• Ext2 Installable File System For Windows – “If you currently have Windows running and you realize that you need some files for your work which you have stored on an Ext2 volume of your Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux!“
• Dave Winer: Bug Labs (Initial Review) – “At a software level, each of the components interfaces with XML over HTTP. It’s as if they read my mind. The pieces are all fractional horsepower HTTP servers. They are using RESTful interfaces everywhere. I haven’t actually seen the XML, let’s hope it’s simple.“
• Greg Hughes: Top-10 Accidentally Bad (But True) Business URLs – “It’s a list of ten URLs that some unfortunate businesses not only registered, but without realizing they put into actual use.” – Via Phil.

• Phil801: A Blog-Facelift and Trying Something New – “I’ve tried really hard to pack as much in as I can without making the site too overwhelming/distracting. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that everything was fairly uniform in style and presentation. Hopefully it isn’t too cluttered.“
• Jonathan Schwartz: Truly Fair Disclosure – “It may not seem like it, but this is a sea change in how Sun communicates with the world – and sets a path for other public companies seeking to drive greater transparency. I wonder how far off we are from ceasing to issue traditional press releases altogether… after all, no news agency could possibly suggest they reach a greater portion of the planet than the internet.“
• Ansel Gasparini: The Book Has Entered Production – “I have a few copies coming to SLCC hot off the presses, let me know if you are going to be there! The book should be available latest by September.“
• Roo Reynolds: IBM Virtual World Guidelines – “The world is positively abuzz this morning with news of guidelines being released by IBM as a code of conduct for IBMers in virtual worlds.“

• Visophyte: An Actual Thunderbird Email Visualization, at Last! – “I have long had the goal of doing some form of e-mail visualization. After many false starts (for both Thunderbird and Outlook), I finally have something to show.“
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: CandyFab.org: The CandyFab Project – “Today we are spinning off one of our projects and launching a new web site: CandyFab.org. The new site is intended to help foster a community around the idea of accessible, low-cost, and open-source three-dimensional fabrication technologies.“
• if: book: CommentPress 1.0 – “This little tool is the happy byproduct of a year and a half spent hacking WordPress to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization—whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts.” – Via O’Reilly Radar.

I am in the city of Oxford at the tail of a two-week speaking tour of the UK. Parts of Oxford have been underwater for the last few days due to some nearly unprecedented summer flooding. After arriving in town yesterday I wandered around and took a few pictures. Many parts of the city are normal and others are under a foot or more of water.

• Dick Costolo: Series A Financing: How Much to Raise? – “You will spend what you raise. If you raise $10 million, you will quickly ramp up to a burn rate of $800k a month, because the investors don’t want their money to sit in a bank account earning interest with 36 months of runway while you hire employees 2 and 3. The amount of money you raise sets you off on a course at a specific pace. Your board will want to know why you aren’t deploying capital. You will hire a marketing team because you can afford to hire a marketing team. You will hire a vp of sales before the product is ready because you can afford to hire a VP of sales.“
• More Gnomedex Passes Available – “Since the main auditorium for Gnomedex 7.0 is now at capacity, community members have requested that we open the external Sound and Cove chambers for an in-house video feed – which we are now officially doing with this new Overflow pass.“
• Dr. Dobbs: VMware Releases Virtualization Benchmark – “Mmark is the first benchmarking system that measures the scalability of heterogeneous virtualized workloads and provides a consistent methodology so benchmark results can be compared across different virtualization platforms. As a result, organizations can compare the performance and scalability of different virtualization platforms.“

• The Daily Galaxy: The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth – “Earlier this year, research revealed that the rise and fall of species on Earth seems to be driven by the undulating motions of our solar system as it travels through the Milky Way. Some scientists believe that this cosmic force may offer the answer to some of the biggest questions in our Earth’s biological history—especially where evolution has fallen short.“
• Frans Lanting: Life: A Journey Through Time – “Seven years ago I stood at the tide line of an estuary and began a personal journey through time. It is humbling to imagine the immensity of time covered by the history of life on Earth but that is what I plunged into, with curiosity and wonder…” – Via The Daily Galaxy.

• Mr. Quack: New Simpsons Trailer – “All the trailers put together plus one extra scene.“
• Babbage Linden: Brighton Rocks – “Like the idea of working on Second Life while living by the sea in a vibrant creative community less than an hour from London and a train ride away from Paris? Then come along to the Virtual Worlds Recruitment Party hosted by Linden Lab and NCsoft in Brighton next Thursday.“

• NotJustATheory.com: Evolution is Not Just a Theory – “In everyday use, theory means a guess or a hunch, something that maybe needs proof. In science, a theory is not a guess, not a hunch. It’s a well-substantiated, well-supported, well-documented explanation for our observations. It ties together all the facts about something, providing an explanation that fits all the observations and can be used to make predictions. In science, theory is the ultimate goal, the explanation. It’s as close to proven as anything in science can be.” – Via Bad Astronony Blog.
• Isabel Wang: On Evangelism – “A few weeks ago I was very excited to see that SoftLayer has given my friend Kevin Laude the title of API Evangelist.“
• Intel Software: Bit Stories – “Welcome to the Bit Stories show. You’re a little early – we like that kind of enthusiasm! Consider yourself one of our very first fans. And we love our fans!” – Via Twitter / Josh Bancroft.
• Facebook Developer Garage: Seattle – “Whether you’re sharing ideas with local developers, looking for partners on your latest project, interested in seeing app demonstrations, seeking developer support direct from other Facebook Developers, or just looking to meet and socialize with other developers interested in Platform Facebook Developers Garage will be a solid time.“

• Anne Zelenka: Three Trends Supporting Productive Multitasking – “In connected mode, you stay in near-constant touch with colleagues and maintain a broad awareness of what’s available online. You accept multitasking as a fact of at least part of your work life. It’s not necessarily a substitute for single-tasking and dedicated focus, but can be a good complement if you know when and how to use it.“
• Seed: A Cyclic Universe? – “Another far more elaborate picture is the cyclic model, which proposes that the big bang repeats every trillion years or so leading to the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets each time. Instead of relying on inflation to smooth out the original random fluctuations, the model has an ultra-slow phase of contraction leading up to each bang that smoothes and flattens the universe naturally“
• Facebook Group: CTOs Using Amazon Web Services – “Whatever, for those of doing cool stuff with AWS.“
• Bob Rose: MapTrot Needs New Home – “We’re looking for a buyer or partner to take over the site and/or the code base. There’s a lot of useful code underneath, and tremendous potential to make the site itself much more than it is.“
• New York Times: As Dollar Crumples, Tourists Overseas Reel – “For Americans visiting Europe this summer, the steep decline of the dollar against the euro and the British pound has made eye-popping prices a lamentable part of the traveler’s tale.” – Not just tourists; us business travelers are reeling too.

• Science Blogs: The Questionable Authority: Let’s Talk Junk (Again) – “There are some stretches of DNA that do something important, but we don’t know what. Scientists are working on figuring it out, but right now all we know is that they’re important. We know this because we understand how evolution works, how natural selection works, and can – do – use that understanding to investigate DNA.“
• Terra Daily: Neutral_Evolution Has Helped Shape Our Genome – “Their calculations revealed that most numts became embedded in our genome over a 10-million-year period centered roughly 54 million years ago – right around the time when the first primates emerged.“