From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/past-present-future-file-systems.ars

A tongue-in-cheek historical review of most file systems, that can double as a quick history of operating systems. I found it hillarious! The ZFS is the future!

Prism for the Desktop

Mozilla Labs last week released a new version of Prism, a single-site browser system that brings web applications to the desktop. The latest version is designed to work as a Firefox extension rather than as a separate XUL application.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/03/major-update-to-prism-first-prototype-of-browser-integration/

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism/Scripting

Roughly, you can run server side code offline. The interesting part is the lightweight browser. It does not support java (I think), but who knows?

Edit: after more careful reading on my part, it is more like a packager, no server side code locally, but the offline-lightweight stands.

Βαγγέλης Μαρινάκης

Phun with physics

http://www.phun.at/

Quoting:

Phun is a Master of Science Thesis by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University.
Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

The some of the videos at youtube are plain fun watching 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5g9VS0ENM