Danny's Space

Memidex is a free online site offering dictionary/thesaurus services. You can also download a plugin for Chrome and Firefox. I've been using Memidex for 4 months now and I find it very convenient and reliable. Memidex is here.

This is the first image of Mercury as seen from the orbiting MESSENGER probe . MESSENGER stands for Mercury Surface Space Environment Geochemistry and Ranging. This probe's mission is to study the chemical composition, geochemistry and the magnetic field of Mercury. It has already surprised scientists with its discovery of water H2O in the exosphere of Mercury. The exosphere is the layer of atmosphere 600 km. from the surface.

This is a reblog of MGSiegler's article on Techcrunch. The biggest news of course is Amazon's Cloud Player. It is the first time that a real player is offering to store your data in its server for free (5 GB). And you can access it in any device you own. IT meaning mostly your music. The Cloud shall be your Hard Drive, Despite the Record Label's Greed

Producers of Hyde Park on Hudson, a radio play adapted for film, announced they have Bill Murray to play Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The original radio play focuses on FDR's inner circle in the White House. See the full gallery on Posterous

Mahmood Al-Yousif  his last tweet before Bahrain Police arrested him.

Begging Cat. Here's the Youtube link.

Reblogged:Beauty from xkcd.com Beauty via xkcd.com on 3/24/11

The Thing About Love by Alicia Keys Listen on Posterous Alicia Keys sings this ditty about what holds us together and what saves us. The Thing About Love from As I Am Love, love will come find you Just to remind you of who you are Love, it will forsake you Threaten to break you, take what you got Everybody laughs, everybody cries Sure it can hurt you, baby But give it a little try See that's the thing about love Friends, sometimes will blind you Sneak up behind you, you can't give enough Then life, it will embrace you Totally amaze you, so you don't give up Everybody laughs, everybody cries Sure it can hurt you, baby But give it a little try See that's the thing about love Oh, tell me that I'm not the only one That's going through it all Oh, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one That's going through it all But it's time, oh it's time For me to shine, hey It's about time, oh it's time For me to sh...

The government of Japan put the number of casualties from the recent earthquake and tsunami at more than 10,000. It has been more than a week and recovery operations around the devastated area goes on. It is quite inspiring to learn of stories of survival amidst the ruins as well as the efforts at saving as many lives as possible in the aftermath. A valkyrie is a female Norse mythological figure who decides who will live and who will die in battle. This belief emphasizes the randomness by which events happen. In 1964 March 27th, the City of Anchorage, Alaska felt the earth move with an intensity 9.2. It will suffer through an 8.2 meter tsunami as well as ground liquefaction and landslides. It was called the Good Friday Earthquake and the valkyries took 131 lives. It was not all nature's fury when it comes to death. Man can arrange wars and throughout history the valkyries were busy-choosing who to take into the afterlife. Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gers...

Expert Reviews explain their benchmarking software here. The benchmark used an iMac with a quad core Intel i5-760 processor and a 128 GB SSD. The 64-bit version of the operating systems were used. Expert Reviews benchmarks concludes that Ubuntu 10.10 is the fastest operating system. They took exception of Ubuntu's performance in multi-tasking. As an Ubuntu user myself, I can't help but agree with the results of this tests. Ubuntu is an excellent operating system. If Ubuntu or linux for that matter has a weakness, it is the matter of proprietary drivers and in this case I blame the drivers. That's why I am heartened to read about the progress of Nouveau which is the open source project to produce a graphics driver capable of 3D acceleration with performance comparable to its proprietary parallels. What's the status of Nouveau is dependent on the Linux kernel development. So far it shows its potential if you are using the latest, linux-2.6.39 kernel, which ...

We got these orchids from my aunt who moved house. We had to repair and tie some of them to strengthen the hold of the roots. See the full gallery on Posterous

Image via Wikipedia The Azkals match against the football team of Bangladesh ended 3-nil in favor of the Philippines . Araneta scored first in the first half. Angel Guirado added two goals in the second half. This gives the team a total point goal of 5 behind Palestine with 7 in their group. The real story with this win is that the Philippines for the first time in AFC history gets to play beyond the qualifying round.

From Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull The Cold War may be over but the dangers of nuclear power is at the forefront. In another Steven Spielberg creation a scientist asked a group: "Do we really have control? Do we really have any idea what we're dealing with here? Control is an illusion."

