The Outer Limits Influence on Star Trek

I must have read it before but I didn't realize or remember the ties from The Outer Limits to Star Trek.

Google Fixes Privacy Flaw? (Part 2)

Okay, when you write a post (or even after) there's a little drop down menu (triangle, arrow thing) at it's upper right.  One of the options is to disallow re-sharing.  You have to do it manually every time I think—I don't see a way to make that the default setting.

That's better than not having that option at all, better than email, and also annoying to have to do.

(Part 1)

Google+ Solves the Social Privacy Problem

By Making Friending Very Complicated by @LizGannes at All Things D.

Google Fixes Privacy Flaw?

(SAI Business Insider)  Oh no.  I thought G+ didn't allow a reader to reshare a post to a wider audience than the original post.

Google+ and Twitter

So I just reposted a story about the halo seen in Hawaii.  I found that story by reading my sparks (spark?) on Google+ where I've entered astronomy as an interest.  The question is, would I have seen it reading my Twitter feed?

I scanned back through my main Twitter stream for about an hour, which is a typical short reading session for me.  A long session might involve reading back through two or three hours.

Then I went to my astronomy Twitter list and read back through those messages, well into yesterday.

The story wasn't there, or at least I didn't catch it.  (Granted I did a quick skim and didn't actually read the Twitter posts).  Hm.

Weird Expanding Halo Seen from Hawaii

Explained by the Bad Astronomer.

Another idea posted by board member neufer was that this was from a detonation charge in the missile’s third stage. There are ports, openings in the sides of the third stage. Those ports are sealed for the flight until the right time, when they’re blown open by explosive charges. This allows the fuel to escape very rapidly, extinguishing the thrust at a precise time to allow for accurate targeting of the warhead.

At this point, the missile is above most of the Earth’s atmosphere, essentially in space. So when that gas is suddenly released from the stage expands, it blows away from the missile in a sphere. Not only that, the release is so rapid it would expand like a spherical shell — which would look like a ring from the ground (the same way a soap bubble looks like a ring). And not only that, but the expanding gas would be moving very rapidly relative to the ground since the missile would’ve been moving rapidly at this point in the flight.

Image credit:  Frame processed by Phil Plait from the video by Kanoa Withington/CFHT.

Hands on with Google+

from Macworld by Megan Geuss and Mark Sullivan.

Inside Google+ by Steven Levy

From Wired Magazine @stevenjayl (author of In the Plex) writes about Google+ as he witnessed things from his inside view.

Happy Summer Solstice

Happy summer solstice today at Tuesday at 13:16 EDT  (17:16 UTC).

Tue 2011-06-21 13:16:00 -0400
Tue 2011-06-21 17:16:00 +0000

Ihnatko Writes for Television

Hah!  If Ihnatko was a TV writer 25 years ago, as he ponders in his blog post N-B-SEEEEE us.

API Design Matters

from ACM Queue by Michi Henning  (2007-06-07).

After more than 25 years as a software engineer, I still find myself underestimating the time it will take to complete a particular programming task. Sometimes, the resulting schedule slip is caused by my own shortcomings: as I dig into a problem, I simply discover that it is a lot harder than I initially thought, so the problem takes longer to solve—such is life as a programmer. Just as often I know exactly what I want to achieve and how to achieve it, but it still takes far longer than anticipated. When that happens, it is usually because I am struggling with an API that seems to do its level best to throw rocks in my path and make my life difficult. What I find telling is that, after 25 years of progress in software engineering, this still happens. Worse, recent APIs implemented in modern programming languages make the same mistakes as their two-decade-old counterparts written in C. There seems to be something elusive about API design that, despite many years of progress, we have yet to master.

New iGoogle Email Client

The new Gmail client in iGoogle is actually pretty neat.  It's essentially the same as the web-based client on, e.g., the Android phone.

VLT Survey Telescope 268-megapixel camera

(PhysOrg.com) -- The VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory, has made its first release of impressive images of the southern sky. The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-meter telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart, which is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality. It is a visible-light telescope that perfectly complements ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope. New images of the Omega Nebula and the globular cluster Omega Centauri demonstrate the VST’s power.

Read more….

Image credit: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM. Acknowledgement: OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute

Post-Mortems at HubSpot

What I Learned From 250 Whys by Dan Milstein at HubSpot. This is quite good and worth reading!

I've learned about how HubSpot's systems work, why they sometimes break, and what we can do to make them more resilient. Beyond that, I've learned a lot about complex systems and failure in general. Which, in case you're wondering, is a fascinating topic. I highly, highly recommend Richard Cook's essay “How Complex Systems Fail” in O'Reilly's Web Operations. Or Atul Gawande's Complications and Better. Or basically anything John Allspaw writes.

