It’s that time again folks, sign up your LoCo. “But Jorge, your LoCo isn’t on there either!” you say, well, that’s because this is the time we start to plan and looking for venues, finding out what kind of jam you want to do and start preparations for the weekend of 26-28 March.

This would also be a good time for your LoCo to find if there’s a hackerspace in your area and get involved in their development. Also, this is the first time we’re having … upgrade jams, where people can concentrate on the upgrade experience.

If you have questions I’m in #ubuntu-locoteams!

If a child is lost in a large Chinese city, then in 99,9% of cases his parents will never see their child again. Now let’s see how very caring parents deal with this problem in an extraordinary way.

Taken from:

http://visboo.com/keeping-a-child-safe.html

Dit blog zal zich hoofdzakelijk bezighouden met mijn ervaringen met het Belgian Ubuntu Loco Team.

RRB-ASSISTANTLOCOPILOT

Taken from: http://www.oddee.com/item_96957.aspx

Other links used:

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/08/11/man-undergoes-surgery-to-use-iphone/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1561232/iPhone-bill-is-as-thick-as-a-novel.html

http://www.kcra.com/news/19369840/detail.html?tsp=1

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/6689164/Worlds-most-expensive-iPhone-costs-1.92m.html

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/health/health/2822668/Apple-iPhone-app-helped-give-couple-baby.html

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34933053/ns/today-today_people/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/waveman216/1051568314/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/6753842/University-of-Michigan-iPhone-orchestra-prepares-for-performance.html

Twitter is making sure that they are not left out of the year of mobile / local / smart phone etc, etc by announcing a new trending service that helps users figure out what might be the buzz about things in their neck of the woods. More and more we are seeing people getting drawn back to their lives on the move rather than behind the computer screen.

The Twitter blog tells us more about this addition

As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them. Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we’ve fully launched so everyone can use it.

The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation, but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama’s election victory, versus those São Paulo, Brazil?

Depending on how active your local area is on Twitter this is a welcome addition to the functionality of the service. I think the ability to monitor different geographic areas of interest regarding some event will be a boon to anyone interested in reporting what is happening. Using the example of the Obama election victory is a good one since he has become such a polarizing public figure it might be helpful to know what the buzz on the local streets are in your town and maybe that of somewhere that you are visiting. It can help to get a feel for the mindset of an area if there is enough of a response to the trend you are investigating.

As a tool for marketers it could do great things for research for various geographic groups as well. Understanding the ‘vibe’ of an area could even help in crafting messaging for paid search ads that are being served to that area. Of course, this will not be something that affects businesses universally but it certainly could help the right kind of business.

This year is certainly about getting down to where we live. I wonder sometimes why this has become so important. Maybe it’s because people are finally seeing that while you can have ‘friends’ all around the world via social media channels that you have never met face to face you have to live day to day on the streets of your town.

Hopefully more people will be looking to experience their local lives when they know more rather than wondering what it might be like to be someplace else.

Any local thoughts?

Social Media Monitoring in Just 60-Seconds. Guaranteed!

I know this may sound silly, actually it does I’m sure, but here are the things I predict I will be missing in this new vegan, smoke-free me:

Sharing food with my husband
Sneaking out on the balcony for a cigarette and some gossip
Hmmm… now that I try to make a list… that’s about it, and you know what? I can live with that.

On that subject, this is Day 6 – and so far so great I am actually pretty impressed with how easy this has been, considering that for the past two evenings, we’ve been out to restaurants. 1st night out was too easy – fusion cuisine restaurant  so vegan choices were abundant. Last night was tricky: my lovely friends decided to go to a mexican restaurant! I still haven’t told anyone about the new me, and actually got away with refusing foods last night by claiming I was in love with the guacamole and couldn’t possibly have anything else. Truth is, the guacamole WAS excellent, really really excellent, and about the only appetizer I could have. It was served with corn tortillas. Before we went out I told my husband about me going vegan, cos we have a habit of ordering foods to share, and those habits include shrimpy and meaty foods.

