I just confirmed my flight and registration for the The Next Web 2008 conference, April 3-4, 2008 in Amsterdam, NL. Two days of sessions and social events. Certainly highlights will include the live DiggNation taping and the champagne soirée at the Odeon.

I’m looking forward to comparing the vibe at this conference to the Emerging Tech and Graphing Social Patterns conferences I attended in San Diego, CA earlier this month.

If you’re going to be there and would like to meet up, drop me a note. My base of operations will be the Owl Hotel in the Museumplein area. By all accounts, a quick tram ride from the Centraal Station.

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(See also: The Next Web 2008)
(See also: TechCrunch article)
(See also: Owl Hotel)

Allows researchers to detect and identify human influenza strains, including bird flu:

Unlike existing diagnostic methods, VereFlu is a breakthrough molecular diagnostic test that can detect infection with high accuracy and sensitivity, within two hours providing genetic information of the infection that traditionally would take days to weeks to learn.

Not something I’m likely to have on the counter in my kitchen though small and fast enough to detect infections at national ports of entry. I expect that as size and speed continue to improve this function may collapse into devices that ‘sniff’ the corridors between airport gates.

(See also: ST/Veredus press release)
(See also: Engadget article)

According to an article in the Sunday Times OnLine this morning, I may be part of a new tribe. The ‘New Nomadics‘.

If your ‘job’ entails loitering in coffee shops, armed with only a laptop and mobile, then you’re part of a brave new world.

Though I’m attached to an interesting group of people, I’ve never been to our offices. I expect much of my work will be done in motion, at customer sites, or some intermediate space other than the office or home.

This is a wonderful time to be alive.

(See also: The Sunday Times: The rise of the new nomadics)

In case you don’t have a phalanx of LINUX servers in your basement, or perhaps if you do, here is a well-organized UNIX guide to get you up to speed. I really enjoy the care and precision of collections like this. This is revision 11. Checkout the PDF and booklet versions cited below.

As an aside, even more fun is to be had in the pseudo-shell available at the root directory of this site. Try a few commands like: ‘weather’, and ‘whereami’. (pseudo-shell)

Efforts like this inspire me to start one for bioinformatics tools, BLAST, et alia.

(See also: UNIX Toolbox: xHTML)
(See also: UNIX Toolbox PDF)
(See also: UNIX Toolbox: PDF booklet)

Here is an interesting collection of visualization tools for social networks, music, search, news, and the Internet. Sadly, many of the tools appear numbingly similar.

(See also: RWW: article)