I'll second this combination.

We actually looked into getting Mapinfo but the licensing costs were heading into tens of thousands and that's before getting any actual map tiles.
Happily using Quantum GIS. This has a plugin that can save shapes directly into a Postgis column.
Postgis took a little patience the first time I installed - I'm running postgres 9.0 on centos 5.4 which requires third-party repository so had to do a few steps by hand - a more recent distro may be easier.
We're using it to map a bunch of franchise areas and redirect new customers after a geolocation lookup.

it's fairly simple... NOT!

Whoah! It's just occurred to me that although I've been lurking around here for quite a few years, I've never actually seen any of you...

there is also the issue of timing. everyhing in a movie is precisely timed so, for example, you get an orchestral stab when the monster face appears in the window. how are you going to achieve this sychronisation with the reader without severly restricrting the amount of words visible at a time? so you are limited to picking a sound loop per page with none of the dramatic timing of a movie score.

There's no doubt that a soundtrack can significantly enhance the immersiveness and emotional impact of films and TV programs. But can some audio accompaniment do the same thing for books?

- No, it can't.

I can think of one useful application of this technology - Reading a music score while listening to the music. That would be cool.

Maybe traditional books could get in on the multi-sense stimulation fad with a scratch-and-sniff panel on the back of every page. They wont though because it's a fucking stupid idea.

Who chooses the appropriate sound anyway? Do they really think someone is going to more fully appreciate the murder scene of Camus' "The Stranger" because some prick in a sound studio came by with: "This scene is on a beach so I'm going to add some wave noises"?

BZZZZT - ok so you've thought about it but you're still wrong.

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Apostrophe

Be aware of the its/it's trap. Use an apostrophe with the word "it" only when you want to indicate a contraction for "it is" or "it has." It is a pronoun, and pronouns have their own possessive form that does not use an apostrophe. For example, "That noise? It's just the dog eating its bone."

Or maybe he's discussing hand-crank-powered devices.

I humbly suggest that all science writers and editors that have difficulty discerning the distinction between "a habitable planet" and "a planet with the so-called habital zone around a star" - particularly when writing or approving a headline or summary - be sent on a one-way trip to learn the difference.

The thing that blew my mind when I first started playing with my n900 is that you can not only ssh from your phone, you can also ssh into your phone. As root.

Then you can start sys-admining your phone itself from your pc.
For example, just install apps via apt-get.
Type a command from a shell prompt your pc and you'll see the app appear on your phone screen.

I very quickly got over using Nokia's OVI apps to sync my phone so now I just copy files to/from with scp. If that starts getting cumbersome I'll probably setup a few folders to auto-sync via rsync.

Frankly, All new tech should be made this way.

surrounded by psychopants?!?!
disturbing and terrifying maybe but not lonely.
Or maybe that just the sicophant in me... ;-)

I agree with you on this point - using Mono you're pretty safe from being sued by Microsoft but there's one big issue with this whole patent issue that concerns me.

Currently there seems to be a bit of a patent arms race between a few large compaines. Most notably Microsoft and Oracle. Both these companies have a set of patents relating to VMs etc that seem to be fundamental to how these platfoms work.
The sheer number and breadth of these patents makes is look unlikely that there is nothing in Microsoft's offerings that voilates an Oracle patent and vice versa so we've got a cold-war style Mutually-Assured-Destruction stand-off in place.

The possible problem facing smaller implementations of either Java or .Net is that even if Mono gets an agreement from Microsoft mot to sue they are still vulnerable to being sued from elsewhere and they don't have their own stockpile of patents to act as a deterrant.

Umm i think that's kind-of how it already is..
I believe iOS doesn't come by default with a url-binding for skype: it gets setup when skype installs.

you're sugesting a change from:
no binding -> skype install -> binding added
to:
no binding -> skype install -> locked-by-default binding -> skype override -> unlocked binding

Straight away the skype install would change to both add and unlock and you're back to exactly the same position as before.

As much as it pains me to say so I'm with Apple on ths one: The app install created a url binding. It's then up to the app to handle those urls sensibly.

Building it wouldn't be too hard as long as he's got a decent sco... oh. wait. never mind.

Seriously, I've been asked "What the hell is Lorem ipsum?" so many times that I now paste in text about Lorem ipsum instead.

Maybe next week I'll start using the content from this very post followed a week later by a story about how I once posted to slashdot on a story about lorem ipsum - only translated to Latin.

Furthermore, Java doesn't have headers. And FSF insists that "dynamically linking" (of course, it is always dynamic in Java) against a GPL'd Java class library results in a derived work as well.

Which is why a number of Java library projects that don't object to the jars being used by commercial software release under a "GPL with classpath exception" license. I always imagine this license sitting somwhere between GPL and LGPL.