On that note, I was so impressed with my husband’s reaction when I told him. I really thought he would find it weird, or wrong, instead he was super supportive and even suggested that my cooking follow those guidelines because eating more healthily was good for him too there are a billion reasons I married him, this was a billion and one

So back to mexican nite – it’s this new restaurant that just opened, called Loco, with the cutest formula ever – you get your own beer barrel table, were you pour your own pint all nite. And the food, I must say, great. Have I mentioned I live in Dubai? That is in the UAE.

So on the menu I thought I wouldn’t find anything to eat; I found the corn nachos with guacamole, and as a main dish, a spinach enchilada. Those were the only 2 items I could eat, and more than enough. We never got to the main course as appetizers were enough. So for me this was most encouraging. If I could find something to eat in a mexican restaurant… I’ll be A-ok

Not doing so great on the smoking side though I had 14 yesterday, socialising not helping… but I guess I’m bound to slip up on my first week.

Next challenge tonite: fondue let’s see me get out of this one!

Some variations of the VW Bug.

The Volkswagen Beetle is one of the world’s most recognizable vehicles. And with its iconic shape, incredible staying power and huge fan base, it’s also one of the most modified. Some people choose to modify their Beetles to make them more efficient, to help them get around in harsh weather or terrain, or to otherwise make them perform better. And others just have fun with their mods.

There’s a wide array of VW mods out there, and many of them are so wacky you wouldn’t think anyone would ever attempt them. One common theme is using the Bug as a planter, or allowing grass to grow over the entire body; this is a link to the Beetle’s image as a “hippie” car. But just as common is putting monster tires on a Bug, turning the adorable little car into an off-roading machine.

The “cute” factor isn’t lost on those VW owners who turn their Beetles into animals or who make their little cars into something equally adorable. Covering a Mustang in fake fur wouldn’t seem right, but for some reason it seems only natural to do the same to a Bug.

Then there are the mods that make some VW Bugs more art than car. These little autos may be out of service, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyed. They’ve been given a new life as objects to be admired and, sometimes, puzzled over.

(images via: Dark Roasted Blend)

Whether they’re functional or stationary pieces of art, modified VW Beetles can be found all over the world. And with the more recent New Beetles seemingly spawning in cities everywhere, we probably won’t see an end to this trend anytime soon.

\

EFE | CARACAS- El presidente venezolano, Hugo Chávez, sugirió hoy al nuevo nuncio apostólico en Venezuela, Pietro Parolin, que haga un “exorcismo” en la nunciatura, ya que, afirmó, allí estuvo alojado un opositor a su Gobierno, al que calificó de “sádico y violador”. “Le recomiendo que haga un exorcismo en la sede de la nunciatura porque el anterior” jefe de esa delegación diplomática “alojó allí a un sádico, un violador”, dijo Chávez a Parolin, a quien también dio la “bienvenida” a Venezuela como embajador de la Santa Sede.

Lea más en ABC.

In April, 29^th, 1961 a doctor of the 6^th Soviet Antarctic expedition Leonid Rogozov aged 27 felt pain in a right lower belly and fever. The next day brought only exasperation. Having no chance to call a plane and being the only doctor at the station “Novolazarevskaya”, at night, in April, 30^th the surgeon made an appendix removal operation on himself using local anesthesia. He was assisted by an engineer and the station’s meteorologist.

In 1959 Leonid Rogozov graduated from the Institute and was immediately accepted to the surgery clinical residency. However, his studies at the residency were broken off for some time due to Leonid’s trip to Antarctica in September, 1960 as a doctor of the 6^th Soviet Antarctic expedition to Novolazarevskaya station.

During this expedition there happened an event that made a 27-year old surgeon world-famous.

In the 4^th month of the wintering, in April, 29^th, 1961, Leonid showed disturbing symptoms: weakness, nausea, fever and pain in a right iliac region. The following day his temperature got even higher. Being the only doctor in the expedition consisting of 13 people, Leonid diagnosed himself: acute appendicitis. There were no planes at any of the nearest stations, besides, adverse weather conditions would not allow to fly to Novolazarevskaya anyway. In order to save the sick member of a polar expeditionthere was needed an urgent operation on site. And the only way out was to operate on himself.

