After Soviet Union stunned the world with the launch of the Sputnik in 1957, USA allocated a lot of money to education, including foreign languages study. That had kick started a lot of research and produced some new methods of language learning. And now we are repeating that past again. As a delayed response to September 11, USA government is planning to pump money into languages again. The languages this time are Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and languages of Central Asia.

Jon Udell is not happy about having to transcribe podcast URLs that iTunes displays, but does not allow to copy. While the general point about lock-in is good, here is a quick techie workaround in a meanwhile. However much iTunes may want to hide the URLs, at some point it has to actually retrieve something from it, and do it using standard network protocol. Enter Ethereal, open-source multi-platform network protocol analyser.

Lose weight and learn DNA structures at the same time - sounds good to me. In yet another example of (sort-of) serious games, Dance Dance Revolution stepping game (or more likely the open source StepMania) has been adapted to use DNA base symbols as direction pads in a game, where correct dance sequence will cause a call-out for the matching DNA structure. If played enough, the correct sequences might actually be remembered on a motor, rather than intellectual level.

Michael Baum reports on the survey of system administrators regarding their troubleshooting activities. It is an interesting summary, but something is missing. There seem to be a lot of questions regarding how the problems are handled now with the predictable answers of base power tools like grep, perl and Ethereal. What I don’t see is any questions on how to fix the problem going forward. By now we pretty much established that until the developers themselves try to support/troubleshoot their own products in production (or get loud enough feedback), they will not understand how to make their products easier to manage post-deployment.

There is a lively discussion around the article by one of the authors of Freakonomics on whether the internet is good or bad to the publishing industry. My take on it is that the internet is bad for publishing industry as it was a year ago. But having to respond to the internet, has actually spurred some long desired growth and innovation in the industry. Specifically, to respond to the greatly increased used books market, some publishers now provide interactive internet content that is free with a new book, but can be purchased separately for a used copy.