Reblog: Man vs. Meltdown They are calling them "The Fukushima Fifty" now in twitter. Those heroic workers who remained behind after the company withdrew staff and other workers from the premises of the Fukushima plant are now man's last line of defense against a nuclear disaster.

The exposed vulnerability of nuclear plants to seismic activity is underscored as the Fukushima nuclear reactors struggle to properly shutdown. The plant workers are really in a battle to gain control of that process and doing so without loosing containment. The drama between the lines here is that Japan is the only country to suffer from the use of nuclear weapons during the second world war. Japan relies on nuclear power to generate 30 percent of its electricity. But do you know that Japan is not even in the top ten countries dependent on nuclear power? 1-France(75 percent) 2-Slovakia(55 percent) 3-Belgium(54 percent) 4-Ukraine(48 percent) 5-Sweden(42 percent) 6-South Korea(40 percent) 7-Switzerland(40 percent) 8-Slovenia(40 percent) 9-Armenia(39 percent) 0-Hungary(37 percent) Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant by: Jezzdk@flickr

Google Chrome/Chromium browser GC/C was updated to version 10 4 days ago but since release the browser has been patched and improved already ahead of the PWN2own hackers confab. Google is taking the meeting of security researchers seriously that it offers 20,000 dollars to anyone who can hack GC/C with a new vulnerability. So far the 20,000 is still safe. I heard that the latest update made speed improvements to the browser. When I updated to Chrome 10, I was skeptical, but I am going to eat my words soon. This version is the fastest I have seen a browser go. I simply enabled prefetching and allow the browser to guess what site it is I am trying to reach. It may not be for everyone. A little annoying at first but I can see this feature as standard in browsers one day. If you allow the browser to remember your browsing history and bookmarks, you might just get that creepy situation when your browser knows and giving you suggestions on sites to go to. tags: google,chrome,chromium,...

Bobby Womack is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is the lead vocals for The Valentinos and Sam Cookes's guitarist. He sings jazz and rock and roll. I know that he wrote the Rolling Stones' It's All Over Now. That's how I knew him all this time. I really like his soulful voice. If you're doing a cover of a very popular song (a cultural icon even) I say, run with it. Bobby Womack

    Sent to you by danny via Google Reader:     Japan Sendai Quake and Tsunami: big photo gallery via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin on 3/11/11 [Related BB post: " Japan hit by catastrophic 8.9 magnitude quake, massive tsunami sweeps country "] An office building burns in Tokyo after an earthquake March 11, 2011. A massive 8.9 magnitude quake hit northeast Japan on Friday, causing many injuries, fires and a four-meter (13-foot) tsunami along parts of the country's coastline, NHK television and witnesses reported. There were several strong aftershocks and a warning of a 10-meter (32-foot) tsunami following the quake, which also caused buildings to shake violently in the capital Tokyo. (photos: REUTERS/Kyodo) People take shelter as a ceiling collapses in a bookstore during an earthquake in Sendai, northeastern Japan March 11, 2011. A building burns after an earthquake in the Odaiba district of Tokyo. Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan reacts he he fe...

    Sent to you by danny via Google Reader:     Japan hit by catastrophic 8.9 magnitude quake, massive tsunami sweeps country via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin on 3/11/11 A catastrophic earthquake has struck Northern Japan, 150 miles off the coast . The quake hit on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 06:25:51 UTC, with a magnitude of 8.9. Frequent aftershocks at the time of this blog post. This is one one of the highest earthquakes ever recorded on earth . The quake is being described as roughly 1,000 times the size of the 2010 Haiti earthquake , in terms of total energy released. The USGS reports that this is the 5th strongest earthquake in the world since 1900. The Pacific Tsunami Center has issued a warning not only for Japan , where a 10-meter (33 foot) high tsunami is already sweeping the country, but for the coast of Russia, Marcus Island, Guam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Marshall Island, Midway Island, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Live coverage on CNN Inte...

Following the sting video of a conservative group showing the NPR executive Ron Schiller making remarks about the Tea Party, the Chief Executive Officer of NPR, Vivian Schiller resigned her post. This also follows the firing of Juan Williams as commentator in NPR for comments he made about muslims. This is about keeping NPR above the fray so that it can continue with its grassroots journalism. It's CEO is not going to let the conservatives use this to punish the organization. Let me see Fox News submit themselves to the same standards of objectivity and fairness to all.

