Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by O’Reilly Media, Inc. and TechWeb, showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for the builders of the next-generation Web. This annual multi-track conference brings together people, ideas, connections, contacts, products, and companies to foster stronger Web 2.0 communities.
InfoWorld has posted the next in our ongoing series of fun quizzes to test your knowledge of all things tech. This time around, the topic is the Web itself. It’s hard to believe that it’s only about 17 years since the Web’s inception, yet we’ve come a long way from those humble beginnings. This week’s quiz tries to reflect the full breadth of topics throughout that storied history.
From browsers to the HTTP protocol, JavaScript to the history of e-commerce, there’s something here to test everyone’s knowledge of history and technical nitty-gritty. Don’t feel bad if you miss some of the answers — that’s part of the fun. There are a lot of unexpected details hidden in this one, so if you bear with it you might learn a few fun factoids for your next LAN party.
BTW, if you enjoy this one, check out our earlier IQ tests on programming and the Linux OS.
Northern California’s premiere comic book convention returns to Moscone South at the end of February.
Richard Price’s novel Lush Life is the story of Eric Cash, who is having a very bad week. In fact, Eric’s life hasn’t been going all that well in general lately.
Eric is the quintessential disaffected New York thirtysomething. He fancies himself a screenwriter, but the only thing he has going is a work-for-hire project that he knows is crap. In real life he manages a hipster bar for his money, which he spends on an apartment that he shares with a girlfriend who may or may not be coming back from an overseas research trip for her master’s thesis on fringe sexuality. Each day makes Eric more aware of the rut into which he’s sunk, as he watches disaffected New Yorkers a decade his junior landing the breaks he feels he deserves. And to make matters worse, one of his coworkers has just been shot, and Eric is the only witness. Or is he the only suspect? » More... »
Believe it or not, Chuck Palahniuk’s latest fails to be as much of a gross-out as I’d imagined it would be. Coming off of Haunted, a loosely-knit collection of short pieces that includes the story of a man who disembowels himself through his own anus during an act of masturbation, then subsequently impregnates his own little sister by accident, I’d figured being the reigning King of Gross-Out was Palahniuk’s new bag.
Turns out it is and it isn’t. It’s true that Snuff, the new novel, is set in the world of hardcore gonzo pornography, and that Palahniuk has obviously done his usual meticulous job of digging for trivia and fast-facts that will leave you scratching your head and wondering if he’s putting you on. Beyond that basic high concept, however, seekers of cult vile transgressiveness could probably ask for more. » More... »
Cards, cash, and real estate may be sent care of my agent.
InfoWorld’s annual Open Source Business Conference will take place March 24-25 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
In the spring of 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led two ships of the British Navy — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — on a voyage to discover the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. They were the first steam-powered vessels to attempt such a venture. Neither the ships nor their crews were ever seen again.
That much we know. The actual fate of the 130-odd men on that doomed expedition will forever remain a mystery. But where history leaves off, Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror picks up the tale, giving a fictionalized account of what might have happened to Captains Franklin and Crozier and their crews as they weathered the next three years trapped in the Arctic ice. » More... »
A few weeks ago, PC World published an excellent guide to setting up your PC with a brand-new installation of Ubuntu Linux. Now they’ve let me do the follow-up.
Available now on PC World’s site, check out “Don’t Fear the Penguin: A Newbie’s Guide to Linux.” It’s your quick-start tour of your Ubuntu installation, including application highlights, configuration options, and how to work cross-platform with Windows and Mac OS X. Best of all, it’s chock full of screenshots, so you can make sense of it even if you haven’t taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu yet yourself. » More... »
I have a new article in the current edition of Multilingual magazine, which I co-wrote with Nelson Ng of eBay. It’s about how eBay re-engineered its back-end systems to support Unicode, the universal character-encoding standard.
Unfortunately, this one is subscription-only for now. But the gist is that eBay needed to convert all of its database tables, applications, and HTML to Unicode in order to expand into Asian markets while maintaining maximum compatibility across all its global sites. Considering the scope of eBay’s operations, it was no easy task. In fact, it took years to complete.
It’s a fascinating case study, so if you’re interested in multilingual computing I encourage you to check it out. Multilingual is a print publication, but digital subscriptions give you access to the current issue online immediately.