Octopart is a search engine for electronic parts.

Super Neat.

Octopart - Electronic Parts, Electronic Components, Datasheets

Learn a new language

What is Learnit? A tool for learners which helps your brain store new words quickly.

Learnit helps you:

* Learn words quickly
* Say them right
* Know the most important words
* Test what you know

A nice little embeddable widget that teaches you 10 words a day in a foreign language. Defintely value here.

Learnit Lists

When Chua wrote his seminal paper, he used mathematics to deduce the existence of a fourth circuit element type after resistors, capacitors and inductors, which he called a memristor, because it "remembers" changes in the current passing through it by changing its resistance. Now HP claims to have discovered the first instance of a memristor, which it created with a bi-level titanium dioxide thin-film that changes its resistance when current passes through it.

"This new circuit element solves many problems with circuitry today--since it improves in performance as you scale it down to smaller and smaller sizes," said Chua. "Memristors will enable very small nanoscale devices to be made without generating all the excess heat that scaling down transistors is causing today."

Memristors, they exist!

When I first started at SEOmoz about 9 months ago, I was the web development intern. My experience prior to the internship was limited entirely to writing code. Since then, I have spent literally hundreds of hours expanding my knowledge into different areas. Specifically, I have focused on accepted SEO techniques and small business practices. My beginner SEO checklists of the last few weeks have been the tangible result of my newly acquired knowledge. In an effort to return to my roots, I spent the majority of the day compiling what I believe to be the mother of all technical SEO cheat sheets. The recommended viewing format of this cheat sheet is as a PDF rather than the traditional blog post (I found the blog posts inconvenient to print). Let me know if this new format works better for all of you. I also included snippets below so you can see what is on the cheat sheet before you download it. Enjoy!

SEOmoz | The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

Tibetan Technology Center

The Tibetan Technology Center is a charitable organization dedicated to harness modern technology for helping the Tibetan community in India.

The center is located at the Tibetan Children's Villages School (TCV) which host and supports it.

The center is managed by a board of directors who work closely and consult with a large group of local and International technology experts.

Tibetan Technology Center | Tibetan Technology Center

The web-site of the Tibetan Technology Center
The Tibetan Technology Center is a charitable organization dedicated to harness modern technology for helping the Tibetan community in India.

Learn more about the center, it’s aims and projects at: -About us-

Tibetan Technology Center | Tibetan Technology Center

Funny. It has been exactly the opposite for us.
We're running a bunch of xfires (14 boxes total, 4100, 4200, 4150) here
and initially started out with solaris because the wise guys said it's faster,
more stable, oh and no least you get that shiny "platinum support" badge...

Yea it was all that and the zfs hype, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing much to be honest. We fell in love with the hardware immediately
and the machines hummed along without too much trouble. Postgres performs
well, java performs well, and ZFS snapshots are a blessing.

Despite all that superficial happyness we switched most of the hosts to linux
(and aim for 100% linux) after a few months. We still love ZFS (and can't wait
for a linux equivalent) but that alone couldn't justify sticking to solaris for us.

What broke it for us is the userland with all its subtle differences
to linux, or in other words: the learning curve. This may sound strange when
talking about a UNIX OS but as a linux shop we're spoiled by the GNU toolchain,
by dead-simple package management and all the little everyday things that just
work a tiny little bit different under solaris.

I'm not saying the linux-UI is better (actually, it is in many
places, but that's not the point here), it's just that we all grew
up with linux, so the solaris CLI "felt like a really old version of linux"
(to paraphrase a coworker) from the start.

Solaris V Linux

Why OpenSolaris Failed To Build a Community

Mr. Alden seems to know about internet access in East Africe.

www.ralden.com - home

This is a commonly reinvented wheel, and the version Stefan (metze) Metzmacher suggested in samba-technical is the round one (;-))

A maximally useful log message contains a number of fixed items, usually in a fixed-format header of some sort, and text for the human reader to use to understand the implications of the problem.

From memory, the fixed information includes enough to allow for mechanical sorting by nastiness and occasionally mechanical processing:

- date/time
- origin, meaning machine- or domain-name
- source, in some detail,, including the executable name and process id as a minimum, if applicable, and optionally the file, function and line, it is good to make this one token, for ease of parsing and resilience when one line has "sendmail:parse.c:parse_it:332:1948" and another has only "mconnect:1293"
- pre-classification, meaning the application type, error type and severity. DFAs can switch on this, and should.

The old ARPA format was error type source and severity as three decimal digits, which you still see when smtp says "250 ok". The 2 was permanent success, the 5 meant "the app", in this case smtp, and 0 was the severity. I prefer ascii, not numbers (;-))
- then the text for the human, saying the meaning of the error, the same way you're supposed to write the **meaning** of code in comments, not just say what the code does.

Syslog does about half of this, metze's did most of it.

Information for good log messages - Journal of davecb (6526)

The Festival Speech Synthesis System

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. Other groups release new languages for the system. And full tools and documentation for build new voices are available through Carnegie Mellon's FestVox project (http://festvox.org)

The Festival Speech Synthesis System