At night, on the 30^th of April, 1961, the surgeon was being helped by a mechanical engineer and a meteorologist who were giving him the medical instruments and holding a small mirror at his belly. Lying half bent on the left side, the doctor made a local anesthesia with novocaine solution and made a 12cm incision in the right iliac region with a scalpel. Either watching in the mirror or by touch he removed an inflamed appendix and injected antibiotic in the abdominal cavity. In 30 or 40 minutes from the beginning of the operation there developed a faint and giddiness and the surgeon had to make pauses for some rest. Nevertheless, by midnight the operation lasting 1 hour and 45 minutes was over. In five days the temperature normalized, in two days more – the stitches were taken out.

In the St. Petersburg Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic there is an exposure of surgical instruments that Leonid Rogozov applied for this uneasy operation.

An astronaut-pilot of the USSR, a Hero of the Soviet Union, German Titov wrote in his book “My blue planet”:

“In our country an exploit is life itself.

… We admire the Soviet doctor Boris Pastukhov, who injected himself with plague vaccine before applying it on the sick people: we envy the courage of the Sovietdoctor Leonid Rogozov who made an appendix removal operation on himself in the hard conditions of the Antarctic expedition.

Sometimes I reflect upon this in solitude and ask myself if I could do the same and only one answer comes to my mind: “I would do my best…”

from Englishrussia.com

From therumpus.net

Facebook employees know better than most the value of privacy.

This past summer Facebook relocated from University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA — where several buildings fan out along the downtown strip — to a new central office in Stanford Research Park. A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space. When I arrived, a security guard handed me a non-disclosure contract to fill out, a requirement to enter the building. “Just making sure you’re not a Twitter spy,” he said. I can therefore not describe the tour my friend gave, though photos of the new space abound on the Internet. Afterwards, we went out for a drink at the Dutch Goose, a bar popular with techies and Stanford graduate students, where most of this conversation took place. Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.

The Rumpus: On your servers, do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?

Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment. The only reason we’re changing that is for performance reasons. When you make any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information —

Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?

Employee: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.

Rumpus: In other words, the person you stalk the most.

Employee: No, it’s more than just that. It’s also messages, file posts, photos you’re tagged in with them, as well as your viewing of their profile and all of that. Essentially, we judge how good of a friend they are to you.

Rumpus: When did Facebook make this change?

Employee: That was actually fairly recently, sometime in the last three months. But other than that, we definitely store snapshots, which is basically a picture of all the data on all of our servers. I want to say we do that every hour, of every day of every week of every month.

Rumpus: So this is every viewable screen?

Employee: It’s way more than that: it’s every viewable screen, with all the data behind every screen. So when we storeyour photos, we have six versions of your photos. We don’t store the original: we make six different versions on the photo uploader and upload those six versions.

Rumpus: And the difference between them would be sizing, certain areas are zoomed –

Employee: Exactly. Different sizes for the news feed, your profile pic, enlargement.

Rumpus: And these reside on servers in your office?

Employee: No, not in our office. Absolutely not. We have four data centers around the world. There’s one in Santa Clara, one in San Francisco, one in New York and one in London. And in each of those, there are approximately five to eight thousand servers. Each co-location of our servers has essentially the same data on it.

Rumpus: And how many users are you up to now?

Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million.

Rumpus: And actually?

Employee: That’s just active users. As far as total accounts, including those that are potentially fake, disabled and whatnot, we’re over three hundred million. The two hundred twenty million are users who have logged on and done something with the site in the last thirty days.

Rumpus: You said they’re changing the policy of keeping all information.

Employee: No. They’re never changing that policy. We still keep all information. What I was referring to, is that if anything, we’re going to start deleting more photos for performance reasons. We are the largest photo distributor in the world.

Rumpus: Really? Is that obvious?

Employee: I don’t know the exact figures off the top of my head, but I want to say upwards of a trillion photos, and then think about six copies of each. This is the epitome of a needle in a haystack. When we need to load a webpage in half a second, we need to go and find upwards of a thousand photos — think about your newsfeed — in one get [snaps], and instantaneously. It’s hard to do.

Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.

Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?

Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.

Rumpus: What did they do?

Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.

Rumpus: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account?

Employee: I have. For engineering reasons.

Rumpus: Have you ever done it outside of professional reasons?

Employee: I will say, when I first started working there, yes. I used it to view other people’s profiles which I didn’t have permission to visit. I never manipulated their data in any way; however, I did abuse the profile viewing permission at several initial points when I started at Facebook.