If you'd like to build resilient systems, here's some of what I've learned from the fifty-plus 5 Whys I’ve been a part of. (And by &rlquo;systems,” I mean systems of people + machines, and by “resilient,” I mean I'm stealing from Allspaw.)

Weighted Random Selection in Python

This morning I was looking for a Python implementation of weighted random selection, i.e., I have a set of weighted items and I want to randomly select one where the probability of selecting each item is proportional to its weight.  I found this blog post by Eli Bendersky which exposes a set of approaches nicely.

New Redshift Record of 9.4

Gamma ray observations of the gamma ray burst object GRB 090429B supplemented by infrared observations from the Gemini North telescope and United Kingdom Infra Red Telescope, both on Mauna Kea, place the object at a redshift of z=9.4, as reported by Emily Baldwin at Astronomy Now.  (Also at Cosmos by Miles Gough).

In the cosmological model, that would mean the scale of the universe was 9.6% of it's current size at the time the gamma rays and IR were emitted.    (1 / z + 1).

Also, see:  Cosmological Distances and Gains of Salt

Image credit: Gemini Observatory / AURA / Levan, Tanvir, Cucchiara.

Forty-three Rules for Better Leadership

A blog posting by Tim Kastelle on 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role by Pam Fox-Rollin.

Google Social Puzzle Pieces

By David Goldman at CNN Money.

Change Your Facebook Password

Access to your account may have leaked.  This discovered problem means it's been possible for others to access your account since 2007 via third-party applications.

The best thing to do is change your password as soon as possible.  That will invalidate any leaked tokens if they were in the possession of any evil doers.

More information is in this article at Symantec.

This is also explained in this installment of Security Now.  Skip ahead to the 58-minute mark.

P.S.  Note that you will have to enter your new password to third party apps you're using after doing this.  For example, on my Android phone I cleared the data and entered my email address and new password into the Facebook app.

Cicadas Attack!

Well, I've experienced the 13-year cicadas that I've heard so much about. In Middle Georgia yesterday as soon as I opened the car door I was greeted by an almost deafening, hard to describe sound coming from the trees. It sounded like the summer cicadas I've always known, but louder and sharper.

They also filled the air. You could look up and see them constantly criss crossing the sky. Two or three flew into my face and hair.

It seemed like they'd taken up residence in every tree and bush in sight, but the rumors of the bugs eating every bit of vegetation in sight turned out to be unfounded.

Dark Energy Is Driving Universe Apart

NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer Finds Dark Energy Repulsive from Science Daily.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion. They contradict an alternate theory, where gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. According to this alternate theory, with which the new survey results are not consistent, Albert Einstein's concept of gravity is wrong, and gravity becomes repulsive instead of attractive when acting at great distances.

The First Hour or Two with the Cr-48

So, I've been using this ChromeOS notebook for a couple or three hours now.  Most things work fine.  I've done the usual email and documents work in Gmail, made a couple of phone calls using Google Voice in Gmail, and played a couple of screens of Angry Birds.

Right now I'm listing to music on Amazon Cloud Player.

Connecting to wifi was very simple.

Mouse motion, famously problematic on this hardware, was a little flaky when trying to play Angry Birds, but otherwise I don't notice much problem.  I finally found the check box to enable tap to click, so that is all better now.

I found the terminal with ssh via Ctl-Alt-T and tried it out.  It works but, again, wide-screen insanity prevails.  Also the font and colors need to be fixed in the terminal.   It's a limited set of commands but ssh is really all I'd need.

Right now it's on the charger and has charged up to 78%.

Using a Cr-48

This is my first blog post and my first user session with a Cr-48 running ChromeOS.

Everything is great so far except for one thing:   The windows are all full screen.  That's about the most annoying thing I could think of.

Otherwise, everything is working pretty well with almost no problems.  I like the size, form factor, weight and even the keyboard so far.

Oh: A Shell Written in Go

By Michael Macinnis.  README at Github.

Tidal Energy In the UK

Fascinating.  They have tidal energy generators in the UK as reported by this article by Chris Goodall in The Guardian.  I find it amusing that they call the energy “renewable” when it's really depleating the angular momentum of the earth's rotation and the moon's orbit.

Still, as far as I can tell, renewable always means a big enough supply that we can't imagine when we'll run out. That's the way new energy supplies often start out.

Nice Hartsfield Atlanta Airport Time Lapse

[VIDEO] By Stephen W. Ramsden

Another Amazing Building Projection

[VIDEO] This is on a real building.

Obscura Digital Demo Reel

[VIDEO]

Five Gigapixel Sky Survey of the Entire Celestial Sphere

Wow!   skysurvey.org.

