2005 July 07

Via Wikipedia:

A series of four bomb explosions struck London's transport system beginning at 08.51 during the morning rush hour on Thursday, 7 July 2005. Three Underground trains were hit within half an hour, and a bus a further half an hour after that. At least 38 people have been confirmed dead as a result of the attack, with the number of injured reported as high as 700. This number is expected to rise as authorities survey the impact of the blasts. The incidents led to the complete shut-down of the London Underground network and many roads near the affected stations were closed, severely affecting road traffic. Mainline services into many London stations terminated outside the city for most of the day, though all but King's Cross had fully re-opened by 17:30. The city's bus network was shut down in the central zone (Zone 1) until approximately 16:00.

Read more on The London Bombings…

To podcast or not to podcast – is that the question? Remember! The Show is happening again tonight at 7pm PST – with live calls, voicemail questions and opinions, a couple of interviews, and a lot of advice sprinkled throughout. You can keep track of the show notes on our wiki (thanks, in LARGE part, to usrbingeek). We had quite a few “geo-location” interviews last week, and each one of them will be posted for your consumption soon. The big news today is that we're currently sitting at #33 in iTunes Top 100 Podcasts list! Swing into the chat room before the ball starts rolling, then tune in live. What else is there to talk about? There's always something on your mind. 1.888.PIRILLO for live calls, 1.206.428.6082 for voice mails.

Read more on #33 With a Bullet!…

As we watch tropical storm Cindy gradually dissipate into a mere tropical depression… as we see the hurricane-candidate Dennis flare up… as the forecast is calling for thunderstorms in both North and South Carolina for the next seven days… we've mutually decided to postpone our trip for a couple of months. Neither one of us are huge thunderstorm fans, especially when we'd have to fly through it. The last time Ponzi was out there, she was held back due to continuous incliment weather. We have too many things happening in the immediate future to risk being delayed. We'll keep our eye on Weather Maps (hat tip to Steve for the link).

Read more on Weather Wafflers…

In addition to providing relevant search results, Google has an open source division lead by a guy many people may remember from the early days of Slashdot, Chris DiBona. Among his more ambitious projects at Google is the Summer of Code, which aims to fund student development projects for about 400 budding developers during the summer of 2005. In a high-energy encounter at Where 2.0, two guys named Chris chat about Google Maps, the new API for Google Maps, the role of open source at Google and random topics of interest to geeks. You can find out more about Chris DiBona at Ego Food and learn more about Google’s open source initiatives at Google Code.

Read more on Chris DiBona on Google Code at Where 2.0…

Lockergnomie Bryan Price felt compelled to respond to P2P Is Not The Devil!:

I agree totally. I just left comments and even blogged about somebody ranting against P2P, specifically VOIP. The reason listed was BECAUSE IT'S P2P! I called BS on it. And I did get an updated response that was more to the point, which was a specific issue to do with the EULA of Skype. Which had nothing to do with the part about it being P2P.
I'm not real happy with Skype, as I've seen it saturate my uplink without me having done anyting at all on Skype, which means that my computer was turned into a proxy/super node/whatever they want to call it. Without being able to opt out, nor being able to throttle it any way, I no longer run it. If it had not been causing issues on my end, I probably wouldn't have even caught it doing that. But when it's chewing up bandwidth from my machine, let alone the other machines on the network, that's when I do have a problem. I've seen the same thing with other P2P programs, but I've also seen the same thing with other non-P2P programs as well.
But to damn something just because it's P2P… That's wrong. Of course, they were talking about running VOIP on a server, which to me is pretty stupid. I don't run office applications on my servers either, so… I guess I really don't get that point.

And it seems that Gizmo may soon overtake Skype as the digital voice darling (although each app suffers from a clumsy UI).

Read more on Skype vs. Gizmo?…