Nothing and Some More

BBC: Serendipity on the Web

Why blog works or I am weird! Normal people do not do this!

Hierarchies are not a natural way of thinking for most people most of the time. In particular, file systems are not a comfortable way for computer users to organize things. 20 years after the first GUI interface with a hierarchical filesystem, most users still save all their files in one of two places: the desktop or the documents folder. If their finger slips and they accidentally move into a different directory, they are lost.

A Summer of Code project with a blog: designing an OLPC-friendly interface for AbiWord. Read in particular Education in Nigeria and Education in Brazil

Use Google Maps Mashups in K-12 Education

Savoir si le geoportail va être remixable; pour le moment, je peux pas essayer!

Vous êtes incroyablement nombreux à vous connecter au Géoportail, portail des territoires et des citoyens depuis sa mise en ligne. Nous avons enregistré plusieurs millions de connexions en quelques heures. En raison de cette affluence, le site est actuellement saturé. Nos équipes mettent tout en œuvre pour vous permettre d'y accéder à nouveau dans des conditions de navigation satisfaisantes et vous remercient de l'intérêt que vous portez à ce site interministériel novateur.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust: their mission is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.

On an island near the North Pole, heads of State from five Nordic countries and the Global Crop Diversity Trust laid the cornerstone today for a “fail-safe” seed vault to be carved into an Arctic mountain. The vault will ensure the long-term survival of the world’s vital food crops.

1=.99999...

EETimes In search of 'electronic kg'

The kilogram, the standard unit of mass, is the only one of the seven key International System of Units (SI units) that is still based on a physical artifact. That item is a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy, about 39 mm high and 39 mm in diameter, housed in a temperature-controlled vault near Paris. Other standards, such as the meter, are now defined in terms of reproducible standards (in this case, the wavelength of a transition of krypton energy states).

Why There Are No Indie Video Games - And why that's bad for gamers (via /.)

The Independent Games Festival has a new website (via Game Set Watch (GSW))

Serious games source, the community

Build your own bridge - there is a free version of the game Bridge Builder for Windows, OSX, and Linux for the 30th bridge building contest, a special for Soccer Word Cup 2006: download and build a bridge!!! (via GSW

Armadillo Run is a physics-based puzzle game. You have to build structures with the purpose of getting an armadillo to a certain point in space. (via GSW)

In case you wonder, Bemani is the Konami's music video game division

Special Vieux Con: the 'Hall Of Light' Amiga game database, with Captain Blood (via Game Set Watch, of course)

Two data recovery utilities: TestDisk: recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again; and PhotoRec: recover lost pictures and videos (via NTK)

And 100 security tools

A LiveCD Linux distro supports traditional Chinese: Taiwan's B2D Project this week released a new Knoppix-based Linux distribution that includes both KDE and GNOME on a single liveCD. B2D is a Debian-based Linux distribution with user environment and read/write support for traditional Chinese.

A LiveCD to try Rails

A LiveCD to try Zope

A LiveCD to try Mono

And for the rest, try Knoppix or Ubuntu

DV Magazine: The Boundaries of Copyright, or a short guide on how to use copyrighted material in your movies (use BugMeNot)

Royal Society to try open access science publishing

Global Alliance for ICT and Development

A conversation with Dan Thomas and Suzanne Peck about open government

Africa i-Parliaments is the portal of the regional initiatives of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs aimed at strengthening the role of African Parliaments in fostering democracy and good governance by developing common information services and tools, and building information management capabilities with the objective of making Parliaments i-nterconnected, i-nformed i-ndependent, or in short, i-Parliaments.

Le Conseil des Ministres Belge vient de décider que le format de document ODF (Open Document Format) doit pouvoir être lu par toutes les administrations publiques belges pour septembre 2007. (via LinuxFr)

OneWorld south Asia is committed to empower the community using ICTs as an effective communication medium

The next United Nation Secretary General blog

LeMonde: Un candidat à la succession de Kofi Annan exalte le multilatéralisme

Outre M. Dhanapala, trois autres candidats asiatiques sont sur les rangs: le ministre sud-coréen des affaires étrangères Ban Ki-moon, le Premier ministre adjoint thaïlandais Surakiart Sathirathai et le secrétaire général adjoint de l'Onu chargé de la communication, l'Indien Shashi Tharoor.