Projection on 26-Story Coca-Cola Building

For it's 125th anniversary, Obscura Digital arranged to turn Coca-Cola's 26-story headquarters building in Atlanta into a giant, four-way projection screen.

The show
About the show
Article from The Street
Obscura Digital

From The Street:

The entire Coca-Cola North Ave. tower in Atlanta—26 stories high and 402 feet (122.8 m) high—is canvassed in scrim.

The projection covers an area 339 feet high and 157 feet wide per side of the building.  The projection surface area from all four sides of the building totals more than 210,000 square feet, making it the world’s largest single building illumination. 

This display uses 45 projectors that are 20,000 lumens each, for a total of nearly 1 million lumens of light simultaneously projected onto the building.  The overall projection resolution is more than 7,000 pixels wide (7040 x 3800).

Paper Computers

I remember an interview with someone from Xerox PARC, probably almost 30 years ago, where they were talking about ubiquitous computers that were like paper.   I remember a quote that went something like, You'd just tear a new computer off a pad when you needed one.  They'd just be laying around your office in piles.

Well, they seem to be here, as reported in this article in The Economic Times.

Saturday 2011-05-07 Is National Astronomy Day

There are events planned at Fernbank and Tellus.

Cloud Computing

Seth asked about our sightings of and thoughts on cool, emerging technologies.

I continue to hold that the technology that promises one of the most significant impacts is cloud computing.  It's been coming for a long time but cloud computing has recently turned one of those corners and it's influence is rapidly accelerating.

Basically, cloud computing means that your data and your applications are out on the Internet, “in the cloud” as we say.

I've been moving my own work into the cloud and I'm probably following that acceleration curve pretty closely.  Here's my current score card.

I've been a user of web-based email since Rocketmail and Yahoo's re-branding and evolution of the same when they both took off around 1997.  For years I merely echoed email into the cloud, keeping my own personal copies on an email server at home.  Sometime around the introduction of Gmail, I stopped keeping my own copy and  switched wholesale to Gmail.

I've been using Google Documents in earnest since 2006.  Since then, probably 99% or more of every document or spreadsheet I've created, including home and work, have been in the cloud.  I added slide presentations to that in 2007, and drawings most recently.  (Note that I've still not found a replacement for Windows Paint, though).

In 2006 I moved my blogging off of my own server and back to Blogger and Blogspot.

For the past several years I've been putting more and more pictures in Picasa, though it's not my sole storage medium in that category.

In the fall of 2009 I became a user of GTD and moved my next action lists and projects to Gmail Tasks.

Over this past year, my move into the cloud has gone mad.

I've used Piknic solely for photo editing.

I've migrated all of my note-taking into Google Documents.  Many folks will remember the blue notebooks I used years ago, inspired by my old friend Leonard's use of them for journals when we were at Georgia Tech.  For a number of intervening years I moved most of my note-taking into on-line text documents edited with Emacs.  Over this past year I've migrated almost 100% of my note-taking on-line into Google  Documents.  I create several new documents every day.

Also this year I made the conscious decision to start migrating all of my media consumption into the cloud and at the same time, decided to get a Roku box instead of a Blueray player.  I use Netflix and Amazon, and occasionally Dish on Demand, for movies, Kindle for books, and Amazon, Pandora and Slacker for music.  My thought is to never again purchase physical media.

I've moved most of my own little command-line utilities into AppEngine equivalents.

I've also become a recent user of Dropbox for file sharing.

The personal Linux “main machine” that I use at work for programming has been a virtual machine for the recent few months.  The next (final?) frontier, for which I'm waiting with poised fascination, is a browser-based integrated development environment for writing, testing and running the computer programs I write daily.  A lot of work is underway and there are some initial results out there now.

I'm late to this ballgame, but I'm also getting ready to move my backups to Carbonite.  That will probably be another case of just putting a copy there, while maintaining other current schemes.

I'm already at the point that I can do almost any thing of significance I do on a computer from any computer that I truly trust.

Dark Matter Valliantly Holds On

In it's flight to remain dark but Jennifer Ouellette says the debate is heating up in this analysis at Discovery News.

Image credit: Computer simulation of large scale structure from Science Magazine.

Finally, the Voice of Reason Regarding Aid to Japan

From The Economist article After the Quake.

From the article:

What you shouldn't do is give money to charities that are raising money off the disaster. The New York Times' Stephanie Strom explained why last month:

[W]ealthy Japan is not impoverished Haiti. And many groups are raising money without really knowing how it will be spent — or even if it will be needed. The Japanese Red Cross, for example, has said repeatedly since the day after the earthquake that it does not want or need outside assistance. But that has not stopped the American Red Cross from raising [tens of millions of dollars] in the name of Japan’s disaster victims.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Scintillating.  Brilliant!  RT @apod.

