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.
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:
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.
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.
Facebook now has a page describing their advertising. I’d not realised quite how underhand they are being with their advertising schemes.
It starts:
From the beginning, the people who built Facebook wanted it to be free for everyone. It now costs over a billion dollars a year to run Facebook, and delivering ads is how Facebook pays for this.
Translation: “we need to make money using you guys somehow, cheapskates”.
Facebook does not sell your personal information. Instead, Facebook makes its money from showing you ads.