Rumpus: How about reading their messages?

Employee: Never individually like that. I would mostly just look at profiles.

Rumpus: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people’s messages?

Employee: See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.

Rumpus: So the master password is basically irrelevant.

Employee: Yeah.

Rumpus: It’s just for style.

Employee: Right. But it’s no longer in use. Like I alluded to, we’ve cracked down on this lately, but it has been replaced by a pretty cool tool. If I visited your profile, for example, on our closed network, there’s a ‘switch login’ button. I literally just click it, explain why I’m logging in as you, click ‘OK,’ and I’m you. You can do it as long as you have an explanation, because you’d better be able to back it up. For example, if you’re investigating a compromised account, you have to actually be able to log into that account.

Rumpus: Are your managers really on your ass about it every time you log in as someone else?

Employee: No, but if it comes up, you’d better be able to justify it. Or you will be fired.

Rumpus: I would imagine they take this—

Employee: Pretty seriously. I don’t really fuck around, at all.

Rumpus: They invented a Chief Officer position for it, Chris Kelly, right?

Employee: Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, correct. Running for Attorney General of California.

Rumpus: Is that a standard position at Silicon Valley web companies?

Employee: I think it’s becoming more of a standard officer position, especially with Web 2.0, 3.0, where the model is basically get as much information out there as you can. Obviously, someone needs to step back and make sure there is some information privacy here, or at least as much as we can put in place.

Rumpus: Facebook was probably a big trendsetter in that regard, right?

Employee: In my opinion, we’ve always provided the most nitty-gritty user privacy settings from the beginning. There’s no other site out there that’s this customizable.

Rumpus: Would you like to give your take on the last few rounds of fuck ups, Facebook Beacon, and the recent Terms of Service controversy?

Employee: It’s really hard to judge exactly the way users are going to react. We just didn’t have a good enough beta-testing system in place. When you have a group of twenty engineers working on a project, they think it’s the most beautiful, immaculate thing in the world, and then they build it, and a project manager approves it. Initially, when that was the case, we just pushed it, and if users didn’t like it we pulled it back. That was just our philosophy, one of trial and error. Whereas now we’ve started running psychological analysis, starting to…

Rumpus: Oh really?

Employee: Fuck yeah. Are you kidding me? We do eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while you browse Facebook.

Rumpus: What do you mean by “eye-tracking”?

Employee: For example, when we want to introduce new features, like when we streamlined the browsing of photo albums, you know, where you can click ‘next’ above the photo, and the page stays the same except you get the next photo? We did tests on that, and actually found out it increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially because we were reducing 77% of the page load, and therefore it was loading faster, and thus generating more clicks. We not only reduced our bandwidth, and how much we have to pay for our Internet, but we made the site faster and increased the clicks-per-minute, which is what we’re truly interested in.

Rumpus: So in what other ways do you track behavior, that isn’t necessarily obvious to users?

Employee: We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.

Rumpus: So maybe you know about this, maybe you don’t. There’s a paradox with international expansion, because obviously all internet companies aspire to a worldwide market, but as service enters countries without great infrastructure, such as 3rd-world countries, the companies have to provide the infrastructure and the countries don’t actually produce any (or much) ad revenue.

Employee: I don’t know anything about that, actually. The one comment I would make about that, is that we’ve definitely tried to continue expanding to 3rd- world countries. Take Iran — well, Iran is not a 3rd world country — but when the Iranian elections came up, and then the disputes, we found out they were using Facebook as a tool to organize themselves and expose their qualms and discontent with the government. So publicly we translated the entire site into Farsi within 36 hours. It was our second right-to-left language, which was actually really difficult for us. Literally the entire site is flipped in a mirror. The fact that we did it in thirty-six hours — they hired twenty some-odd translators, and engineers worked around the clock to get it rolled out — was pretty fucking phenomenal. We had at least three times as many user registrations per day the first day it was out, and it has been growing. So we’re definitely still serious about foreign outreach. And the thing is, we have such a gigantic market share in the larger sections of Europe, in Australia, in Mexico, in the States and Canada, and that’s where 99.9% of our ad revenue is and probably will be always — or at least will be the next five, ten years. So the fact that we’re breaching into these other markets mostly means just allowing family and friends to connect even more deeply, which is really our ultimate goal.

