Public database of sampled music

http://www.whosampled.com/ I haven't explored it, but it's a cool idea.

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Susan B Anthony riding a roller coster

 teehee... (click on the pic for the artist's blog)
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A cool idea

One for LBS on mobile: I often go places with other people and want to spend more time in some places, but have to leave them for later. I'd like to have a tool that will read your current location so you have a 1-button add-to-list-of-places-I-want-to-revisit. 
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I don't think it's clear to some users what kind of authorisation they give to programs when they click an accept button. When you click accept, in most cases you give that software full authority to act as you in any action which it can perform. It's also problematic that outside of (and sometimes inside of) large government operations, the principle of least privilege is neither understood, nor implemented when it is, in the case of dodgy or absent specifications, a very good way to limit the damage rogue programs (and operators) can do.
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fucking GSM standards

Post-2000, why the FUCK couldn't 3GPP hyperlink their specification documents? Seriously, go to the fucking trouble. It's worth it.
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Is it possible to derive statistics about bodies of English text  in general from measurements of a dictionary ? For example, if I have a chart of the letter most likely to come before any given letter in the alphabet taken from a dictionary, is that applicable to, say, a journal article?

A dictionary isn't distributed like the usual English text, so I'd say no. Richer metrics would be required to make that sort of translation.
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Upgrading software

Briefly, upgrade your software only when you want to take advantage of new features or security/stability fixes. That seems obvious, but a lot of people (especially people new to the idea of maintaining a software system) still think that "bleeding-edge" is the way to go, when that just isn't the case. There's nothing to be gained by putting your system in an unstable state at a whim or for the vacuous accomplishment of having the newest thing.

Furthermore, when you do upgrade your software, make sure you have a path back to the previous version so that if something doesn't work well with your system (and there will definitely be times this happens), you can revert without too much hassle. Too many times have I made some install that didn't have a sane un-install procedure--files flying all over the file system, and the only record of where they were supposed to go in a binary executable. Yuck. Avoid using binary executables for setup when you can and it'll save you trouble. And for god's sake, don't make them for your software, but make an install shell script if it wouldn't inconvenience your users. Sure theres the problem of platform incompatibility that comes with that approach, but that's true in any cross-platform system, and there are other ways of dealing with those problems.

Remember, remember the 5th of November...(tee hee)
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