There has been some discussion and rumors swirling around about Apple and a tablet PC of some sort. John Gruber discussed it, as did Paul Bucheit, and the comments on Hacker News has some insights too. For the record, here is my prediction, from the software side of view:

I’ve started a new site called Sencepta Futura to discuss my thoughts on futurism. You can read the welcome post for a little more about my motivations in starting the site. Comments and suggestions are appreciated. (There is also a Twitter account: @senceptafutura)

Quick announcement: I’ve decide to take a leave of absence from Stony Brook and continue working here at YouNoodle. I plan on staying here for a year, and either go back to Stony Brook, or transfer to a school out here. San Francisco is great, and I’m excited to be staying. YouNoodle has turned out to be a great place to work - my coworkers are awesome, and I’m excited about the stuff I’m working on.

I’ve just realized I had never enabled the DISQUS commenting system I installed when I launched this site. I’ve enabled it now, so, you can comment on any post. Also, keep in my thoughts on blog comments: GYOB: Get your own blog.

A while ago, I wrote Snippits, a Ruby program that performed text expansion, with quite a few useful features. I built is fairly quickly, because I had an itch to scratch: I hated typing the same thing over and over and over. Computers ought to be able to automate common tasks, and they can’t figure out how to do so themselves, we should be able to teach them. At the time, there was nothing that did text replacement on Linux (but several tools for Mac and Windows existed), so I set out to write my own.

I got pretty far - Snippits was functional, stable, and speedy enough to use daily, and I did so. Of course, it could have been more functional, more stable, and more speedy, but it was good enough for me - and, actually, a couple of users. I was proud of how Snippits had helped people, and I enjoyed using it immensely - there is something extremely satisfying to bypassing tedious typing and retyping of your name, address, email, or really, anything, over and over.

This summer I’ll be working at YouNoodle, an Internet startup based in San Francisco. YouNoodle has a social network for everyone interested in startups, and has several analytical tools they can use to predict the success of a startup. They’ve been covered by the Times.

I’m really excited about this summer! YouNoodle is a great company, and I’ll be working with an awesome team.

Giles Bowkett posted a snippet of Archaeopteryx code, and one line caught my eye: eval("@#{option} = attributes[:#{option}]"), because of the eval call.

Christian Neukirchen wrote a Ruby coding style guide.

I’ve spent some time re-doing this site - it’s now running Drupal 6, with a new theme, and a slightly reorganized front page. I’ve imported all the old content, but I haven’t checked everything manually to make sure it’s OK. Please let me know if you find anything.

I now also syndicate a bunch of other content onto here as well: Twitter entries, Last.FM tracks, comments on Reddit, etc.

SC08 is over for this year. The competition ended officially 4PM Friday. We ended up stopping the RAxML job we were running for 40 straight hours; it didn’t look like it was going to finish at all. In the end, we didn’t complete a single dataset.