Debian at 17. Happy Birthday and Thank You to Ian Murdock and all the maintainers and contributors.

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software especially under the GNU General Public License and other free software licenses. Source: Wikipedia

Kudos to Bart Decrem who will become senior vice president at Disney, in charge of all mobile games after they bought Tapulous, the iPhone game company he co-founded with Andrew Lacy. The start-up, based in a storefront in Palo Alto, did not take venture capital.

Because we were angel funded, we have been flexible and have been forced to be scrappy. That has paid off nicely in the middle of a recession. And with that comes a capitalization table that is very friendly to investors and the team.

Interview with Kara Swisher in 2009

Bart explained to Gamebeat why he sold Tapulous to Disney.

Disney has music brands, Marvel Comics, Pixar, ABC, and ESPN. They have great content and you will see a lot of action around marrying great games, brands, and social gaming mechanics. I use social to mean games that are social.

For Bart, it's all Decremental!

It was just weird. I was like, 'I’m supposed to be at Boston not Cleveland.' It was just weird.

- Kieren Kershaw, Age 9

Thirty-one years ago the oil industry used the same playbook they use today.

Crimson Tide defensive end Marcell Dareus rolls through

Alabama football, though, is alive and well, thanks
to a defense that would have made the Bear smile.

Eddie Pells in the Huffington Post

We're ready for some BBQ!

Celebration!

We welcomed in the New Year with our very own Winter Classic of pumpkin pancakes and Sumatra coffee inspired by last year's Lucheonette performance (above) by Jeff Barnett Winsby and Bowie Zunino.

Google By the Sea?

The answer is here.

East Berlin to a foreign visitor was a bleak city devoid of billboard advertisements and the consumer luxury goods in shops one was accustomed to in Western Europe and North America. West Berlin contrasted its other half with bright lights and department stores on the Kudamm. Foreigners had to exchange 25 DMs (German Marks) for the same in East German currency upon entry into East Berlin. There was really nothing to buy except an overpriced lunch in the main hotel. In West Berlin, residents were paid subsidy by the federal government to live there.

Then to everyone's amazement, the wall opened.

TV coverage of the Berlin Wall's fall differed greatly between German and the U.S. A German television crew set up a camera and let it roll as events at the wall unfolded. American television flew in network news anchors, stood them in front of the wall and fresh from the flughafen they "explained" what was taking place all around them.

It wasn't long after the dancing and celebration ended that night clubs opened in abandoned buildings in the East and American Express opened an office in a prominent location (as if they had already chosen the spot.)

Eventually, the world would hear the stories of East German secret police the Stasi and their files.

Pieces of the Berlin Wall today in Leipziger Platz across from the Canadian Embassy

Berlin Twitter Wall

Sidekick phones, produced by a subsidiary of Microsoft, are made to send e-mail and text messages quickly. The phones link to a service operated by Microsoft that maintains a backup of their owners’ data.

Microsoft’s servers failed on Oct. 2, cutting off Sidekick users from e-mail, Web browsing and most other services apart from voice calls and text messages.

Those services were restored over the next week. But in the process, data on the Sidekick server and its backup server became corrupted.

As reported, someone else's data center may not always be the best place to keep your calendar,
contacts, photographs and messages, if you do not have your own back-up and your data is not in a
open format you can readily move.

Reuven Cohen points out how such incidents such as this crash may not be the end of cloud computing,
but point to the importance of being able to take your data somewhere else:

This failure hits at the heart of why interoperability and data portability is so important. It comes down to bad things happen and I should have the ability to take the data that is mine if I choose to do so, easily.

Microsoft bought the Sidekick maker Danger last year as a defensive move against Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry. Several of Danger's original developers had been recruited by Apple and co-founder Andy Rubin
joined Google as director of mobile platforms.

Fishing in Arpoador, Rio

Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009

For his fifty-nine years on the planet he had extensive credits as shown on Baseline. Baseline's founder summed it up well here:

In an unusually focused group of films in the mid-eighties (Sixteen Candles, 1984; Weird Science, 1985; Pretty in Pink, 1986; Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986; Uncle Buck, 1989), all set in the same Chicago suburb, writer-producer-director Hughes examined the roots of Generation X before anyone realized it existed. He did so with such understanding and style, displaying a sensitivity to adolescent concerns and middle-class family life that is as rare as it is precise.

- James Monaco, How to Read a Film

The Chicago Tribune shared some local insight on his films and life in the Chicago area. A number of blogs by those who grew up with his work, such as this fan, recalled Hughes' most memorable lines of dialogue such as one from the 1985 film, The Breakfast Club:

Screws fall out all the time, it’s an imperfect world.

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

- Merce Cunningham (1919 - 2009)

Maybe you have seen images, like the one above, from Cunningham's pieces or have seen the dances performed live. We remember one viewing in which an aging Cunningham appeared on stage crouching and pigeon toed captivating the audience with his twitching and precise movement like an impish bird of nature. Cunningham's work was full of such moments, however abstract. For a lifetime of creating such moments, audiences will forever be grateful.

Mary Emma Harris writes in her book The Arts at Black Mountain College (MIT Press) how in the spring of 1948, John Cage and Merce Cunningham visited the college in North Carolina on a tour to the West Coast.

Cage gave the first performance of his recently completed Sonatas and Interludes (February 1946-March 1948) for prepared piano, and Cunningham danced. To demonstrate their delight and appreciation, the faculty and students loaded their car with gifts of food and paintings when they left...

There was no media shortage yesterday of reflection and commentary on President Obama's first one hundred days in the Oval Office.

Among the President's report cards were those from the BBC, Huffington Post and Brennan Center.

The Kansas Citian published its own chronology of the first 99 days.

The Economist compared Obama's approval rating at 100 days with other U.S. Presidents.

The Wall Street Journal headlined Obama "engaged, yet elusive" while acknowledging, of course, that these times defy easy descriptions and old labels. The Journal put the first one hundred in historical perspective as did the New York Times which asked five historians for their view.

The Takeway talked to Nobel economist Paul Krugman.

There's more from the
Washington Post
Xinhua
Slate
Salon
Daily Beast

Video

If you prefer to watch video, an assembly of Obama footage is available from Politico and the Guardian editors go all talking heads.

Photos

A visual summary by the Official White House Photo Office is posted on the White House blog and on flickr.