How Engagement Killed Gameplay

From What Games Are.   RT @kevinmarks.

Facebook credits

A 600 million-dollar virtual economy (from cnnmoney.com).  Yikes!

Why Apple and Google Need to Stalk You

from cnnmoney.com.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Is up for sale as reported by Gizmodo.

More information is at Profiles in History.

Built on a custom ladder frame chassis, many old world forms of car building were employed, and modern technology stepped in to created a vehicle which was both accurate enough to fool veteran and classic car experts, when held under the scrutiny of 70mm cinema cameras, and durable enough to withstand everything from driving in sand, cobbled streets and down staircases. The bonnet is crafted of polished aluminum; the boat deck is hand-crafted of red and white cedar built by boat builders in Buckinghamshire, and the array of brass fittings were obtained from Edwardian cars. Even the alloy dashboard plate is from a British World War I fighter plane!

Most powerful millimeter-scale energy harvester generates electricity from vibrations

From physorg.com.  This is fascinating.

Watch This Impressive Forerunner Of The iPad From 1994

[VIDEO] From Business Insider.

Usefulness of Inventing Programming Languages

Emilis Dambauskas invents a programming language using bullet lists.

Catching Up

Okay, time to catch up again to empty some items I emailed to myself into the blog.

St. Louis Airport Tornado Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXmi2p4uSCc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQYp3RXkvLw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4niRpJN1EY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgbYdnL6e8Q

Pad Reviews

If you're even a little interested in a computing pad, here are two excellent reviews by one of media's best writers, Andy Ihnatko, both from the Chicago Sun-Times.

(Note, Andy's writing is a joy to read even if you aren't interested in pad computing).

Are the Blackberry Playbook and LG G-Slate ready to take on iPad?

Hands-on review: How does Motorola Xoom compare to iPad?

More about Andy Ihnatko

Can Your Programming Language Do This?

An excellent argument for functional programming from Joel Spolsky.

I take exception in a couple of ways.  One is that, for some of the example code, it might actually become harder to read/understand as you go further into the article.  I don't think anyone would have trouble understanding the earlier versions.

Second, it's true that having map-reduce be natural to the language and, more importantly, the programming style may lend to thinking in those terms.   However, I don't think that's necessary to think of using map reduce as a solution for large scale computing.  It's possible to understand the concept without it being natural in the language.  (I explain it regularly in non-FP terms).

Happy Easter from Simon's Cat

[VIDEO]

Solar System Telescope

solarsystemscope.com is very neat.  At first I was bothered by the schematic representation of planet's orbit sizes.  However, in fact, there's a control that lets you slide between the schematic and true display of relative distances and sizes.  It's a nice tool for visualization.

Facebook Datacenter Tour

Scoble has a tour up of a Facebook datacenter.

Image is from scobleizer.com.

ISS Flyover

I just happened to be outside with the dog and looked up to see the International Space Station flying over.  I was quite sure that's what it was.  It was extremely bright, like Venus, up around mag -3 or so I'd guess.  It was in the SSE and gliding across the sky at the speed a plane would fly over but with no blinking lights at all.

It was quite beautiful since, at the same time, a high-altitude jet was passing in the other direction with a faint con trail illuminated by the already-set sun.

Data at NASA confirms the sighting for tonight at 20:49 EDT and predicts a similar flyover tomorrow evening at Mon 2011-04-18 21:14:00 -0400.  (21:14 EDT).  It will pass from WSE to NNE and achieve a maximum altitude (above the horizon in degrees) of 43 deg, quite high.

For more information:    http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/

A Beautiful Phase Change Demonstration!

Using sodium acetate.  [VIDEO]  Phase change material at Wikipedia.

Hottel Memo a Hoax

Re: FBI UFO investigation.  Story from International Business Times by By Jesse Emspak.

Own Your Profile and Web Identity

Good advice that some web pundits hand out is that you should own your own profile, your own web identity.

That means you shouldn't depend on, e.g., Google, Facebook, or Twitter as your only presence and identity on-line.  It's a good idea to register yourself with all of them, and *carefully* control what information is there, but it's also a good idea to have your own site which you own and fully control and which is always the main place people can go to find out what you want them to know.

To do this is cheap.  The main requirement is a domain name, yourname.com or whatever you want to call it.  Of course you'll be limited by what's available.  You can get these from, e.g., hover.com, for about $15 a year.  Once you register a domain name, you legally own it and can always control what information it points to.

From there you can build a home page, even a minimal one, with Google Sites, Wordpress.com, or even Facebook or Twitter.  You can also buy a site web hosting service like Squarespace.com.

Then you just forward your domain there.  If something happens to the site you're pointing to, then you just forward your domain name to another site.

