- MIT News Office published a story on “analog systems biology” (28 Sep 2011) but failed to link to the underlying paper, prompting criticism about the persistent absence of direct paper links in science journalism.  
- A discussion of filesystem performance highlighted that XFS on Linux can accumulate up to 16 GB of unflushed transactions on high-memory machines, leading to long stalls; the lack of a true userspace I/O barrier in Linux was identified as a core problem.  
- Participants debated the practicality of “well-designed userspace programs” on Linux, concluding that the kernel’s storage layer is fundamentally flawed and that experimental filesystems (ubifs, logfs, btrfs) act as “honeypots” that divert developer attention from fixing these issues.  
- A Python/Unicode debugging session revealed that a file with a UTF-16 BOM was actually encoded as 8-bit ASCII with interleaved null bytes; the correct decoding required specifying UTF-16-BE or UTF-16-LE explicitly, and the malformed file was traced to a “very dumb program.”  
- A proposed “news-to-paper” bookmarklet/web service was described that would automatically redirect readers from popular science articles to the corresponding academic papers, relying on crowdsourced mappings.  
- Bitbucket announced native Git support (3 Oct 2011), expanding its previously Mercurial-only hosting.  
- Thingiverse’s new “deadly weapons” policy was criticized for vagueness and for potentially chilling open-source hardware development; concerns were raised that distributing weapon CAD files could violate ITAR regulations.