(This post about creating passionate users is dedicated to Kathy Sierra.)
I think this new initiative is an interesting success on Dell’s part. Dell will embiggen their support for Linux by offering Linux distributions on some of their desktop and laptop machines. (What, you’ve never heard of “embiggen”? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.): Dell to Expand Linux Factory Installed Options
Since launching Dell IdeaStorm

I upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.0.x to 2.1.x tonight, and I’m a little grumpy. Autosave is great and all, but does upgrading WordPress have to be so much of a hassle? The official way to upgrade is to unpack the latest zip over top of your current installation, which seems like a recipe for cruft to keep accumulating. Things like WP-Cache can get really confused in the middle of an upgrade, and then you’re stuck doing surg

If you blog, you should get the Linkify bookmarklet that Laurence Gonsalves wrote.
How does it work? It’s an easy 2 step process:
1. Drag the Linkify bookmarket to your personal toolbar.
2. Dang! There is no step 2! Sorry about that. I, um, got mixed up. There’s just one step.
Now how do you use it? Well, see the link I made to Laurence Gonsalves? To do that, I wrote the words “Laurence Gonsalves,” selected that text, and

(Thanks to SEW for reminding me that I meant to write about this.)
Google recently introduced another nice piece of flair: a “Blog Bar” that lets you pick keywords, and then rotates through relevant posts by fading new links in and out. You can see it in action over on this post by Mark Lucovsky. You can also get a News bar, which is kind of fun too.
It’s really easy to get your own:
Step 1. Go to http://code.google.com/apis/aja

A little while ago, Ionut noticed that Google Video added a “Blog Buzz” section to its front page. The Blog Buzz shows videos that bloggers have been talking about and linking to recently.
So for example when The Lisa does a Friday Recap and links to this “Zeroes” parody of Heroes, our blogsearch team takes that blog post and other posts from around the web and then computes some buzzworthy videos to highlight. Huzzah! I

When referring to those little widgets like MyBlogLog that spruce up a page, do you say “flair” or “flare”? The first place I heard the term was Office Space, and they call it flair: Peter: What are pieces of flair?
Joanna: That’s where you know, suspenders and buttons and all sorts of stuff. We’re, uh, we’re actually required to wear fifteen pieces of flair. But then FeedBurner refers to their product

I’ll chime in that I think Yahoo pipes is a really neat idea. As every decent UNIXhead knows, pipes let you combine small command-line tools easily by routing the output of one tool into the input of another tool. For example “cat census-names | cut -d’,’ -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg” might take a list of peoples’ names, extract just the last names, sort the list, unique-ify the list and produce a count of how many times each name occurred, then sort by the biggest number

Did anyone else tune in to see Bill Gates on The Daily Show? How do you think he did? Do you plan to take Vista for a spin in the next few months?
And does Jon Stewart really not know what a beta program is? For shame, sir. For shame.

It will be like shouting in a thunderstorm for a while.
- today: nationwide elections. The House went to the Dems; how will the Senate go? Three seats remain open as I get ready for bed.
- Guitar Hero II also comes out today.
- Oh, by the way, Britney Spears got divorced today.
- this week: the Web 2.0 conference, starting today