The main idea is that this gives you a somewhat “permanent” address on the web.  Your “permanent” address used to be your email address, but that turned out to be a bad idea as spam and other email abuses blossomed.

From this main identity page, you can point to any and all of any other sites you'd like to point people to such as a blog or even your Facebook page if you must.

Video Games vs. Books

I thought I'd comment on Christopher's very thoughtful and well-written post on Video Games vs. Books here.

I agree that games can have educational value, especially when they act as some sort of real-world simulator.  I learned a little bit about Indy racing some years ago from a racing game.  I never realized racing involved things like wheel diameter (different on the inside from outside for the Indy oval), gear ratios, type of rubber, etc.  Even simple things like weight of fuel in the tank.  I don't know if  I would ever have read a book on racing in the Indianapolis 500, but I learned a lot from fooling with this game.

Similarly, I've learned more than a little about flying from flight simulators and even a some basics of city planning from Sim City.

In the past, and still going, has been the same argument about TV:  Can it really be educational?  What about the fact that kids don't read as much, etc.?  At least games require engagement and some problem solving, and sometimes even reading!

As for games causing violence, I firmly believe that, generally, all technology is amoral, neither good nor bad.  Any technology can be used for either.

As a kid, we played army (always WW II), cowboys and Indians, police and bad guys, nearly 100% of the time.  Incidentally, all of my favorite TV shows were about the same things.  Oh yeah, I forgot humans vs. aliens.

Many of the video games out there are great at teaching strategy, planning and related problem solving.  I always enjoyed Starcraft for that reason.

I guess I find the first person shooter games a little disturbing because they train one to move quickly through an enclosed space and shoot as many targets  as possible.  Those targets are living and moving, and usually shooting back.  The nature of games themselves can cause a boy to spend hours and hours on this and, as a result, become quite well trained in that scenario.  The games may not cause a person to turn to violence but if a person does, the result may be a more effective killer, perhaps with a higher sense of confidence.

Here's a wonderful thing about books.  They aren't just pure action, or even strategy and tactics.  They involve thoughtful introspection by the narrator.  You get to see into the mind or minds of characters, how they think and feel, and even how they deal with morality of the issues at hand, at least in the better writing.  Maybe some of the better games have this same property, I'm not sure.

There's something about reading a book that encourages one to pause and think, particularly when the reader is challenged by something there.  Or at least you may have to stop reading and go do something else, and then your mind can continue on reflecting on what you've read.

As amazing as movies and video games are, and there's no slowing down, they still haven't caught up with the experience of a good book.

Use the Wall Phone. The Wall What?

[VIDEO] My kids showed me this.  Life in the 21st century.  (If the link doesn't take you there automatically, start watching at 2m37s).

Powerful Space Explosion May Herald Star's Death By Black Hole

From space.com.   A large and unusually long-lasting outpouring of x-radiation brought attention to GRB 110328A.

The explosion looks like a gamma-ray burst — the most powerful type of explosion in the universe, which usually mark the destruction of a massive star — but the flaring emissions from these dramatic events never last more than a few hours, researchers said.

“We know of objects in our own galaxy that can produce repeated bursts, but they are thousands to millions of times less powerful than the bursts we are seeing now,” said Andrew Fruchter, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in a statement today (April 7). “This is truly extraordinary.”

The space explosion was detected on March 28 when an instrument on NASA's Swift satellite detected an X-ray eruption

“The fact that the explosion occurred in the center of a galaxy tells us it is most likely associated with a massive black hole,” said Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist for Swift at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Image credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

Astronomers Calculate Comet's Orbit

using amateur images from the web.

Happy 38th Birthday Cell Phones

“Martin Cooper was walking the streets of New York, talking on the phone…it was April 3rd, 1973 and this was the first time that anyone had made a mobile phone call in public,” by Brad McCarty from TNW.

My faorite part is where the picture description says Cooper is the one on the right.

Image at http://www.oaktreevintage.com.

New Blogger Looks

Google announces “five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3….”

Here's what they look like on this blog.

Interesting, you can apply them to any blogspot blog by appending /view to the URL. That's an interesting approach to customizing.

YADC: The Deathstar

A [VIDEO] tour of Lucasfilm's/ILM's data center by Greg Grusby of ILM, blogged by Arik Hesseldahl and via Data Center Knowledge.   (YADC:  yet another data center).  It is interesting to see him point out the old machines they used for Star Wars Episodes 1–3.

MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub

The MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering blog is an excellent source of information and explanation on the nuclear situation in Japan.  The short answer:  There's a lot of unnecessary fear, uncertainty and doubt, some of it malicious.  Though the situation is serious, there's just not a lot to worry about.

What's This About IPv4?