Rumpus: What’s the creepiest Facebook interaction you have had?

Employee: Well, the weirdest one I’ve ever seen was one I was able to investigate, one of the situations which required me to log into other accounts. This guy had emailed my friend at school a very very odd message, pertaining to the name ‘Caitlin,’ which is her name, and ‘poop.’ It was literally one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen: a two-page message about the name ‘Caitlin’ and its semantic relation to ‘poop.’ We found out that he had actually sent it to the first two hundred Caitlins he found on Facebook search.

Rumpus: That’s weird.

Employee: Really weird. Out of nowhere, no reasoning. He started sending it twenty times a day, to different Caitlins, for three weeks or so.

Rumpus: What’s the most bizarre?

Employee: I found a fake account created from Berkeley that used the profile picture and information from the brother of one of my very good friends. We looked up the guy who created the original profile, and he had never ever heard of him, never ever met him, obviously had never seen him. But this guy had evidently added him as a friend, and sadly he accepted it, but literally stole all of this guy’s information, created a fake account, and was communicating with himself from the fake account. He was writing on his wall and posting back to the “other person’s” wall. We found out the guy actually had about fifteen fake accounts that he created, stealing other users’ pictures and information to create the accounts, and was actually communicating back and forth with himself. Just to try to make himself appear cool, I guess?

Rumpus: That’s a really sad display of humanity.

Employee: Yeah. That is the most bizarre encounter that comes to mind. Those two are the big instances I’ve seen that made me say, “What the hell is going on?”

Rumpus: So tell me about the engineers.

Employee: They’re weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I’d say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he’s literally rewriting the entire language. There’s this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiledlanguage. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesn’t have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. It’s much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he’d get it. And there’s a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.

Rumpus: So what will be the net effect of running the site on Hyper PHP?

Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to.

Rumpus: When’s it coming out?

Employee: When it’s done. Next couple of months, ideally.

Rumpus: So where do these geeks come from?

Employee: I would say at least 70% of Facebook engineers are from Harvard and Stanford.

Rumpus: Wow. I know Zuckerberg went Harvard, what’s the Stanford connection? I mean other than just Palo Alto.

Employee: I don’t think there’s any question that Stanford is the number one CS department in the world.

Rumpus: Stanford engineers invented Silicon Valley.

Employee: They did.

Rumpus: How has the recent move affected the company?

Employee: Facebook just moved offices to Stanford Research Park, which is where the original HP was started. Before it was kind of sprawled out. We had seven or eight offices downtown.

Rumpus: Any changes in atmosphere after the move?

Employee: It was just nice to have everyone in one office. Before, any meetings that happened were inconvenient for most people. I mean, engineering was split up into three offices. It was a pain. Now there’s more unity, more ease of communication. Everything feels more internal. It’s super-friendly. I think the coolest thing about the work environment is the trust. They don’t care what, where, how, when, as long as you get your shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done. Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done. And it goes a long way. Because I know I can get these things done. I know I’m going to have to go back. And I may be there until ten or eleven tonight.

Rumpus: I’m sorry we drank all these beers.

Employee: It’s the trust deal. We’re able to do that. We don’t have to worry. We can put our personal lives first, as long as we get our work done.

***

Rumpus original art by Lucas Adams.

Hello Fantagians! Have you logged in recently? If you have, you have seen the bulliten. If not, here you go.

So as you can see, Fantage is releasing new hair styles, clothing, and boards!

As you can see, it gives no indication if only new member items are released, or nonmember and member items are released. Hopefully both types of fantagians will be able to buy new things on thursday!

With that in mind, i would advise playing good games that give you LOTS of starS so you can buy things on thursday!(top models gives a lot, even if your hosting)

On an off topic note, i will most likely not post tommorrow due to a family members surgery (not mine). Wish her luck, please. She’s having back surgerey, AGAIN because she messed up the plates in her spine again.

So yeah. Hope the update helps!

~Ducky

Design Studio Tjep released a new collection of jewelry called Clockwork Love.
Jewelry Clockwork Love express different emotions and the whims of the heart.

These are awesome!!!

Click on any one of these to see it move.

When people in China go to vacation, their train stations look like this: