this, and please donate and support him!

Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers

Another great find from Aryk - Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers over at Kevin Pang's site. I agree with all of these.

IE9 Info From MIX'10 (updated)

From MIX '10 comes some Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview Info. Short story: HTML5, hardware acceleration, and a public download that's appears to be available (Vista SP2 + only).

Personally I don't care about the IE9 rendering engine that much, even if it's faster than chrome/webkit/mozilla by a factor or 10x. What has put me off IE again and again is the user interface that sits around the rendering engine. The feel of it is sluggish and feels just.... "bleah". The big long list of icons to the right of the tabs, the menu bar sitting in the middle, the weird button/dropdowns for things like suggested sites, the little icon that pops up every time I select something and the huge long context menus.... Yech! I'm sure some of these things can be turned off, but honestly I don't get far enough to even bother, cause I just use IE to download firefox/chrome.

However for you fine readers, I'll take a bullet and am installing it on my home machine and will give it a run and report back. Who knows, maybe MS has taken the Windows 7 and Zune approach and hit one out of the park this time?

Update: OK, so the download is a tech preview, of no use to "normal" users as it is basically a rendering window with no UI. Only 55/100 on the ACID3 test, and the one quick test of the HTML5 site I tried (this canvas experiment) failed. The YouTube HTML5 site also doesn't work, but that could be a browser detection issue. Still, I have hopes that the speed/html5/css3 demos that they are showing off turn out being real in the end. Bringing these new technologies (blah blah not an official standard yet blah blah) to the browser that still (somehow) has 70%+ of the market (or whatever it is these days) is a Good Thing.

10 Funniest Wedding Fails

Oddee.com has a good list of 10 Funniest Wedding Fails.

Death Star/Force Comparison Chart

Kudos to James Strocel for pointing me to the Death Star vs Force comparison chart.