We've run out of addresses so now what?

I decided a few weeks ago it was time to think about this a bit and try to come to some reasonable conclusions. I wrote a really long and rambling, i.e., useless blog post which is still sitting in the draft bucket. Now I'm going to take a stab at a shorter summary.

So, how will this problem affect you and me?

It may cost money

There's now a shortage of IPv4 addresses meaning they are scarce resources. That's the definition of an economic problem and the response will be rising prices. I think that the more you care about what your IP address is, the more you'll have to pay. If you don't care, maybe you don't even know what an IP address is, then the impact may not even be noticeable.

For the most part, the ones who care about IPv4 addresses are those providing services. They'll have to pay more and, in some cases, charge their customers more.

There will be down time

Still, a lot of changes will need to be made in the networking infrastructure that underlies the world most of us live in. That means large projects will be undertaken, some in a panicked rush, and mistakes will be made, even in the best of cases. For you and me, that means web sites will go down, we'll lose access from time to time and other inconveniences will pop up without warning. Think of big highway construction projects.

And finally,

IPv6 is not a solution

IPv6 is not a solution to the IPv4 problem. It's an entirely new undertaking that's so huge, I claim it's an entirely new problem, even bigger than the IPv4 challenge.  Claiming IPv6 solves the IPv4 problem is like saying we can fix some local problem on Earth by terraforming Mars and moving there. Well, in an indirect way that would render the original problem irrelevant, but it's not an easy or affordable solution and it has a whole lot of details that aren't worked out yet.

I continue to think that the current IPv4 problem can be architected away using network address translation (NAT). We've pushed off the scarcity of numbers this way over the years. Now it just needs to be done on a bigger scale, and it will be accompanied by the problems I've predicted above.

Warning! Take Heed!

Fake USPS Emails in Circulation posted on Softpedia by Lucian Constantin. “A wave of fake United States Postal Service (USPS) emails currently making the rounds are trying to pass a trojan downloader for a shipping label.”

The spam emails pose as failed delivery notifications and bear a subject of  “Post Express Information. Your package is available for pick up.”


The contained message claimed that an error in the shipping address caused the package to be returned to the post office, from where it can be retrieved.

“Your package has been returned to the Post Express office. The reason of the return is ‘Error in the delivery address’ Important message!

“Attached to the letter mailing label contains the details of the package delivery. You have to print mailing label, and come in the Post Express office in order to receive the packages” the emails read.

The attachment is called Post_Express_Label_ID_[number].zip and contains a malicious executable of the same name.

My personal advice continues to be the same: Avoid clicking on links in the email message. Instead, type in the address by hand in your browser to go to the page and see what's up.

OO vs. FP

Finally, a concise and perfect resolution to the question of object oriented programming vs. functional programming, assuming the debate is even an appropriate one in the first place.  I've stuggled along with this issue myself without finding a satisfactory resolution.

Today a blog posting announced, and was echoed on Slashdot, CMU Eliminates OO Programming for Freshman [Sic.  I presume it's for more than one freshman].  In the ensuing discussion, bradley13 posts a reply that captures and resolves this issue in the most concise and accurate way I've seen.

OO is practical for lots of problems, because it makes modelling real-world data easy. However, it is not useful if you want to give students a solid understanding of the theoretical computer science. OO is fundamentally data-centric, which gets in the way of algorithmic analysis.

To give a pure view of programming, it would make sense to teach pure functional and pure logic programming.

That's it!  FP is useful for expressing and teaching algorithms!  Now, having a programming language that doesn't even include I/O makes sense.  Now I understand why colleges wanted to use FP (Scheme and such) for their introductory classes.   You can just settle into looking at the pure algorithms with the same mathematical purity as you study  2 + 3 = 5 or a proof in geometry.

That's also why FP seems so difficult to use in the real world, at least to me, in spite of well-written and -spoken arguments, and perhaps even well-documented examples, to the contrary.

On the other hand, OO is indeed well-suited for writing real programs and solving real problems.  It is imminently practical.

Now it makes sense.  The theoreticians scoff at OO while practical coders are sometimes bewildered by FP.  (Okay, it could be that only I am befuddled, and the FP proponents do keep saying that you just have to see the light).

There are some underlying themes in the discussion on Slashdot I agree with.  One is that I don't think any education program should start with OO.  I agree that a program should begin with the simplest programming environment possible   Most folks around my age, and some younger, learned FORTRAN or BASIC first.  That seemed to be a perfect introduction.   And yes, I'm well aware of the FP crowd that is shouting at this point:  FP is the epitome of purity and simplicity!

In fact, I've heard that some teaching programs are switching to Python and I think that's an excellent solution.   Python can serve in all of these roles, from a simple, BASIC-like beginner language, to a functional language for studying theory, to an immensely practical language for solving some of the most difficult  computing challenges.

