1. Mouse art — A program that creates nice artwork from your mouse pointer tracking.
2. Jimmy Whales’ theory of failure — Wikipedia founder talks at TED and says: fail, fail, fail.
3. Diagram of secure passwords — How are you choosing your passwords?
4. The number one rule of design — Insightful analysis of the application design process.
5. Printing is getting new life forms, like the Pencil printer and the Paperless printer.

Which is your favourite link of the week? Please share with comments or tweet.

seven: «I’m very busy preparing Linux Day 2010 at the moment.»
geekscrap: «Whoa! it’s in october, isn’t it? You’re taking it early!»
seven: «This year it’s going to be big.»

You’ve been warned.

1. USIM card with an embedded Wi-Fi radio — Next generation phone SIM will run local hotspots.
2. European Credit and debit card security broken — You’d better use old signature-based cards.
3. Infineon TPM hacked — It eventually happened. No gory details though.
4. 21st century life in transition — What happens when you apply digital rules in analog world.
5. Twitter History — A nice video with developers from Twitter.

If you have a little more time, you may enjoy this 20-minutes video by Jamie Oliver at TED 2010 on food education. He must have read Ned Batchelder’s tips on presentation: entertain, educate, practice.

So here is the proof:

Appearance: the pictures above speak for themselves. When I came back from my trip at McDonalds, I found some more snapshots at TrashFood blog. As the Photoshop ad says, product images are for illustrative purposes only.

Taste: it just doesn’t live up to the claims. Asiago cheese doesn’t taste like Asiago, at all (you guys at Consorzio Tutela Asiago have no shame?). It’s just too sweet and meshing badly with industrial bread. The artichokes sauce really strikes the taste. Other reviews by other customers here, here and here seem to agree with my review.

Health: Nutritional information is not printed directly on the package, but McDonaldsMenu.info website is referenced for more information. Here’s nutritional info for McItaly, compared to best seller Big Mac (symbols legend):

It’s quite easy to figure out that McItaly is 30% more caloric than Big Mac (about the same calories of a Pizza Margherita), is really fatter and especially bad for your cholesterol, considering high levels of saturated fat (91% of what you should eat daily, just in one burger!).

Price: € 4,20, a high price tag for a burger, but relatively low if matched against calories.

The verdict: Overall quality is quite low, compared to other McDonalds burgers. If you’re in for junk food at McDonalds, stay with Big Mac.

P.S.: As you can notice from my pictures, endorsment from Italian government is clearly noticeable on the package. They should have better checked what’s inside the package as well.

1. Church business is about showing off symbols.
   Technology has its own symbols too.
2. Jesus wants you to keep vegetables vegetatives alive.
   Technology has found a way to talk to them too.
3. For centuries, Church stated that Earth was flat.
   Now Technology may prove that the whole Universe is flat too.
4. Tech spreads ideas through the world-wide web.
   But Church is catching up fast.
5. Church fears that Tech may lead to atheism.
   In fact, people typically pray God when they need to restore a backup.
6. Child pornography audience has rapidly moved to P2P technology.
   So Church is making clear that traditional methods work fine too.
7. In China, Church is controlled by the government.
   In China, IT leader Google reclaims some of its “Don’t be evil” mantra.
8. Human clonation, Church warns: «a dangerous experiment which could cause a deep moral crisis».
   Embryons implant operation was most clicked on YouPorn.
9. Church asserts that human development is explained by intelligent design.
   Scientists may try and open a black-hole to slip in a parallel universe to search for prior art.
10. According to the Church, marriage should be ’til death.
    Thanks to staminal cells research, your mother-in-law will live forever.

1. Panopticlick — EFF shows off user tracking by fingerprinting browser’s User-Agent.
2. Misa digital guitar — Open Source touchscreen guitar runs on Gentoo.
3. Preordering the Apple Tablet — You may like iPad or not, but you can’t forget the wait.
4. Ian Bicking: A new way to deploy web applications — Extending Google’s AppEngine paradigm to a customized world.
5. What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory by Ulrich Drepper — A nice evergreen for my CS students.

Google’s rampage

In the last 7 days, clickstream has been exceptionally dominated by Google, so I think it deserves its own hit parade:

1. Google’s proposal to extend DNS protocol — adding originator’s IP in queries would help geo-customized response.
2. Chromium Blog: More Resources for Developers — brief of next-gen web technologies.
3. Google Deducing Wireless Location Data — by inspecting packet headers and measuring transmission rates.
4. Chromium Blog: Encouraging More Chromium Security Research — security bugs wanted, dead or alive.
5. Google Xistence Offers to Live Your Life For You — a nice parody on social networks by Australian web designer Philipp Drössler.

P.S.: The best news of the week (of the year?) is actually this one.

1. Humble Pied — nice tips to get inspired and productive.
2. High Performance Enabled SSH/SCP — how to make your SCP session run at full bandwidth.
3. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’ — He’s too young to be called visionary.
4. Naked airport scanner catches cellphone, misses bomb components — Whoops, it’s not a sex bomb they missed with the full body scanner.
5. TJ Creamer twits from space — International space station went on-line this week.