Bruce Trigger: Archaelogist, Anthropologist 1937-2006

This is, by Web standards, old news, but I still wanted to mark the passing of a great Canadian mind. See the article on the Globe and Mail site.

Archaeologist, anthropologist and historian Bruce Trigger had a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that roamed across civilizations — from ancient Egyptians in Africa to the Huron Confederacy in Eastern Canada — historical time frames and scholarly disciplines. He understood from an early age that complexity was an underlying factor in human behaviour, an insight that made him wary of ideological determinism and rigid methodological approaches to data.

See also: Honouring Bruce Trigger in the McGill Reporter.

Memories for Life

Memories for Life is a unique project, funded by the EPSRC, bringing together a diverse range of academics in a bid to understand how memory works and to develop the technologies to enhance it. We are our memories. Our memories underpin every thought we have, every fact we learn and every skill we acquire. In today’s technology-rich society this human memory is now supplemented by increasing amounts of personal digital information; emails, photographs, Internet telephone calls, even GPS locations and television viewing logs. We believe bringing together psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists and computer scientists will lead to a more effective use and management of both the human and computerised memory. It will place the technology in the context.

This truly sounds like a fascinating project.

Warning: cheesy pet video ahead. ;)

Anybody who knows me (and them) knows that I had to do the following. Consider it saving a short snapshot for posterity, since they’re 10 (Surf, dog) and 8 (Bandit, cat).

Or like Linus Torvalds once said:

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.

Whoever said cats and dogs hated each other didn’t know these two. Surf’s been taking care of Bandit since the day he was born. And yes, the snoring is coming from Surf. :)

Screencast: Installing Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop

In the spirit of my other Linux install screencasts (1, 2), I took a lot of screenshots while installing Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop on my 12″ iBook G3, and made this 2+ minutes video out of them.

It hopes to demonstrate how easy it can really be to install Linux, and to demystify some of the FUD around this great platform. Show it to your family and friends during the Holidays, and we might just end up with a few more Linux users in the new year! :)