Life

The seventh season of Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance crowned its latest champion last week, and for the first time since the show debuted in 2005, I did not care. The first six seasons were a fantastically guilty pleasure—like a hip flask of whiskey at a dry wedding—that I hid from friends and colleagues. This year’s contest, however, proved beautifully boring. The choreography and dancing were still stellar but something was missing all season that I could not enunciate. » Read more

In early 2009, as the stories of many websites begin, a few college friends were considering what kind of project they might start together. In this particular case, the result was OpenHatch.

OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don't know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for "bite-size bugs," the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors. » Read more

Nearly two million babies would survive past their first month of life each year if they were simply kept warm. That's all. It's called thermal regulation, and all that means is keeping their environments warm so that their calories go to gaining weight and staying healthy instead of keeping their bodies warm.

Timothy Prestero, co-founder of Design that Matters and the related ThinkCycle initiative, spoke at LinuxCon 2010 on the open development of medical devices, in particular, DtM's role in creating open and usable incubators for babies in the developing world. » Read more

This article is based on a talk that Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Law Center gave at LinuxCon 2010.

Our software must be safe. It's in cars, voting machines, financial markets. And now it's in medical devices, which our very lives depend on. » Read more