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Yesterday was Tom's first day back at school. It seems that no matter how old you get, you are still forced to do group activities during orientation that make you feel like you're back in kindergarten. Since I'm still working, I'll just live vicariously through him until it's my turn to go back to school...or until his midterms come up in a couple of weeks.
It's not often you see anything innovative in mapping... but MapBlast's new LineDrive mapping system for driving directions is really a leap forward in printable maps for navigation. Rather than simply highlighting the route on a map, the system seems to actually create a vector diagram of the route, showing the turns and relative directions but (critically) removing the scale of the distance of each leg, as well as any turns in the road itself. By omitting this useless information (distance is provided in numeric terms, which is what you would convert the map leg to anyway in viewing it) the diagram is far easier to read, and even easier to memorize if you're the driver. Edward Tufte would be proud.
USA Today has an extensive report up today on Linux's progression into key financial and creative markets.
"Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston and others are scoring results like Dresdner's with Linux pilot projects. IBM -- an early and big backer of Linux -- recently opened a Manhattan office to promote Linux among its financial services clients. And Reuters is deploying Linux servers to process the data and news widely used on Wall Street to make real-time trading decisions. 'It's the start of something big,' says Mark Hunt, Reuters' director of standards. 'If you can use Linux in financial services, you can use it for anything.' "