Kottke.org:

Well, now, this is gorgeous. Stamen Design overlaid watercolor textures on OpenStreetMap map tiles to show you what it would look like if your favorite watercolorist designed Google Maps. It's fun to scroll and scroll.

This widget lets you display images in a rich interactive visualization similar to that of Apple iTunes known as Cover Flow. It is a Flash-based implementation.

With this widget, you can make beautiful interactive timelines like the one below. Try dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on each event for more details.

If you think people who use Apple products are prisoners, you’re essentially accusing them of being too stupid to make their own decisions. At least Stallman explicitly calls them fools! Raymond, with his pretty-window-treatment metaphor, apparently thinks Apple users are style-obsessed fetishists, too dim to make the right purchasing decisions. Which, oddly enough, is the same stance that Microsoft has been known to take.

I left Yahoo over two years ago, but prior to that I spent three years running product for Delicious.  Since then I’ve remained a loyal user and supporter.  To this day I keep in touch with former Delicious colleagues and consider many to be friends.  And though I’ve felt that Delicious has been frustratingly slow to evolve in recent years, I’ve always wished the best for the product and the remaining team members.

This project aims to offer a simple cross-platform application for cropping PDF files. A simple user interface lets you define exactly the crop-region by fitting a rectangle on the visually overlaid pages.

This is the website for the Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and published by Apress. Here you can find the full content of the book, a blog with tips and updates about Git and the book and open source projects related to Git or referenced in the book.   Read the book now!

Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

"The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others."

"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important."

"Go has fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection. It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language. It's a joy to use."

Google to develop an open source operating system.

Nice piece from a series on open-source in The Economist. More companies are embracing open-source software. Their motives may vary - 'open' as in gratis, or 'open' as in extensible/flexible? - but it is clear that the take up versus proprietary software is increasing. The next danger, according to the authors? Getting locked into the cloud.