Google releases Chrome Browser 10 with 25 security vulnerability patches with the new version. Fifteen out of the 25 are rated as High in the security tagging system employed by Google. Google's browser is looking good going into next week's PWN2OWN hackers' confab. It's traditional to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of different browsers in this hackers' conference happening in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Blogging owes, in my opinion, its resurgence to blogging sites offering the ease of automatic posting to bloggers. Automatic posting or autoposting is an opt-in feature to forward my post to my other blogs (or to twitter and facebook). Obviously if this feature is enabled over your network of blogs, a hacker can take over your entire network by hacking one blog site. Don't make it easy for them to do that. So I'm dropping autopost in Amplify and Posterous. The contrary opinion comes from those espousing ease of use, convenience and the speed by which you can disseminate your words out there. Certainly, this argument is most logical and strong in light of the use of social media in the Tunisian and Egyptian models. Even as I consider my blogs among the masses, I'm not about to drop security in favor of ease of use. That would be a foolish trade. In any case, I am watching current improvements in security in blog sites and in browsing in general.

a lot more people are aware of linux not to mention the concept of operating systems now. linux? is that like windows or mac osx? ye, something like that. http://amplify.com/u/bt2b8

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."-Linus' Law Open source code is transparent. Anyone who knows what they are looking for can examine it. The community of users are volunteers testing applications that are properly tagged as alpha or beta. That community benefits from free software. Software that can be modified without legal impediments. When I first encountered it, my skepticism is like how can anything work? Since joining a community (even without programming skills) I have seen things work from the inside. It's amazing that I give so little time (free time) and get an operating system and all the software that I need to do my job. I also get excellent support when I meet challenges. Amplify’d from www.zdnet.com Windows is, yes even now, built on a single-user working on a solo machine model. In addition, Windows was designed to make it very easy for programs to trade data and instructions with each other. That’s why it’s so easy to move data from say W...

Abraham Lincoln with a presidential proclamation liberated the negro slaves and ended slave trade in the United States. Czar Alexander II of Russia also freed russian slaves called serfs from their bondage. In fact he did it a year earlier than Abraham Lincoln who had to govern over a civil war and fight to keep the Union. Back then it was the Russian monarchy who was calling the western states socialists, which highlights how far from the mainstream Czar Alexander II was in his decision to emancipate slaves. He was advised that there will be a revolution by the aristocrats who owned the slaves. He provided land for the freed slaves and payment for the slave owners. Abraham Lincoln tried to prevent a civil war. At first he called on negroes who wish to be free to fight for their freedom on the side of the Union.  He freed the slaves but did not provide a means for them to be accepted in the society. Former slaves lived in huts and in poor economic conditions. Their lot in life ...

The US is sending two warships and Marines into the Suez. If Marines get in the game and the current situation remains, we might be seeing something like the US action In Panama to capture Noriega. The Marines will be facing mercenaries swimming in weapons provided by Gaddafi. The Libyan freedom fighters are surrounding Tripoli and consolidating their gains. From what we know of Gaddafi, he isn't going anywhere. Amplify’d from www.alarabiya.net "In the years ahead, Libya could become a peaceful democracy, or it could face protracted civil war, or it could descend into chaos," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The stakes are high." Read more at www.alarabiya.net   See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bsdsy

Chinese manifesto asks why industrialization in China led to the widest gap in rich minority and the poor majority in China's history. Inspiring manifesto from China's Jasmine revolution via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 2/27/11 As Bruce Sterling notes, this manifesto of the Chinese Jasmine revolution (translated by Human Rights in China), "sounds almost identical to the gripes that the impoverished American populace might make to their own leaders. There's nothing specifically Chinese about these demands." Every good and honest Chinese person, please think: So much public housing has been sold to individuals, so many state-owned enterprises and so much land have been sold, and nearly all state-owned property has been sold off. But where has all the money from these sales gone? It goes without saying that state-owned property belongs to the entire people. But what did the people get? Led by an authoritarian regime, the opaque process of privatization ha...

URL:   http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/gnome-shell... It's important that we innovate and move the concepts about Desktops. I understand what Canonical and Gnome are trying to do each with their own way of improving the current Linux desktop. I think new Linux users will find both interesting and usable. The power users will point each other to alternatives. I for one am looking at Bodhi and Mint. Both are Ubuntu (and Debian) based so I wont be flying too far from my "old" favorite. See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bs39c