To bradley13 I say, Thank you for clarifying this discussion for me in such economic terms.  Well done!

Your Kidding Me! Thunder?

Who ordered that?

What's Wrong with the World

Color syntax highlighting.  I could cry.  I used to write beautiful code that was completely readable on a properly printed black on white laser-printed page in Courier font.  The programs were somewhat literate and completely manageable.

Now I seem to be completely dependent on colored syntax highlighting because my code is brief and basically illiterate.  Thank goodness I found go-mode.el for emacs for my Go language programs.

The Super Moon

I saw the so-called super moon last night after it had well-risen high in the sky.  It was a beautiful and bright full moon.  However, it didn't look that different to me from any other full moon.   Phil Plait always does a good job of explaining these kinds of phenomena.

Amazing Earthquake Visualization

From the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, here's an amazing report on the Sendai 2011-Mar-11, 05:46:23 UTC Earthquake featuring GPS Kinematic Solutions and accompanied by fantastic videos.

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Happy vernal equinox today at 19:21 EDT  (23:21 UTC).

Sun 2011-03-20 19:21:00 -0400
Sun 2011-03-20 23:21:00 -0000

Google's Quest to Build a Better Boss

From the NYT by Adam Bryant.

Fukushima Nuclear Accident

A simple and accurate explanation by Barry Brook.  This seems to be a well written and correct explanation of what has happened in Japan, sent to me by Phillip.  The article is long, but not as long as you might think from the web page size—most of the page consists of the follow up comments.

Note that I don't (necessarily) endorse the web site where the article is found.

Here's the most disheartening moment in the middle of the article—the point where the actual failure occured.

When the diesel generators were gone, the reactor operators switched to emergency battery power. The batteries were designed as one of the backups to the backups, to provide power for cooling the core for 8 hours. And they did.

Within the 8 hours, another power source had to be found and connected to the power plant. The power grid was down due to the earthquake. The diesel generators were destroyed by the tsunami. So mobile diesel generators were trucked in.

This is where things started to go seriously wrong. The external power generators could not be connected to the power plant (the plugs did not fit). So after the batteries ran out, the residual heat could not be carried away any more.

Here are the first three of the author's final conclusions.

• The plant is safe now and will stay safe.

• Japan is looking at an INES Level 4 Accident: Nuclear accident with local consequences. That is bad for the company that owns the plant, but not for anyone else. 

• Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine. If you were sitting on top of the plants’ chimney when they were venting, you should probably give up smoking to return to your former life expectancy. The Cesium and Iodine isotopes were carried out to the sea and will never be seen again.

The Power of a Flood

It wasn't that long ago that I came to realize the real power and  peril of a flood isn't just the rush of a wall of water, but it's the fact that the raging water is full of rocks, trees, cars, houses, etc.  This video illustrates that with disturbing clarity.

Caught Up

Well, that catches me up for the week, I think.  I've decided to favor blogging over Twitter for posts that I think are somehow significant since Twitter has become so ephemeral.  Right now that means I email to them to myself instead of retweeting them but then there is a delay before I get around to posting them.

There may be some tool out there that allows re-blogging a tweet, but that capability isn't in my favorite Twitter client, Seesmic on Android.  Such tools I have tried don't construct the blog post in they way I want it and so just aren't useful.

Tsunami in Northeast Japan

[VIDEO].

AMD Building a Large Data Center

Near Suwanee.  From the Gwinnett Business Journal.

Happy Birthday ZX-81

The little computer was released on 1981-03-05 as the successor to the ZX-80 (1980).

I fondly remember a kit version of the ZX-80 that a group of us bought and built at the planetarium.  I wrote software for it to reduce variable star observations we made with a photometer we'd bought for the observatory.  The work of building it was really done by one of the planetarium associates, Ron, and he took the interesting approach of building it in something like an old portable case for some type of tape recorder I think.  He also built a little keyboard with actual push buttons as an alternative to the little membrane keyboard the kit (and the ZX-80 computers) came with.

Secret X-37B Space Plane

A launch was planned for 2011-03-05.   Apparently it succeeded!

The Artificially High Price Of Academic Journals

And How It Impacts Everyone by Mike Masnick at techdirt.com.

Go Computer Language

Go is a new programming language designed and written from scratch by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson (Wikipedia).  The main web page is at golang.org.  There's a wonderful little playground tool there which let's you try out Go right in your browser.

A little informal study group at work has formed to look at Go so I've finally started playing with it a bit myself.  Colleague Jeff McNeill started this off with a series of blog posts on Go, which are quite well done.

Here are a couple of outstanding videos which tell you a lot about the language.

