Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, on the future of the web.
I worry about the independent web. I worry about the content creators, and I worry that if 100 percent of the distribution of everything starts to go through just a few websites, that kills the vibrancy.
The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little device. It’s a tiny, cheap yet reasonably powerful Linux PC. Having seen the recent videos of the system running XBMC and an AirPlay client, I’m convinced they are not merely toys.
The aims of the project are laudable: the founding aim is to provide a perfect device for teaching programming and other computer skills on a very affordable device, particularly for a school environment. I think they’ve succeeded: the cheaper variant of the device is just $25.
At this price I’m almost certain to buy one to try out — almost certainly the $35 version, however, as the $25 version has no ethernet connection (though can connect to wifi via a USB dongle).
So what am I going to do with my Raspberry Pi? I’d imagine that to begin with, I shall be playing with the media centre possibilities. Running a bare-bones install with XBMC atop it seems like it could be a great system. Low-power, silent and with the power to drive HD h.264 output, the system sounds ideal for this kind of thing. The community forming around the device seems keen on this idea too, so hopefully the support will be there from those more experienced with this kind of thing — and working out which remotes work well is something best crowd-sourced.
Another dream I have is Raspberry Pi Colo, along the lines of Mac Mini Colo, though whether the hosting could be as affordable as the device I don’t know. Imagine a dedicated server for $35 + hosting. I can imagine that would keep this site going.
The power available in such cheap systems continues to amaze and inspire me. The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic acheivement.
MG Siegler: Why I hate Android
So that, ladies and gentleman, is why I hate Android. It has nothing to do with the actual product (which continues to improve every year and is quite good now). It has to do with a promise that was broken and swept under the rug.
You’ll have to read the full article for the reasons—and a fun Harry Potter analogy.
I was getting an error loading any pages in the Solr admin UI:
Error 404: missing core name in path
What this is supposed to mean is that you have a multicore Solr setup and have not included the core name in your URL used to load the admin UI. However, I don’t have more than one core; a single one is fine for my needs right now.
It turned out that the problem was quite a far cry from that which the error message implied. I had a solr.DictionaryCompoundWordTokenFilterFactory filter loaded with a dictionary text file that was not UTF-8. The filter assumes UTF-8 and so was choking on my file.
The solution was to use iconv to re-encode the dictionary file, but not before a lot of head-scratching. Even the traceback in the terminal wasn’t great, about an error in STREAM, though at least the “stream” tipped me off that it might be an issue with loading a file—once I’d figured out that if I disabled my filter the Solr admin UI would load.
It’s a little long and subject-specific, but it’s a good explanation of the mostly unconscious bias that permeates our society.
Male privilege — again — is about what men can expect as the default setting for society. A man isn’t going to have everything about him filtered through the prism of his gender first. A man, for example, who gets a job isn’t going to face with suggestions that his attractiveness or that his willingness to perform sexual favors was a factor in his being hired, nor will he be shrugged off as a “quota hire”. A man isn’t expected to be a representative of his sex in all things; if he fails at a job, it’s not going to be extrapolated that all men are unfit for that job. A man who’s strong-willed or aggressive won’t be denigrated for it, nor are men socialized to “go along to get along”. A man can expect to have his opinion considered, not dismissed out of hand because of his sex. When paired with a woman who’s of equal status, the man can expect that most of the world will assume that he’s the one in charge.
In my sphere, tech and more specifically open source, this is why organisations like the Ada Initiative are so important.