Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

Lots of upgrades for me over the past 24 hours. The most relevant one is that WordPress 2.5 was officially released today, so my blog is now running on 2.5. What does this mean? Well not a whole lot for you readers unfortunately, given that the big changes occurred on the back-end [...]

I should be a plastic surgeon because I just gave my website a wicked face lift. This is a design I’ve been working on for quite a while now. I started it last spring/summer when I was thinking about making a blog. By the time I actually got the site up and [...]

Researchers at HMS have discovered an important mechanism by which cancer cells can grow so quickly (via /.). They’re hoping to use this information clinically to significantly reduce the growth rate of cancer cells, making them much easier to manage. Cool.

Hulu, a site by NBC, opened today (via LifeHacker). You can view full-length episodes from some of your favorite TV shows and also some full-length movies. Currently, the TV shows seem to just be a conglomeration of whatever was available on the individual shows’ websites. I’m hoping this service continues to grow [...]

I just saw that Amazon MP3 now officially supports Linux. Packages are available for the latest versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE. Sweet! Even though it’s not an ideal free software solution, it’s still exciting to see a service selling DRM-free music to the free software community. Seems like a [...]

A few weeks after Drupal (runs RMstudents.com) got an upgrade to 6.0, Wordpress is scheduled to offer its next big release (2.5) next week, and Ubuntu will upgrade to 8.04 in a few weeks. Ah, the wonders of regularly updated free software packed full of new features!

The New Rig (just purchased):

Lenovo Thinkpad T61 14″ Widescreen model
Specs:

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T8300 (2.4GHz 800MHz 3MBL2)
Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (no free OS offered )**
14.1 WXGA+ TFT
Intel GMA X3100 GM965
1 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz SODIMM Memory (1 DIMM)*
100GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo 24X/24X/24X/8X Max, Ultrabay Slim
Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN [...]

I’m a big fan of Wordpress. It runs this blog, millions of other private blogs, and hundreds of thousands of blogs at Wordpress.com. It’s a great architecture for developing online tools and the community is one of the best around. Matt Mullenweg (lead developer of Wordpress and founder of Automattic) announced today [...]

Cory Doctorow says “Intellectual Property” is a silly euphemism. (good read)

Finally, someone has developed a plug-in for OpenOffice.org that will allow you to open Microsoft Office 2007 documents in .*x format (e.g. .docx, pptx, etc.). If you’re not familiar, OpenOffice.org is a free software office suite that operates similarly to Microsoft Office except that it’s available on all operating systems, you don’t have to [...]