Short Takes

No real time for a longer post this week. So, instead, a small collection of notes:

• Google has gotten a lot of criticism for it's real names-only policy. Now it looks as if they may be preparing to back down on it. No word on exactly how and when, but my guess is that this will coincide with the appearance of company and brand-name accounts; they need a public name separate from whoever is actually managing the account so the back-end mechanism would be just about the same. I also guess that they'll still require a real name for registration and only your publicly visible name will be pseudonymous. That'd be good enough for most cases.


• And speaking of Google+, Chris Willson has finally appeared there. He's a travel photographer based in Okinawa, and has been one of the inspirations for my own photography.


• Not speaking about Chris at all, this is a letter from a psychopath to an author who recently wrote a book on psychopathy. It's a good, insightful read. Psychopaths are usually depicted more or less as monsters in news and in fiction. This letter serves to remind us that they — like anyone with a psychological disorder ­— aren't monsters, but just people. Nothing more and nothing less.


• I've installed the new version of Ubuntu on my laptop. It's much as I expected: mostly smooth and working well, but as always with a new version there's a few issues I've had to work around. But I have to say that by now there really are no necessary workarounds in Ubuntu any more. All things I've dealt with are about how I expect things to work after using Linux for many years; a newcomer would no doubt find the current system to be just fine. Recommended.