• iPad App Pricing – Nice analysis of iPad and iPhone application pricing.
• The Value of Ideas – “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.” Or actions speak louder than words.
• The IBM Muppet Show – “IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff.”

• Arab society’s crunch points – Interesting talk about the Middle East and how change might be made. Hint: it doesn’t involve “regime change.”
• iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out? – “We have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).”

• Realism in UI Design – “The more realistic something is, the harder it is to figure out the meaning.”
• Jan. 19, 1983: Apple Gets Graphic With Lisa – And without the Lisa there wouldn’t have been the Mac…
• Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers – Steven Levy finds that mobile (cell) carriers are all evil… I wish this was an isolated problem but it seems to happen everywhere. Does anyone actually like their provider?

It’s that time of year where all the papers, magazines and websites devolve into the best of the year articles rather than actually generate new content. I didn’t want to feel left out so here’s my contribution.

Of course “best” can mean any number of different things, so I’m going to pick a few top fives.

Here are the most popular pages viewed this year:

1. Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on CentOS 4
2. Professionalism
3. Oracle 8i for Linux Installation HOWTO
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. Review: Belkin Wi-Fi Phone

It continues to surprise me how popular the Oracle pages are. They are now very old products and the pages have not been updated for quite some time now.

• Separating Explosives from the Detonator – A sensible response to the pants bomber…
• Google ‘open’ memo betrays deep corporate delusion – “Aside from Apple, no tech outfit is more secretive about what goes on inside the company.”
• Q: “Once in a blue moon” is a rare event. But what does “blue moon” really mean? – These things are never as simple as you think they should be…

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “From My Past.” I guess this image shows something from all of our pasts, except perhaps the glasses. I saw this in the Natural History Museum in Vienna and it amused me.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Vehicle.” I’m entry number 167.

• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

• After 1,100 miles and 52 days, Eddie Izzard has finishing line in sight – Awesome achievement. And I don’t mean “awesome” as in an “awesome hot dog.”
• John Marcotte, Author of the 2010 California Protection of Marriage Act – Marcotte is trying to get divorce banned. “People who supported Prop 8 weren’t trying to take rights away from gays, they just wanted to protect traditional marriage. That’s why I’m confident that they will support this initiative, even though this time it will be their rights that are diminished. To not support it would be hypocritical. "
• PM apology after Turing petition – About time too!

• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – Maybe the Internet isn’t the end of literacy after all…
• Galileo’s telescope reaches 400th anniversary – “Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble.”
• Creationists, now they’re coming for your children – “The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it.”

• In pictures: Satellite eye on Earth – July – Awesome images.
• Amber Ale: Brewing Beer From 45-Million-Year-Old Yeast – Science, history and beer, and all in one story. How could I not bookmark this article?
• Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline – “The evidence is staring Microsoft’s leadership in the face that they have lost the most lucrative segment of the market, but, judged by their actions and public remarks, they seem to think it’s all a big joke. They should be sweating this but they’re laughing it off.”