Talk by Rob Pike

Andrew builds a URL shortener

Interesting Ngrams

I finally got around to playing with the Google Ngram Viewer.  Here's an interesting example comparing IBM, Microsoft, Google, Linux and UNIX.

What they say is true, you can spend a lot of time playing with this!

Hooray! Seesmic Gets goo.gl

My favorite Twitter app on Android now supports the goo.gl URL shortener:  Seesmic on Android.

Seesmic.com

In the meantime, I've really been enjoying Tweetdeck as a Chrome App on the desktop.

Ga Tech Robot Music Promo

I still get a kick out of this PSA.

Why David Karp Started Tumblr

From Tech Chrunch.

How The Atom Bomb Helped Give Birth to the Internet

From Ars Technica.

An Angry Birds Birthday Cake

[VIDEO] That actually works.  Enough said.

Pretty Time Lapse of Night Sky

[VIDEO] A radio astronomer's eyes.

Valentine's Day Solar Flare

I missed this class X solar flare that erupted on Monday.

IMAX 3D Still Isn't Worth It

We saw Tron Legacy last weekend and I've concluded that IMAX 3D still isn't worth it.  I had actually already decided not to see any more IMAX 3D movies but, because I heard a recommendation that Tron was particularly worth it, I tried it again.

It wasn't.  The movie was okay, as most reviews said, but the 3D was terrible and just in the way.  Maybe something was wrong with my glasses, but I tried another pair with no improvement.  There were multiple reflections of high contrast images, bright white on black, off axis.  I suspect this might have been a result of 3D glasses over my regular glasses, but I never noticed it before.   There is a lot of high-contrast coloring in Tron.

Still the biggest problem is that 3D makes a giant, five-story-tall IMAX screen look like a small screen in front of you.  This is necessarily true since it's a property of 3D photography.  I still love the IMAX experience of the giant screen and the incredible sound.  3D simply destroys the giant screen experience.

I'll grant that Avatar was really amazing in IMAX 3D, but I don't intend to see another IMAX 3D movie regardless of what people say.  From now on when I make the rare trip into a movie theatre, I'll seek out the digital, e.g., DLP, high-resolution projections and will avoid 3D altogether for the most part.

Google Art Project

I finally got around to spending a little time looking at the amazing Google Art Project.  Zoomable, high-resoution images allow you to zoom down to the cracks and brush strokes.  Street view techniques let you walk through virtual representations of great museums of the world and look at the exhibited pieces.

In The World of Firesheep

When in a hotel room, it's nice to be able to use your Android Nexus S to set up your own private, secure wifi network to use your laptop on.

Planet Tyche?

Four Jupiters and out in the Oort cloud.   It's possible that WISE could detect such a planet if it exists, according to Mike Brown in this Universe Today article.

My first response to seeing the tweet for this article was to say, Bah!, Humbug!, and ignore it.  However, this theoretical outer body has some basis in patterns of comet orbits.

Actually, the most fascinating part of the article is the diagram.  Look how evenly spaced the planets appear when put on a log scale!   (Well, yes, with Uranus omitted).

Image originally from NASA/JPL.

Phantom of the Floppera

[VIDEO] You have to love a computer with three power switches on front.

HP Desktop Computer (Refurb) $99

HP Compaq DC5750 Desktop, Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz, 1GB,80GB, DVD-Rom, Windows XP Pro - Refurbished at Buy.com,  if you need a cheap, desktop.

OO Design for Testability

An excellent talk by Misko Hevery on writing OO code to make it easier to test—highly recommended if you are an OO programmer in any language.

3D Will Never Work

Walter Murch explains to Roger Ebert why 3D movies will never succeed due to the physical realities not matching what our eyes and brains expect.  It's quite simple when you think about it.  In a 3D movie, our eyes aren't focusing on the point they are converging on.

The secondary effects he mentions I've already noted myself, e.g., the 3D view makes the screen effectively smaller.  I've already concluded it's a waste to watch a 3D move on IMAX for that reason.  Scott Wilkinson aruges effectively that 3D IMAX is worth it because the resolution is higher, they use two projectors making the resulting movie brighter, and the screen is more likely to fill more of your field of view.

IPv4 Countdown

Follow the depletion of unallocated IPv4 addresses at @ipv4countdown.

Bing Copying Google Search Results?

Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land tells the story of how “Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.”

Chrome Sync

I just set up Chrome to sync across all computers, meaning it will sync bookmarks, themes, apps, extensions, etc.  Note that I still have to enable the syncing on each computer where I want it to sync.

Down Right Now

I heard that Yahoo Mail was down today and I found this interesting status tracker:   downrightnow.com.
It tracks Gmail, Blogger, Yahoo Mail and others.  Interesting.